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+{"text":" \nThe Thirteenth Turn\n\nCopyright \u00a9 2014 by Jack Shuler.\n\nPublished in the United States by PublicAffairs\u2122, a Member of the Perseus Books Group\n\nAll rights reserved.\n\nPrinted in the United States of America.\n\nNo part of this book may be reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information, address PublicAffairs, 250 West 57th Street, 15th Floor, New York, NY 10107.\n\nPublicAffairs books are available at special discounts for bulk purchases in the U.S. by corporations, institutions, and other organizations. For more information, please contact the Special Markets Department at the Perseus Books Group, 2300 Chestnut Street, Suite 200, Philadelphia, PA 19103, call (800) 810-4145, ext. 5000, or e-mail special.markets@perseusbooks.com.\n\nBook Design by Pauline Brown\n\nTypeset in 12.5 pt Adobe Garamond Pro by the Perseus Books Group\n\nLibrary of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data\n\nShuler, Jack.\n\nThe thirteenth turn : a history of the noose \/ Jack Shuler.\u2014First edition.\n\npages cm\n\nIncludes bibliographical references and index.\n\nISBN 978-1-61039-136-8 (hardback)\u2014ISBN 978-1-61039-137-5 (electronic) 1. Hanging\u2014United States\u2014History. 2. Lynching\u2014United States\u2014History. 3. Violence\u2014United States\u2014History. I. Title. HV8579.S58 2014\n\n364.1'34\u2014dc23\n\n2014007475\n\nFirst Edition\n\n10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1\nContents\n\nAcknowledgments\n\nPreface\n\norigins\n\nCHAPTER 1 The Thirteenth Turn: Origins of the Noose\n\nCHAPTER 2 Rope, Ritual, Roots: The Iron Age Hanging of Tollund Man\n\nCHAPTER 3 An Ignoble Death: Hanging from the Roman Empire to Medieval Europe\n\nrevolutions\n\nCHAPTER 4 At the Crossroads: The Spectacle of Hanging in Colonial New York\n\nCHAPTER 5 Hanging Hannah Occuish in Post-Revolution America\n\nCHAPTER 6 Meteors of War: Death by Hanging and the End of Slavery\n\nCHAPTER 7 The Noose in the Museum: Hanging and Native America\n\nlynching\n\nCHAPTER 8 Alone from a Tree: Lynching in the Post-Reconstruction South\n\nCHAPTER 9 A Story of Hands: An Early Twentieth-Century Lynching in the American Midwest\n\nCHAPTER 10 Strange Fruit: The Legacy of Marion\n\na good death\n\nCHAPTER 11 When the Gallows Come Down\n\nCHAPTER 12 The New Burning Cross\n\nCHAPTER 13 The Noose in Our World\n\nNotes\n\nSources\n\nSelected Bibliography\n\nIndex\nAcknowledgments\n\nI would like to first thank the amazing individuals who let me interview them and shared their hearts and minds and time. I am grateful.\n\nWriting this book made me aware of the many limits to my intellectual abilities. If not for the help of countless librarians and fellow researchers, it wouldn't have happened. One person who was a constant touchstone for research was the ever-exceptional Joshua Finnell. I was ably assisted by four gifted scholars\u2014Holly Burdorff, Olivia Nienaber, Cecilia Salomone, and Elisabeth Halse\u2014and a treasure trove of Denison librarians past and present, including Lareese Hall, Michael DeNotto, Pam Magalaner, and, especially, Susan Rice, who tracked down many obscure sources for me.\n\nMany wonderful people read parts or all of the manuscript. I appreciate their efforts on my behalf. The flaws that may appear in this book are my fault alone. Thank you, Gene Shaw, Jon-Christian Suggs, Mark Noonan, Bill Munn, Walter Hoover, Mitchell Snay, Paul Thompson, Katharine Jager, Benjamin Gessner, Toni \"The Enforcer\" Lisska, Dennis Read, Keir Bickerstaffe, Jim Davis, James Weaver, and Mike Croley.\n\nLinda Krumholz and Fred Porcheddu were my first and last readers. You two are gems.\n\nMany thank yous to all my talented colleagues in the Denison English Department and its fearless organizer and captain, Anneliese Davis. Thank y'all for giving me a home and a sounding board.\n\nGenerous funding from the Denison University Research Foundation helped support my research. A special thank you also to Denison faculty who offered assistance along the way, including Laurel Kennedy, Toni King, Sylvia Brown, Ann Townsend, Erin Henshaw, Isis Nusair, Andrew McCall, David Baker, Stephen Kershner, Harold Von Broekhoven, David Busan, Sandy Runzo, and Jess Clawson.\n\nThe amazing folks at Sandra Dijkstra Literary Agency, including Sandy and my friend and champion, Elise Capron, helped make this book a book. Thank you, Elise, for believing in this project.\n\nThank you to all of the inspired folks at PublicAffairs including Benjamin Adams, Brandon Proia, Clara Platter, Josephine Mariea, and Melissa Raymond.\n\nMany thank yous to the curators, librarians, and volunteers in all the archives, museums, and historical\/genealogical societies I visited, phoned, or e-mailed. Y'all are the front line, the guardians of history and story in this country, and your work is key to our future.\n\nCountless people looked up random facts\/tidbits, helped me make contact with people to interview, and offered advice along the way: Craig Keeney, Chris Johnson, Rabbi Robert Kaplan, Peter Hawes, Anna Connor, Becky Michaels Anderson, Heidi Beirich, Lloyd Bourgeois, Terry Bradford, Fred Counts, Bill Munn, Sheri Sharlow, Crys Armbrust, Susan Thoms, Lee Morgan, Betsy Blake, James Burgess, David S. Reynolds, Jane Rissler, Bill Barker, Doug Perks, Chris Evans, Elizabeth Baer, Rick Lybeck, Nic Butler, Leo Riegert, Joan Hunstiger, Mo Stemen, Niels Lynerup, Markil Gregerson, Ole Nielson, Anne E. Bentley, Kalki Winter, the Brothers Snyder, Lin Fredericksen, Blair Tarr, Laura L. Phillippi, Bruce Elleman, Patricia Schaefer, Chuck Haddix, Edward J. Akins, Theodore Miles, Rico Ainslie, Alan Bean, Trina Seitz, Marva Felchlin, Katy Klettlinger, Richard Graves, Neal Coil, David Turk, Todd A. Cox, Hayes Oakley, and Rick Williams. I'm sure I'm leaving someone(s) out, and I do apologize.\n\nTo the craftsmen and women of the International Guild of Knot Tyers, thank you for letting me join and participate in your annual guild meeting. Thanks especially to Glenn Dickey, Colin Byfleet, Lindsey Philpott, and Owen K. Nuttall.\n\nTo Ceciel, Amelie, and Frankie\u2014thank you for tolerating my absences and for anchoring me. I love you all.\n\nLastly I would like to acknowledge the response and activism of Denison University students during the fall semester of 2007, my first semester on campus. Their reaction to seeing the noose and their ways of understanding this powerful symbol inspired the writing of this book. My colleagues across the campus and, in particular, my friend and fellow CUNY Graduate Center alum Nida Bikmen deepened my knowledge and encouraged me to write this book. That experience reinforced something my parents taught me long ago\u2014violence must be met with examination and dialogue, not with more violence.\nPreface\n\nAn oak tree stands in the center of the campus commons at Jena High School in Jena, Louisiana. It's an imposing oak with stretching limbs ringed by sidewalks and the kind of well-trodden grass one finds at many American high schools\u2014sandy spots here, a discarded potato chip bag there. A tree whose limbs offer shade at lunchtime and underneath which, rumor had it, only white students could sit. But it was August, and a few black students wondered whether they could sit there too; they'd also heard the rumors but didn't believe them. They asked the principal, who said they could sit wherever they pleased.\n\nThe next day two nooses, or, more specifically, hangman's knots, fashioned from nylon rope, were found hanging from that oak tree. It was already Louisiana sticky-hot in the early morning, and the nooses hung like dead weights in the thick air\u2014immovable reminders of a past that's not even past, to borrow from William Faulkner. A school administrator cut them down, but the message had already been delivered.\n\nA day later a group of black students held a sit-in beneath that tree, and the school launched an investigation to identify the culprits. It didn't take long to find them\u2014three white students did it, they said, as a joke. Those students spent nine days away from the school and two weeks at in-school suspension, and then were required to undergo psychological evaluations. The local school superintendent claimed that \"many persons of authority\" interviewed the three students and that \"the result of those interviews showed that the students were not motivated by hate and there was no indication from any of the students that they had any inclination to do any violence.\"\n\nThe school's child welfare supervisor, Melinda Edwards, noted that it was very clear to her that these students had no understanding of the history of lynchings in their home state nor elsewhere, nor did they understand what the noose symbolized for many African Americans. She claimed, \"We discussed this in great detail with the students. They honestly had no knowledge of the history concerning nooses and black citizens. This may seem hard to believe for some people, but this is exactly what everyone on the committee determined.\"\n\nJena's noose incident was followed by several violent encounters between black students and white students on and off campus. When a group of black students apparently beat up a white student, the accused were brought up on charges of attempted murder and conspiracy to commit murder. News of those charges spread nationally, and Jena's noose incident became part of a national conversation. On September 20, 2007, this little Louisiana town played host to one of the largest civil rights demonstrations in recent years. Jena was in the news and in the public consciousness, and soon nooses started showing up everywhere\u2014at workplaces, in front of private homes, or dangling from trees at schools across the country. These \"noose incidents\"\u2014a clunky but widely used term used to describe a range of events\u2014involve one or more persons using a noose in order to intimidate another. The noose referred to here is usually a particular kind of noose, the hangman's knot or hangman's noose, a knot consisting of somewhere between six and thirteen loops or wrapping turns. These nooses are often fashioned from rope or sometimes drawn on a piece of paper, but recently nooses also have been sent as text messaged photos, in faxes, or in e-mails. In many cases a noose incident is considered a hate crime.\n\nOn November 25, 2007, the New York Times published an editorial graphic depicting forty-seven noose incidents across the eastern half of the United States, incidents that the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) and Diversity Inc. had culled from news reports or from individuals. Their research revealed that noose incidents were happening not just in major East Coast cities and the rural South but also in California and Oregon and Colorado. This wasn't a new phenomenon, though. At an NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) meeting in July 2000, Ida L. Castro, chair of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), acknowledged a spike in noose-related workplace harassment suits. \"These cases,\" she said, \"are not confined to a particular geographic area or region of the country. Rather, they are occurring from coast to coast and border to border.\"\n\nAs news of the Jena controversy dissipated, the nooses remained with us. They have, it seems, become a new version of the burning cross. I've been tracking noose incidents since September 2010 and, since then, can account for at least eighty-two incidents in which the noose was used in order to intimidate some minority group or person. This number includes several incidents in which white children put a noose around the neck of a black child and then either beat or taunted them.\n\nBut it was the incident in Jena, with its chilling overtones and national publicity, that compelled me to write this book. Kids do all kinds of nasty things to each other, especially young teenagers. Yet I knew, as most people know, that hanging those nooses is over the line. Why is that? How and when did the noose acquire so much symbolic importance? It's almost like a collective family secret: feared, assiduously hidden, never spoken about until our kids stumble upon it. And then we have some hard thinking and explaining ahead of us.\n\nWhen I first came across the Jena story I wondered how it could be that the noose hangers didn't understand the significance of that object. Though lynching was more common in southern Louisiana, Jena and its neighboring central Louisiana parishes had their share, so it seemed surprising that those high school students claimed ignorance of this history. Today Jena is the parish seat of La Salle Parish and is surrounded by Grant, Winn, Caldwell, Catahoula, Avoyelles, and Rapides Parishes. But until 1908 Jena was part of Catahoula Parish, no stranger to extrajudicial killings. On July 16, 1908, three black men in Catahoula\u2014Miller Gaines, Sam Gaines, and Albert Godlin\u2014were accused of torching a cotton gin and then were lynched by persons unknown. In the same parish sixteen years earlier another black man, John Hastings, was accused of murder and lynched. His son and daughter met the same fate three days before, presumably because they wouldn't give their father up to the mob. And in the parishes that surround present-day La Salle\u2014Avoyelles, Rapides, Grant, Caldwell\u2014there were at least fourteen lynchings between 1885 and 1928.\n\nThere was a history of lynching in Jena's backyard, but these young people claimed no knowledge of it. Was it mere chance that they chose this particular symbol to display? Surely they knew something about this history? Maybe not.\n\nMy last book, Blood and Bone, explored the Orangeburg Massacre, the killing of three black college students and wounding of many others by South Carolina highway patrolmen in 1968. This happened just a few miles from my childhood home, and yet it was a topic most white folks wished to avoid discussing. It wasn't until I was much older that I learned what really happened. I understand the noose-hangers' ignorance because I lived it. In researching the Orangeburg Massacre I also learned how the noose had been a part of my community's history, something I didn't know about until I was in my thirties.\n\nThere are reasons for this, of course. Lynching isn't something many wish to discuss, let alone bring up in a classroom. It's a nasty part of American history; the stories produce discomfort, especially for white people like myself. And well they should: the violence and the numbers are staggering. According to one estimate, from 1882 to 1968 there may have been at least 4,743 recorded lynchings in the United States. Lynching served as a method to reinforce and maintain a white supremacist social order, especially in the South in the years following Reconstruction. Black men made up the majority of those lynched, but black women, recent immigrants, Native Americans, and white men were as well. Researchers meeting at the Tuskegee Institute in 1940 asserted that a lynching occurs when three or more people kill someone illegally and when the killers claim they are serving justice, race, or tradition. Lynching is not the same as private murder. There must be some evidence that a community supported the act, either actively or through their collective indifference.\n\nAs practiced during its heyday, lynching was brutal, vicious, and routine. More often than not, to be lynched was to be hanged. Not only were people hanged, but they were often beaten, burned, and bludgeoned before or after and their bodies left on display. The rope helped facilitate this display, holding the body high off the ground for all to see. Sometimes body parts\u2014fingers, toes, genitalia\u2014were kept as mementos. Sometimes photos were snapped of a smiling young girl standing by a hanging corpse or of hanging bodies in the background and a crowd of onlookers in the fore, gazing solemnly into the camera as if to say, \"We did this. This is our work. This is our routine.\"\n\nLynching and capital punishment are a central part of American history. Hanging is a part of American history, our history. So the noose can teach us a lot about the underside of our progressive narratives of freedom, justice, and the rule of law. We love to praise the strides we've made as a nation, but those notes ring hollow if we lack an appreciation for what life looked like before them.\n\nIn Regarding the Pain of Others Susan Sontag addressed the controversy over an exhibit of lynching photographs and postcards called Without Sanctuary. Sontag writes,\n\nSome people, it was said, might dispute the need for this grisly photographic display, lest it cater to voyeuristic appetites and perpetuate images of black victimization\u2014or simply numb the mind. Nevertheless, it was argued, there is an obligation to \"examine\"\u2014the more clinical \"examine\" is substituted for \"look at\"\u2014the pictures. It was further argued that submitting to the ordeal should help us to understand such atrocities not as the acts of \"barbarians\" but as the reflection of a belief system, racism, that by defining one people as less human than another legitimates torture and murder. But maybe they were barbarians. Maybe this is what most barbarians look like. (They look like everybody else.).\n\nIncluding, of course, all of us.\n\nWhat do those deep and violent roots say about American culture today? When writing of the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacres in sixteenth-century France, Natalie Zemon Davis argues that the ease, the regularity of that violence indicates that these are behaviors passed on from generation to generation, that massacre is a kind of cultural technology, that it is taught and learned.\n\nCould we also think of the noose as a cultural technology? This book tells the story of this cultural technology and its manifestations across time as part of a conscious and complicated routine for killing human beings. This book offers a story of the noose\u2014from method of execution to symbol of intimidation. Although numerous and important scholars have explored the history and role of public hangings in Europe and America as well as the history of mob-led lynchings, this book takes a different approach and brings together many hanging stories in order to help us understand how the noose has both a material and symbolic presence in contemporary United States. I will blur the lines between legal and extralegal executions because my focus is on the noose, on the technology, and on telling the stories of the lives it affected\u2014lives that ended by the verdict of some government or the whim of some mob.\n\nIn telling the history of the noose, I have chosen stories that I think demonstrate what it meant and how we have\u2014slowly, more slowly than we or any of the schoolteachers in Jena, Louisiana, would care to remember\u2014learned not to use it. It's that lack of memory, that nervous secrecy, that motivated me to write this book. So much history and so much progress live in those thirteen turns that we have to do more than look at it through the spaces between our fingers if we want to understand it. This book is a sketch of the life, a biography of sorts, of an object whose meaning goes far beyond its look and feel.\n\nThat biography is a story, I believe, about how we come to understand the things that make us wince. In some cases we will travel far from home and into the wilds, so to speak, of the human experience. That journey is important because it puts us in the place of the violent act and reminds us that these things happened in specific places, in our communities, in our backyards, and in our (mostly European) ancestral homes. The noose has served as weapon, spectacle, ritual, artifact, relic, symbol of ultimate state justice, and symbol of ignominy, as a way of defining victims as inferiors. And throughout I will remain loyal to the questions that stirred me to write this book: why is the hangman's knot being used to intimidate Americans (of many races and backgrounds) in the twenty-first century? Why has the noose become a symbol of intimidation surpassing the burning cross, a tool for radical racists at a moment when some pundits insist that we live in a postracial America? Why does this thing have so much potency as a symbol? To truly understand the American story, these are answers we need.\norigins\n\nChapter 1\n\nThe Thirteenth Turn:  \nOrigins of the Noose\n\nThis is a story about a knot. A knot made from a rope. Any rope will do; they are all made by combining smaller strands, the way many narratives combine to create a larger story. And like stories, they can be simple and straight, twisted and complex, useful, or entangling.\n\nAs a tool, knots have served humans well. Rope and knot-tying expert Cyrus Day claims that \"except for sticks and stones they may be man's oldest tool,\" though he says there's little archaeological evidence for this in part because ropes are made of organic and, therefore, deteriorating material. For the most part knots have been a technology used for obtaining food\u2014to make snares and nets and to bind things. One of the earliest knots discovered is a fragment from a Mesolithic fishnet found in 1913 on the Karelian Isthmus in what is now Russia. In the nineteenth century discoveries in the Swiss lakes region revealed that textiles and ropework were central to the lives of the Lake Dwellers of the Paleolithic era. Many of the knots archaeologists discovered are still tied by human beings around the world today and are, perhaps, \"culturally universal.\"\n\nI want to better understand this technology, so I take a walk to the hardware store in town to buy a length of rope. A paunchy man with few words, a ruddy face, and a dark green baseball cap rolls some half-inch-thick nylon rope on the store floor from an enormous spool. To measure, he eagle-eyes the rope next to the floor tiles. When he has what looks like ten feet, the ruddy-faced man whips out a large hunter's knife, with a portrait of a golden retriever, bird in mouth, on the handle, from his back pocket and slices the rope, balls it up, and drops it in my hands.\n\nBack in my office the rope rests on my desk, nylon and modern, and the fluorescent bulbs burning above reflect off its slick, white surface\u2014luminescent, radiant. With a YouTube video and several knot-tying books at the ready, I attempt to tie a hangman's knot. After several tries I give up. For a knot-tying amateur and Cub Scout dropout\u2014I never even got my Bear badge\u2014it's a complicated knot to tie well. Besides, tying knots takes patience and practice. I don't have much of the former, which makes the latter almost impossible. So I need help.\n\nPoking around online, I stumble upon a website for the International Guild of Knot Tyers (IGKT), and I shoot off an e-mail in hopes that there will be a member in close proximity to Granville, Ohio, where I live. A few days later I get an e-mail from Glenn Dickey. He tells me he'd be happy to help me with this project\u2014before even knowing what I was up to\u2014and signed the e-mail, \"Happy Knotting!\" A few days later, as I'm reviewing class notes in my office at 8:30 a.m., my phone rings. It's Glenn.\n\nIn what ended up being a forty-minute conversation, Glenn introduces me to the curious world of knot-tying hobbyists. Before he called me, I had no idea that such a world existed. When I tell him about my project, he doesn't seem to wince, and he doesn't hang up. He's intrigued, in part, because my subject is a knot. I ask him if we can meet, stating that I'd like to interview him in person. We talk dates and times and places, and finally he says, \"Listen, I'm retired. I don't mind driving to you.\"\n\nA month later Glenn arrives at my office with no directions from me, a task some students find quite difficult. \"You found me,\" I exclaim, when he walks in. \"I'm good at finding things and figuring things out,\" he replies. He fits the clich\u00e9 of a guy who can figure things out, a guy interested in knots. Glenn is wearing blue jeans and shiny white Newbies, a tan expedition shirt, and a thin tan jacket with a \"Santa Maria, Columbus, Ohio\" emblem on the front. His blue ball cap has the same logo. Glenn, I soon learn, is a longtime volunteer with the Santa Maria replica, a ship moored on the Scioto River in downtown Columbus. Two pins just above the \"Santa Maria\" emblem on his jacket note his six hundred hours of volunteer service on the project. With all the Santa Maria regalia alone, Glenn would be a character, but the whole ensemble is brought together by two thin pieces of cord hanging around his neck, tied, he tells me later, in a \"Carrick bend-on-the-bight\" knot.\n\nBorn and raised in Ohio, Glenn learned knots by watching his father, a sailor in the US Navy during World War II, make animal halters for local farmers. They lived out in the country, surrounded by farms, and his father had a skill that was in demand. Glenn's father would take hemp rope and make custom-fitted rope halters for horses, cows, sheep, and goats. He was a craftsman from the old school.\n\nTechnology and mass-produced imports eventually made his father's knot-tying skills obsolete. When cheaper commercial halters could be made for pennies with cheap nylon webbing and rivets, why pay a neighbor to make them? Cheap imports and new technologies, Glenn explains, have created a world in which most folks today can only tie one or two knots. Some can't even do that; they can't even tie their own shoe-laces correctly. Instead, we live in a world reliant on buttons and zippers, snaps and Velcro to secure and fasten and hold. \"In the 1800s most folks could tie five or six knots,\" Glenn said. \"They'd go in to the butcher, and the butcher would tie up a package with string or cord; now things are prepackaged and heat-sealed or taped. Christmas presents are taped up. There's a bit of reflexive nostalgia among knotters for a time when people could use knots: taking string or rope\u2014a flexible tool\u2014and turning it into something useful. Glenn was chasing this nostalgia when he signed on to be the knot expert for his son's Cub Scout troop. He says he volunteered not only because no one else was interested but also because he could remember what it was like watching his father practice his skill and wanting to learn from him; he wanted to share this experience. Glenn quickly realized that he knew only a few knots\u2014not enough to teach the kids in the troop. A friend mentioned the International Guild of Knot Tyers, and he contacted them. They, in turn, put him in touch with the American head of the organization, who gave Glenn great advice on teaching knotting to kids. Glenn soon discovered that he had a gift for knotting. Knots were a problem to be solved and a skill to be gained; he developed what can only be described as a passion for them. Glenn began to live and breathe knots. Before he retired, Glenn was a computer engineer keeping several hundred computers running for an insurance company. Every day there was a different problem and a different solution. It all makes sense: knotters are engineers at their core, people who obsess over complex problems. Not surprisingly, there are a lot of engineers in the IGKT.\n\nThe IGKT's raison d'\u00eatre is straightforward: \"We are an educational non-profit making organization dedicated to furthering interest in practical, recreational and theoretical aspects of knotting. Our aim is to preserve traditional knotting techniques and promote the development of new techniques for new material and applications.\" Despite calling itself a guild, which implies exclusiveness and maybe secrecy, the IGKT is open to anyone. Today it has members in about fifty countries, though these members are few (about a thousand worldwide) and far between (there are just six in Ohio, including Glenn and his brother). This Guild has no secret ceremonies or handshakes, and yet Glenn said there are some members, himself included, who will not share all of their knot-tying secrets openly. Learning to tie knots well takes time and effort; there are some things he just won't share. Glenn tells me, \"I learned how to do it\u2014if you get to my skill level, you will too.\" And he's got skill. \"If you walked up to me and asked me if I could do a sheet bend, a square knot, a bowline, any one of these roughly one hundred knots, I could do them without looking at a book. Average people,\" he says, \"know about two or three knots.\" That makes me average at best.\n\nThe knots he lists off mechanically have origins and stories, magic and power. And as I get to know Glenn, I begin to better understand those who believed and still believe there is something magical about the craft of knot tying. I mention to him how I often watch my two-year-old daughter try to tie the laces of her shoes. She'll move her hands around in the air as she holds the two ends and it looks like she's conjuring ghosts or something. Glenn agreed that there's something magical about the process as well. \"With the ocean plait,\" he tells me, \"you take this fiber that doesn't have any structure, and you give structure to it. And that is magical. You take something that is chaotic, limp cord in a corner, and put it through an orderly sequence. Then it becomes something useful, something that has a form.\"\n\nAnthropologist Tim Ingold writes that \"skilled action has a narrative quality, in the sense that every movement, like every line in a story, grows rhythmically out of the one before and lays the groundwork for the next.\" Like the steps one takes to tie knots, the knots themselves develop and change and are part of a long narrative. Glenn, too, is part of that narrative. As he ties and talks, I realize something: he's incredibly talented, and, like his father, he's an old-school craftsman.\n\nAnd Glen loves to talk knot lore. In some cultures wedding attendees are not allowed to tie knots during the ceremony because it might cause infertility. In others knots are tied and untied to set free captives, to release spirits. Sailors would tie up knots when they had favorable winds and undo the knots when winds became unfavorable. Indeed, in Homer's Odyssey Aeolus gave Odysseus a bag tied up with silver cord. The bag contained all but the West Wind, the wind he needed to take him home. After nine days of excellent seas and sailing, Odysseus's men got curious\u2014they thought the bag contained gold and silver. So one night they untied the knots while Odysseus slept. The winds rushed from the bag and pushed the boat back from whence it came, despite being within sight of Ithaka. Over a thousand years later a man named Sopater was executed in Constantinople during Constantine's reign for \"binding the winds by magic, because it happened that the corn ships of Egypt and Syria were detained,\" causing widespread hunger.\n\nA sense of wonder is shared within the knot-tying world. In the right circumstances a simple knot can acquire great meaning, but they can also provoke mysteries. A few years ago at a meeting of the North American branch of the IGKT held in New Bedford, Massachusetts, a guild member brought with him an interesting problem for meeting attendees to solve. There had been a murder somewhere near Detroit. Police found the body of a woman dumped in a body of water; they weren't told if it was a pond, a ditch, a river, or a lake. The woman was found bound with rope, arms fastened tight across her chest with what looked like an old clothesline. And the knots the killer had used were most unusual. The detectives heard about the IGKT and contacted one of its members in hopes that they might be able to identify the knots. Guild members were each shown a series of forensics pictures separately. They took notes and proffered theories. The photos were a handicap\u2014the lighting was poor, the angles were all wrong. And yet every guild member who looked at them, Glenn included, was able to say something about the rope, the knots used, and the handedness of the killer. \"We knew that the person who did it was right-handed,\" he narrates. \"We knew that the person had possibly been in a profession in which knotting was used. We knew that the person was dead before they were tied up. We knew that the killer was in a hurry, which makes sense because he'd just killed somebody and he wanted to get rid of the evidence. It wasn't preplanned; it was on the spur of the moment.\"\n\nIn an intense situation human beings are often not creative; they act in ways that come naturally or in ways that have been practiced, rehearsed. Glenn thinks that it's the same way with knots. When the average person has to tie a knot in a stressful situation, they'll tie the easiest one they know, usually an overhand knot or a granny knot, which results from an incorrect overhand knot. The man who had killed this woman used a modified packer's knot, a knot used only by individuals in certain professions, like butchers. In the Tape-Button-Velcro Age few people can tie the knot, let alone identify it. Separately and together, each Guild member noted the uniqueness of the knot, that only someone who tied such a knot on a regular basis would use it in a stressful situation (like, for example, after murdering someone). They re-created the knot and noted that the person tying it was likely right-handed. The important thing, though, was the knot itself, the packer's knot. \"So we took that information to the police, and they brought forward two suspects,\" Glenn explains. \"One was, I can't remember, I think an auto mechanic. But the other was a butcher. We said, 'The butcher did it.' The butcher would have to know how to tie up a carcass, to bundle it.\" The police interrogated the butcher, and he confessed to the murder. As he tells me this story, Glenn is burning the ends of some rope I had in my office. Over the course of the interview he did this to all my rope, almost like it was a compulsion. He cut and burned, cut and burned the ropes, a meditative process, taking something fraying and chaotic and bringing about a kind of order.\n\nForensic expert Rodger Ide asserts that knots often \"provide very good interpretive evidence, helping to reconstruct how the crime or incident occurred.\" Indeed, he says, \"murders by hanging and strangulation are not normally pre-planned in sufficient detail to mislead pathologists and forensic scientists.\" Therefore, investigators can learn a lot from the trace evidence found on the ropes, medical evidence from the damaged body, and information from the knots themselves. What was the ligature made of\u2014rope, cloth, wire, chain? What kind of knot was tied, and what can that tell the investigator about the knot-tying skills of the murderer or victim? Can those skills link them to any sort of trade or hobby?\n\nGlenn reaches into the knapsack he brought with him and riffles through some books, pulling out a book called The Black Book and opening it to a marked page. It's a photograph of the 1908 lynching of four African American men\u2014Virgil Jones, Robert Jones, Thomas Jones, and Joseph Riley\u2014in Russellville, Kentucky, over an apparent labor dispute. I'd seen the image in numerous guises, as photograph and postcard. It's horrific. Four lifeless bodies, each with his hands bound behind his back, dangling from a tree off a desolate country road. One of the men was found with a note pinned to his body that read, \"Let this be a warning to you niggers to let white people alone or you will go the same way.\"\n\nI ask Glenn, \"You mean to tell me that you can say something about the knots tied and the people who tied them just by looking at a photograph of a lynching or of a hanging?\"\n\nIt turned out that he could.\n\nThe Thirteenth Turn\n\nOn October 28, 2010, a volunteer, Mel Distel, arrived at the Santa Ana office of gay rights organization California Equality Now and found a hangman's noose on the doorknob. She called the police. The officer who responded to her call told her, after observing the noose, that \"what it is, is a string on a door.\" Distel said she couldn't believe what she had heard. She asked him whether he didn't see the relationship between the noose and the threat that it represents. The officer replied, \"Sometimes you just have to live with being a victim\" and told her that his car was once broken into, somehow equating the two events.\n\nThat string on the door was a perfectly tied hangman's noose, with thirteen turns around a black nylon rope. The hangman's noose is a knot, a sliding knot to be exact. Clifford Ashley writes in his Ashley Book of Knots (essentially the knot-tying bible) that \"a Noose is just one thing: a knot at the end of a rope that tightens when hauled on. Any loop becomes a Noose if a bight is rove a short distance through it.\" Translation: any loop becomes a noose if the slack part of the rope is curved and one end of the rope can be pulled through it and tightened. Functionally, a noose is a simple slip knot.\n\nThe word \"noose\" has uncertain origins. Its Latin origins are most likely the word nodus, which could have meant a knot or tied mass of strings and, thus, is related to the word \"node.\" In the theater a node can be a \"predicament\" or \"entangling complication.\" Sometime before the Norman Conquest of England the \"d\" disappeared. Today the word shows up in colloquialisms\u2014\"slip the noose\" or \"tighten the noose.\" Marriage is often described as a noose. Ties are often described as nooses. In a 2012 article in the London Evening Standard Richard Godwin wrote that power-dressing \"marks a clear line between our different selves, too. I am happy to wear a tie to work\u2014and also to un-noose myself at the end of the day.\" I've heard the word used more directly as a verb on National Public Radio's Talk of the Nation when a guest from the Wall Street Journal was discussing a piece she wrote about the burden of being given the mantle of \"most likely to succeed\" in high school. One person she interviewed claimed that he had been \"noosed\" by that title. Neal Conan opines, \"Noosed\u2014that's an interesting verb.\" (Awkward laughter from guest and host.)\n\nUnlike the word \"noose,\" the origins of the knot itself are fairly certain. In fact, it was probably one of the earliest knots because it could be used to capture small animals and birds; it was a tool used for the maintenance of human life. But the noose hanging from that office's doorknob was a hangman's noose, which is more than just a simple sliding knot, more than just a word with possible Latin origins, more than just \"a string on a door.\" A hangman's noose or hangman's knot\u2014sometimes called Jack Ketch's knot after a seventeenth-century English Hangman\u2014is a specific kind of noose, and it must be made in a particular fashion. The hangman's knot is a tool for killing\u2014it is a very deliberate knot. In The Ashley Book of Knots, the hangman's noose is Knot #1119; it is part of a family of knots that also includes the Scaffold Knot (#1120), Gallows Knot (#1121), Newgate Knot (#1122), Ichabod Knot (#1123), and Gibbet Knot (#1124).\n\nThe hangman's knot binds tightly. The coils or turns are there to add friction to the knot and to make it more difficult to open once placed around a victim's head. There's a debate about how many turns a proper hangman's noose should have; some suggest that it has nine turns because, Ashley writes, \"even if a man has as many lives as a cat, there shall be a full turn for each one of them.\" Others suggest that it should have thirteen turns because of the bad luck such a knot brings. If ever there were an ominous twist of rope, surely it is the thirteenth turn in a hangman's noose.\n\nGlenn Dickey thinks that the exact origins of the hangman's noose might be hard to pinpoint. Finding an originator of this knot would be a bit like trying to find the person who invented the wheel. Other than the Hunter's Bend, there's only one knot named after its supposed originator\u2014the Matthew Walker. Knot #1119 might have been adopted or developed by hangmen from fishing, equestrian, or sailing knots. It looks a lot like a heaving line knot, used to give a rope extra weight so it will reach a dock when a sailor tosses it from on board. Such a knot is formed with wrapping turns around the rope, akin to the turns of hangman's knot. What's certain is that in its popular manifestations the hangman's knot looks formidable, almost elegant, like it would go over well on the big screen. (One guild member I talked to named Don Burrhus called it a \"tuxedo.\") And yet there's no reason to believe that the thousands of people who have been hanged over time were killed with #1119. A simple slip knot could do the same work.\n\nLike other knots, the hangman's knot likely developed over time for the specific purpose of killing someone quickly. The turns around the rope might have developed so as to better position the neck in order that it might break. \"We do know,\" Glenn explained to me, \"that it's a constricting knot, so that if you didn't break the neck, you went into the constricting phase, cutting off circulation to the brain and air to the lungs, which would result in death.\" It's no exact science; it's just that this particular knot might have worked better than another knot.\n\nSo I ask him to show me how to tie one, if possible.\n\n\"I don't do this knot very often,\" he replies. It's not that he's never been asked to demonstrate how to make one\u2014some of the Cub Scouts pester him about it endlessly\u2014but it means a lot of things to a lot of people. Besides, the hangman's knot is a deadly tool, he said; it's not a joke. In September 2010 a tourist visiting the Boot Hill Museum in Dodge City, Kansas, stuck his head in a hangman's noose that was on display, apparently to take a photo. Somehow he lost consciousness, fell forward, and nearly hanged himself before museum staff rescued him. And in October 2011 a teenage girl working at a Missouri haunted house accidentally fell with a noose around her neck, again almost killing herself.\n\n\"To start,\" Glenn explains, \"you make a Z in the rope. You leave a longer working end or wend down there below the Z. You contract your parts of the Z together, and you start wrapping the knot around the parts of the Z. There's a lot of folklore about the number of times you go around. One is that you go eight turns for optimum\u2014that it gives you the maximum friction with maximum pulling. Other folklore says that on ships you give it seven turns for the seven seas. I've heard nine. I've heard thirteen\u2014bad luck. After you wrap your turns, there's a loop left up at the top. You run your working end up through the loop, pull one part of your knot down. Make these wrappings as tight as you can, and you end up with a hangman's noose. The idea is that this piece here helps you tighten and loosen that loop.\"\n\n\"As you were doing that,\" I say, taking a deep breath, \"I was thinking about how different tying this knot seems from tying other kinds of knots. It just seems different.\"\n\n\"Because of the wrapping turns . . .\"\n\n\"No, because of the use. What it's used for. Does it feel different to make this knot?\"\n\n\"Yeah, this is a different knot. It has a specific purpose. There are few places you run into a knot like this.\" He tells me that you might see a version of a hangman's knot on a ship's rigging, like when ropes are pulled through deadeyes, round discs with three holes that make them look face-like. You might see a hangman's knot when fishing, like when tackle is attached to fishing line. But these are rare instances.\n\nThe kind of rope used to make the knot makes a big difference. Today, there's a lot of nylon braided rope, and the knot can be produced by a right- or left-handed person fairly quickly. But before the advent of nylon rope, people would have used hemp, linen, or manilla rope. These ropes were typically right-laid, meaning that the strands turn right\u2014a complicating factor for a left-handed person. Glenn picks up a piece of manilla rope and starts the process all over again, tying the knot with his right hand. It's clearly more difficult with this rope. The knot tyer has to pay attention, be precise.\n\n\"You have to figure out where everything's going to come out as you're tying your hangman's noose because when you start to wrap this\u2014see, I've done six turns, almost seven, and I'm out of rope.\" He starts over. This situation, a knot expert making a mistake and having to start over, raises an important question: Could someone tie such a precise knot quickly, with an angry mob demanding immediate death?\n\n\"Listen,\" Glenn says as he makes his wraps, \"if you see a well-made hangman's noose, you can pretty well figure that it was made ahead of time.\"\n\n\"That it was premeditated.\"\n\n\"Right. The person couldn't stand in front of the judge and say, 'We just got mad at him and did it on the spur of the moment.'\" He holds up the hangman's knot. \"There you go.\"\n\n\"Now can you teach me?\" I ask.\n\nI place the rope on the flat surface of my desk and make a six-to-eight-inch-wide Z with the middle of the rope. Because I'm right-handed, the left-hand part of the rope is loose\u2014the standing end or nonworking end. Then I compress the three loops that I formed with my left hand and start wrapping the rope around these loops. I make nine wrapping turns, stick the working end through the loop jutting out from the bottom of the turns, and then adjust the turns to make sure they're tight. I pull the working end tight. It's done. It has become a structured form, a potential killing machine made by my own hands.\n\nBut I'm working with modern rope, not one made of hemp or jute or some other natural fiber, but rather rope that's smooth and easy to manipulate with my unlearned hands. Under pressure it would be even more difficult to orchestrate. If I wasn't in a climate-controlled office with excellent lighting, plenty of time on my hands, knot-tying books and knot guru at the ready, and three different kinds of rope\u2014if all these conditions didn't exist, I'm not sure I could do it.\n\nCause of Death\n\nIn the best of circumstances a modern judicial hanging execution will follow strict protocols. First the victim is weighed and measured to determine the exact distance he should be dropped in order to ensure a quick death. At the time of execution the condemned walks onto a platform with his hands tied behind his back. The legs are then bound, and a hood is placed over the head. The noose of seven to thirteen turns is placed around the neck and tightened. At a signal, a trapdoor is released, and the condemned falls below the scaffold to his death. If all goes well, the noose and drop will do the work of quickly dispensing the condemned via what's often called a \"hangman's fracture\": \"the violent breaking of the C-2 vertebra just below the base of the skull.\" This will fracture the spinal cord and compress the arteries in the neck. If the drop isn't precise, the victim will die of strangulation or decapitation.\n\nThe protocols and accoutrements of the hanging execution were developed over centuries; they are the result of technological progress, if you want to call it that. But no matter how \"scientific\" the process becomes, the hanged person can endure a range of experiences that eventually will lead to his or her death. The hanged may struggle for many minutes while trying to get air. His bowels and bladder may evacuate, either because a lack of oxygen will relax the requisite muscles or simply as a result of fear-induced adrenaline rush. Limbs might twitch for some time afterward. The noose itself can rip flesh from the neck and side of face. The body becomes a grotesque figure, as eyes \"bug out,\" tongues protrude, and necks stretch. A heartbeat may be detected in that body for up to twenty minutes after the trapdoor is released. Finally an over-drop can lead to decapitation; an under-drop can lead to a repetition of the process.\n\nAn important thing to understand about hanging executions is that they do not always lead to an instantaneous death. A doctor of anatomy at the University of Washington School of Medicine named Cornelius Rosse believes that instantaneous death from the fracture of the spinal cord happens in only a few such executions. He believes that \"the weight of the prisoner's body causes tearing of the cervical muscles, skin, and blood vessels. The upper cervical vertebrae are dislocated, and the spinal cord is separated from the brain, which causes death.\" Although hanging may cause the spine to break, strangulation or suffocation is usually the cause of death.\n\nAfter a thorough study of a number of hangings, British physiologist Harold Hillman offers a few insights to support Rosse's claims. Hillman asserts that rapid \"fracture-dislocation\" doesn't always happen, especially if the condemned \"has strong neck muscles, is very light, the 'drop' is too short, or the noose has been wrongly positioned.\" There are simply too many variables. And, Hillman adds, \"If the fracture-dislocation is not rapid, death results from asphyxia.\" In such a case death is prolonged and painful. When asphyxiation occurs, the noose closes off \"the jugular veins and carotid arteries but the vertebrae protect the vertebral and spinal arteries which also supply blood to the brain.\" In other words, the hanged person is still aware and hasn't lost all sensation. Even if fracture-dislocation occurs quickly, the hanged person doesn't lose sensation. Hillman writes that \"the sensory signals from the skin above the noose and from the trigeminal nerve probably continue to reach the brain until hypoxia blocks them.\" Thus, it's tough to say when a hanged person no longer feels pain.\n\nThe cap or hood as well as physical restraints around arms and sometimes legs obscure manifestations of pain and further complicate our ability to gauge the amount of pain a hanged person experiences. We know, for example, that dislocations and fractures cause pain, but for obvious reasons signs of pain like shouting or screams cannot be heard when someone is hanged. However, other signs like \"violent movements,\" \"contraction of facial muscles,\" urination, and defecation can be observed. The source of the pain, Hillman writes, is from stretching skin, the fracture-dislocation of the vertebrae, and the often long process of asphyxiation. Hillman argues that the pain experienced by the hanged is severe. He points out, though, that although most contemporary judicial hanging executions occur under the best of circumstances, some do not.\n\nForensic scientists note that the literature on the physiology of hanging is still sparse. One of the central questions about hangings\u2014how long does the hanged person live after they are dropped?\u2014still lacks a definitive answer. In 2010 a group of forensic pathologists, part of the Working Group on Human Asphyxia, published a review of animal models of hangings as part of concerted effort to begin addressing this gap in knowledge. Based on this research, they believe that \"cessation of cerebral blood flow, rather than airway obstruction\" causes the victim to cease breathing. Muscles stop moving after one to three and half minutes, and then a generalized seizure occurs. In another study, also by members of the Working Group, researchers analyzed a filmed suicide and noted that although the victim lost consciousness after thirteen seconds, he then began to convulse, the last muscular movement happening four minutes and ten seconds later.\n\nBut most of these studies have been done on hangings that, like judicial executions, occur under controlled conditions. In the worst of circumstances, like when someone is lynched, the victim would endure significantly more pain and would, most likely, die as the result of asphyxia. The knots used can tell us a lot about why and how that pain came about. In the photograph of the lynching of Virgil Jones, Robert Jones, Thomas Jones, and Joseph Riley in Kentucky, the knots are inelegant, to say the least. More importantly, the nooses that killed them were not hangman's nooses.\n\nThe Lynching of Virgil Jones, Robert Jones, Thomas Jones, and Joseph Riley.\n\nEven though it's a poor image\u2014from a bad angle, poor resolution in spots\u2014Glenn Dickey says that it is obvious to him that the person who tied the knots was right-handed. The lay of the rope is his first clue. Using his hands to demonstrate, he says that if you are tying the knots in the photo with right-laid rope, the rope would go right. \"You'd use your left hand to bring the rope around and bring that loop down. If you were left-handed, it would go the other way because you'd be using your left hand to pull it through and your right hand to shove the loop down.\" The photo also reveals that all of the men have their hands tied behind their backs. Pointing to one man in the photo (left of center, back to the viewer) Glenn adds that the rope is wrapped low around his wrists. \"He was likely alive when this knot was tied. It's a binding knot\u2014you're trying to restrict this person's movements. The knot goes up and around his wrists. It's a form of handcuff knot. They just looped it around his wrists a number of times and then tied what you'd consider to be a bowtie knot or square knot.\"\n\n\"It's not an elegant knot,\" I note.\n\n\"No, it's not elegant. Whoever tied it was in a hurry, and they used whatever rope was at hand. You can tell that most of the rope is three-stranded right-laid rope. And this was a rural area, so it was probably used on the farm. This was probably manila rope\u2014half-inch to three-quarter inch.\"\n\n\"Thinking about the intensity of the moment\u2014the lyncher must go with what they know. The most basic knots they can use. What they can do quickly.\"\n\n\"Not to mention,\" Glenn interjects, \"that the person probably isn't sitting there obediently saying, 'Go ahead and do this.'\"\n\nWe quietly stare at the photo. There is no hangman's noose. No gallows. No hood to cover their faces. Those four men were strung up, quite literally lifted off of the ground and left to slowly strangle. There was no clean \"hangman's fracture.\" Their deaths were slow and painful.\n\nGlenn breaks the silence, \"It's amazing what people are taught and learn, isn't it?\"\nChapter 2\n\nRope, Ritual, Roots:   \nThe Iron Age Hanging of Tollund Man\n\nI'm on a train traveling from Copenhagen, Denmark, to Silkeborg, a small city in Jutland and home to Tollund Man, an Iron Age (circa fourth century BC) body discovered in a Danish bog with a noose around his neck. I have an appointment with a Danish archaeologist named Ole Nielson to talk about this bog body and how he might have died. But I'm especially curious about this noose, in part because it is so ancient but also because it takes this story to Europe, where so much of America begins.\n\nThe train heads east through a tunnel and over a bridge crossing the Storeb\u00e6lt, the great strait connecting the Kattegat and Baltic Seas. Out the window, I spy a beach where a man with a fluttering black scarf walks his dog as the waves crash on rocks covered in a layer of thick white ice. In the distance wind turbines spin above the water. After Odense, the train eventually arrives in Jutland and passes frozen, snow-dusted fields anxious for spring. A hint of sun soon disappears, and it's all gray sky and field again. I could be back in sunless Ohio where, two days before on the way to the airport, my daughter asked, \"Daddy, when will the sun come back?\"\n\n\"I hope by the time I come home,\" I told her.\n\nI press my face against the glass and think of the small towns I whoosh past and the lives led in them. I see farms with haystacks resembling teepees and then a small herd of red deer run across the snow. The train zips through a stand of evergreens, a dark swatch of forest, and quickly back to gray sky, white field, and, suddenly, to my right I spy a herd of American Buffalo.\n\nI get off the train at Silkeborg and walk out of the station onto an empty and wind-blown street. It is late Sunday morning, and there are few folks around. Nothing but the station looks open. I don't have a map and am a little nervous. I've heard the Danish are serious about being on time. So I go with my gut, turn right out of the station, and just start walking. Ahead of me I spot a woman with a stroller turning a corner, and I catch her eye.\n\n\"Do you speak English?\" I ask with the biggest \"I'm-a-lost-American\" grin I can muster.\n\n\"A little,\" she says.\n\n\"I'm trying to find the Silkeborg Museum.\"\n\nShe thinks for a moment. \"Art or old stuff?\"\n\n\"Old stuff!\" I laugh.\n\n\"Keep going straight and then turn left and walk some more. You will see it on the right\u2014big yellow building.\"\n\n\"Thank you,\" and I'm on my way.\n\nOle Nielson's office is on the second floor of the big yellow building. It's an ample-windowed corner affair with a large desk, home to an enormous computer screen (with one of the busiest desktops I've seen in some time: multiple files and folders cover the screen). Nielson has close-cropped salt-and-pepper hair. He's about my height, thin, with bright eyes and smile, and wears jeans and shiny black leather shoes, a dark purple collared shirt that's half sticking out of his black sweater. He's half-rumpled, half-put-together. This could be stereotypical scientist-chic or it could also be the result of parenting young children. We sit down at a circular table, and he offers me a cup of dark coffee. It's windy outside, and the windows shake as he pours.\n\nNielson is an archaeologist with a background in prehistoric and medieval archaeology. Most of his life's work has been about presenting complicated research for public consumption. He has worked at a reenactment park, other museums, and now he's in Silkeborg. \"All the work archaeologists do is of little worth if the people don't know about it,\" he says. The public has to get something out of it, in part, he says, because they fund the research. But they also have the right to know why you're digging where you are and what you're learning from it. This is their history.\n\n\"By the Malta Convention,\" he tells me, \"we have obligated ourselves to preserve the remains where they are, in situ, actually. But if that's not possible, we have to keep it for research.\" Prior to the twentieth century some bog bodies were left in the bogs where they were discovered; others were given \"Christian\" burials. More recently, though, bog bodies have become important resources for scientific study, and rather than be reburied, curators and researchers alike are giving them a lot of attention.\n\nTollund Man was discovered on May 8, 1950, by a local family digging for peat, a common source of heating fuel. They were in Tollund Fen in Bjaeldskov Dal, only six miles from the museum. When those diggers saw what looked like a face buried in the peat, they called the police. One of the police officers who arrived happened to be a volunteer at the Silkeborg Museum. He could see immediately that it wasn't a recent crime\u2014that it was a bog body\u2014and he summoned an archaeologist named Peter Glob from Aarhus to help dig the body out. A team of volunteers constructed a wooden crate to carry the body, encased in an enormous piece of peat. Then the body and peat were lifted by hand ten feet up onto a horse-drawn cart for transport to the train station and on to the National Museum in Copenhagen. It was quite an effort\u2014one volunteer, a local policeman with heart trouble, died from overexertion a few days later.\n\nOnce it was at the museum, researchers began the process of cleaning and studying the body. Meanwhile the folks from Silkeborg wrote to the National Museum, wondering whether the body would one day be returned so they could display it. The museum replied that such a display might not be a \"good idea,\" that it would be a little \"macabre.\"\n\nTollund Man. Photo by Ole Nielson.   \nUsed with permssion of Silkeborg Museum\n\nNielson disagrees, though. \"First and foremost I'm a scientist, and I'd like to have the most information from the material.\" He stops himself and notes, \"I even use the word 'material.' And I want that information because of the people who live today.\" By studying bodies and bones, he says, we can compare and contrast and actually discover quite a bit about what it was like to live in the past that might help us understand how we live now. But sometimes what's best for you isn't always best for others, he says. Sometimes beliefs or feelings get in the way.\n\n\"But he could be your relative,\" I say.\n\n\"I'm from the northern part of Jutland originally. So, sure, yes, Tollund Man might be my ancestor,\" Nielson replies.\n\n\"But you don't look a thing like him\u2014there's more red in your cheeks!\"\n\n\"Yes, but I do say hello to him every time I see him.\"\n\n\"You do?\"\n\n\"Yes, I say, 'Hello, old friend!' I really do. He's beautiful. He looks very human-like. I think many people feel that connection. I know I do.\"\n\nIn 1950, when Nielson's \"old friend\" was first examined, some might have questioned that positive description. He measured about five feet three inches and was estimated to be between thirty and forty years old when he died, sometime around 350 BC. Images of his body when he was first completely exposed revealed a man in the fetal position who looked asleep. His eyes were barely shut, his lips pursed. The flesh from his arms and legs had disappeared, but his rumpled feet were whole. You could still see the stubble on his chin, eye lashes, eye brows, fingernails, the lines on his fingers, and the soles of his feet. An autopsy revealed intact organs, including the stomach, whose contents revealed his last meal, eaten twelve to twenty-four hours before his death. It was a simple repast, gruel really: barley, linseed, oats, and then ground-up seeds of weeds\u2014persicaria, fat hen, corn spurry, gold of pleasure, field pansy, and, possibly, hemp nettle\u2014likely all part of a normal Iron Age diet. It's curious that he was preserved at all. That he was preserved so well, organs intact, is somewhat of a miracle. The conditions had to be perfect. Tollund Man had to be placed in the bog in the winter. If the bog was warmer than 4 degrees centigrade, his body would have deteriorated rather quickly.\n\nWhen he was first discovered, Tollund Man was naked except for a sheepskin cap and a belt. But there was another piece of material on his body\u2014a plaited leather rope formed into a simple slipknot. The fact that the rope was fashioned into a noose and tied around Tollund Man's neck has led to the assertion that he was hanged. There is other evidence too. First of all, the rope was positioned behind his neck and not in front. Also, there were marks in the skin beneath the chin and on the sides of the neck suggesting hanging. There was no complete fracture of the vertebra column, but that's not unusual for a hanging, especially one that likely didn't involve a substantial drop. And so because of the location of the knot, the marks on his neck, and X-rays performed by pathologists in 1950, the consensus has long been that he was hanged rather than strangled. CT scans in 2002 further support this consensus.\n\nNielson ushers me over to his computer and opens a file with a picture of one X-ray of Tollund Man's head and neck. \"The knot was behind his neck,\" he says and points to it. \"Here in the front you can see the groove from it. It was cut off at a certain length, and he was put in the bog with it. It was still very tight. It was not a hanging in the English sense, where you drop from a point and then you snap your neck. He was choked to death by this noose but not strangulated, because the rope would be further down on his neck.\"\n\nX-Ray of Tollund Man.  \nImage by Bispebjerg Hospital.   \nUsed with permission of Silkeborg Museum\n\nWhy he was hanged, though, is an open question: we don't have any written records from the Iron Age, so there's almost nothing to go on. A first theory, though, is that Tollund Man was a criminal or undesirable, executed and tossed into the bog. Many bog bodies show visible signs that they were brutally beaten, some were strangled, and a few of them hanged\u2014signs of punishment or retribution.\n\nHanging has deep roots in Northern Europe. Arab travel writer Ahmad ibn Fadhlan commented on the customs\u2014including hanging executions\u2014of the peoples of the Volga Bulgaria he encountered during his travels from 921 to 922; these were probably what are today called Rus', and probably at least partly of Viking descent. Fadhlan wrote that \"if they catch a thief or a robber, they lead him to a thick tree, throw a trusty rope around his neck and hang him to the tree, and he remains hanging until with the wind and rain he falls to pieces.\" Hanging on gallows is mentioned in Beowulf as well as in the Edda and the Sagas of Iceland. Perhaps the most often cited source regarding the roots of hanging in Northern Europe is Roman Senator Tacitus, who, in synthesizing reports of the Germanic tribes in the second century, mentions that traitors or deserters are hanged on trees. Though based on oral accounts and not a true history per se, Tacitus claimed that some tribes also punished people by throwing them in the bogs. He wrote that \"cowards, dastards, and those guilty of unnatural practices, are suffocated in mud under a hurdle.\" The Nazis took a particular interest in the bog bodies and tried to link them to the early Germans in order to make the case that these early Germans populated all of Northern Europe and, therefore, Scandinavia was actually German territory. But they were especially interested in Tacitus's assertion that the bog bodies were \"cowards, dastards, and those guilty of unnatural practices\" (a.k.a. homosexuals) who early Germans sacrificed for angering the gods. This could open the door for persecution of those the Third Reich deemed to fit in those categories.\n\nThese days, though, the leading theory is that bog bodies were not executed criminals per se but were actually sacrificial offerings to the gods. Cremation and burial in a small urn or pot and placement in a barrow was the common Iron Age burial practice. So the fact that these mostly intact bodies have been found in bogs is striking, especially as bogs were considered sacred spaces\u2014home to the gods or the place where one could communicate with the gods. Peter Glob argues that Tollund Man was sacrificed to Nerthus, the goddess of fertility, also known as Mother Earth. Nielson's predecessor, archaeologist Christian Fischer, believes he was a \"thank offering\" to the god Odin (or a forerunner of Odin), who the Icelandic skalds called the god of the hanged. Fischer notes that, in addition to Tollund Man, other bog bodies show signs of hanging, including Elling Woman and possibly Borremose Man. Others were found with ropes around their necks and the cause of death more ambiguous.\n\nFischer traces the relationship of hanging and religion from the Middle Ages backward, beginning with two accounts of groves of trees with multiple sacrifices to Odin, the god of the hanged. A tapestry from circa 800 AD, placed in a ship burial at Oseberg by Oslo Fjord, shows a hanging grove (grove of trees used for hangings), perhaps also sacrifices to Odin. That tapestry is similar to a picture stone from circa 700 AD found near Gotland. Lastly, Fischer mentions gold fogeys (gold figures from the sixth and seventh centuries) that look like hanged bodies. It's hard to get much closer than that time frame, and Fischer concludes that we can't say definitively that the bog bodies were sacrifices to Odin because there's no clear link. Clearly, though, Tollund Man was part of some shared ritual involving hanging or strangling, given how many of the bog bodies that were found had been hanged or strangled.\n\nNielson underscores Fischer's argument. \"Just because we can't see any positive signs that Odin was a god at that time doesn't mean that he or the forerunner of Odin didn't exist. At some point this belief must have worked its way in. Elling Woman, the other bog body in our museum, was hanged too. We have the noose, a different type of noose than the one Tollund Man was hanged with, but also made of leather. He and Elling Woman are not the only ones. He is part of a group from that period, all found in the bogs, and more or less they may have the same faith. They were killed some way or another, with a slit throat or hanged or maybe were strangled, and thrown into the bog, from a period when people were cremated properly. So he's part of a system, you might say.\"\n\nBut why? That's totally another question.\n\nNielson tells me we have to pay attention to the care given to Tollund Man because that bolsters the sacrifice theory. \"When he was found he looked very, very peaceful. He had his mouth and eyes closed. He was laid down in the fetal position. He looked like he was asleep. He was put in an old peat pit and rather quickly he must have been covered or he would have been eaten by scavengers. This shows me that there was a certain care for him and about him. It wasn't like he was an awful criminal that you would hang until he fell off the tree himself. I think the way that he was laid down, the tranquility of his face and features, show that somebody closed his mouth and eyes. Somebody cared for him and put him down like that.\" We'll never know, of course, whether Tollund Man was a willing participant in this process.\n\nNoose on Tollund Man. Photo by Arrne Mikkelson.   \nUsed with permission of Silkeborg Museum\n\nIn 1950 the researchers at the National Museum were only able to preserve the head, which was sent back to the good people of Silkeborg. So for many years only the head, hat, and noose were on display. The rest of Tollund Man was scattered about the country in several research institutions\u2014a foot here, a thumb there. Christian Fischer worked tirelessly to bring Tollund Man back to his native ground. Some of the recovered body parts had deteriorated a great deal, so Fischer made a replica of the rest of his body, and this is what is on display today and what attracted me along with thousands of others to Silkeborg every year.\n\n\"Why are people fascinated by Tollund Man?\" I ask Nielson.\n\n\"Because you can literally stand face to face with a prehistoric man. He looks like a person who could wake up at any moment. . . . He looks like just a normal man with some wrinkles and stubble on his chin, the imperfections\u2014the nose is bent a bit. An image from the Iron Age is one thing because we can see that it's a reflection from them. But this is different. This is a person from the Iron Age\u2014a person that's two thousand three hundred, two thousand four hundred years old. And I think he's really beautiful.\"\n\nNielson is almost lost in this reverie\u2014it's strangely endearing. Smiling, eyes wide, and clearly delighted that this is his job, that he gets paid to work with Tollund Man. There's a genuine respect and care in his approach to his work with this body, this person.\n\n\"Let's go have a look at him,\" he says. \"Okay?\"\n\nWe walk through the central museum building and outside though a courtyard to the building that houses Tollund Man. I hear peals of laughter from children and smell coffee. It was warm and cozy, or hygge, as the Danish say. As we enter, Nielson is greeted by his children, who are participating in a special kid's day at the museum. They're making crafts and are ably assisted by volunteers dressed in what appears to be period costume.\n\nAfter chatting up his children, we walk through the Iron Age hall to see Tollund Man. He's in a dimly lit room off the back of the main hall, resting in the center of the room on a raised platform. The platform is partially circumscribed by a bronze railing. Nielson walks up to the display, leans down, and whispers in English, for my sake, \"Hello, old friend.\"\n\nI do see what Nielson is saying: even though he is over two thousand years old\u2014even though he is a hanged corpse\u2014there is a placid, handsome quality to this man. His pursed lips, closed eyes, his prominent but awkwardly bent nose. He's just resting, I think. He could wake up at any moment. I ask Nielson what he'd say to him if he did wake up.\n\nHe laughs, \"I'd have quite a few questions! Hah. That would be something.\" He pauses and thinks. \"You know, his brain is well preserved. And I often wish I could take a USB stick and plug it in to download his last thoughts! This probably will never happen, but when I started studying archaeology thirty years ago I had no idea that there would be something in DNA that could tell us so much about people and migrations, how people evolved.\" And DNA testing of Tollund Man is in the works\u2014an exciting prospect, says Nielson, because it could tell us so much about this man, his background, his tribe. And maybe whether he's related to Elling Woman, a find that could further support the sacrifice theory.\n\nThis man from Tollund Fen represents two meanings of the noose: ritual and spectacle. The noose is part of a ritual central to his culture, and he was hanged in order to realize the desires, be they religious or disciplinary or both, of the community he lived in. Rituals are community; they demonstrate community and reinforce values, create solidarity. Modern executions are rituals of sorts: we kill to rid our communities of those we deem evil or those who have broken the social contract. But the noose can also be part of a spectacle\u2014a hanging execution that serves political and social purposes, a visual performance with pedagogical intentions.\n\nYet Tollund Man's death does not fit neatly into either category. He was perhaps both ritual and spectacle when he was killed, and in many ways he is ritual and spectacle still. When we look at him we are looking into the past. The bog preserved a man from one age for view in the present. And, in the noose, because hanging is still a ritual we recognize, we can also see the past in the present.\nChapter 3\n\nAn Ignoble Death:   \nHanging from the Roman Empire   \nto Medieval Europe\n\nMost archives restrict access or at least require some hoop-jumping in order to deter casual researchers. But the process itself isn't terribly complicated. In order to view manuscripts in the Sherman Fairchild Reading Room at the Pierpont Morgan Library, I fill out an online form with detailed information about myself, my project, and the manuscripts I want to view, set up an appointment, exchange a few e-mails with the librarians, and then, on a bright Manhattan morning, stroll down East 37th Street to the side entrance of the Morgan. After signing in, I take an elevator to a special access floor and walk across a space bridge to the reading room entrance. I place my coat, backpack, and computer case in a locker and then wash my hands, as directed, at a special sink in the foyer to the reading room. I'm buzzed into the windowless reading room, where I am told to read the researcher guidelines and sign my name, acknowledging that I will not touch what can't be touched or handled and that I will not trace, rub, tear, rip, dismantle, or destroy any of the materials.\n\nThe librarians are kind and curious, rechecking the catalog to see whether there was something I might have missed in my own search. They bring out a number of manuscripts. The first one I look at takes my breath away. It is Manuscript.M.390, a Catholic Book of Hours from sixteenth-century Belgium, with gorgeous illuminated leaves. The first page I see is a Nativity scene, and the pages seem to glow golden, the edges dotted by tiny flowers and insects\u2014moths and snails. Stunning.\n\nI slowly turn the pages of the manuscript, reading the images as they trace the life of Jesus Christ from birth to crucifixion. One image of the crucifixion is itself quite striking: a pale Christ crucified on a deep brown cross, with bloody wounds in the hands and feet and Mary Magdalene crying at the base. Jerusalem is in the background looking a lot like a medieval city, with spires that remind me of the castle at Segovia, Spain (on which the Disney Castle is modeled). To the right of Christ is a group of men and soldiers, and on the hills beyond\u2014just part of the scenery\u2014are two tiny gallows (with people hanging on them), two Catherine wheels, and a tree from which hangs the limp body of, I assume, Judas.\n\nThere's no money shot of the noose around Judas's neck; it's too small. Regardless, the noose is quite present. In subtle ways Christ and Judas are being compared and contrasted here, and it is through images like this that the practice of hanging enters the cultural lexicon of the Western world. Here all eyes, including those of the Virgin Mary, are on Christ. And there's visible sorrow in the eyes of both Marys. Christ is mourned and martyred; he is cared for. In contrast, Judas and the other hanged bodies are left to rot in ignominy.\n\nBut most obvious to me as I sit in this reading room is the color\u2014the ecstatic palate used for Christ shows the copiers' position on this matter quite clearly, something I never could have understood by viewing this image on a computer screen or in a book. Christ's crucifixion is all magnificent colors\u2014vivid blues and reds, bright green grass below the cross, and golden rays emanating from Christ's crown. Conversely, there is the darkness of those pedestrian punishments beyond, the hanged men suspended between heaven and earth.\n\nAncient Hangings\n\nReferences to hanging found in ancient Greece as well as in the Bible suggest that some have long viewed hanging as a dishonorable way to die. In ancient Greece especially it was considered dishonorable because it was associated with female suicides; a woman, it was believed, committed suicide by hanging because hanging was thought to be a bloodless death (though it is often not). For example, in Sophocles's Oedipus Rex Jocasta, upon learning the truth about her son-husband Oedipus, hangs herself from a \"dangling noose.\" Classicist Eva Cantarella writes that in ancient Greece, \"the noose was not only the privileged instrument of female suicide, but also, very often that with which women were killed.\"\n\nIn Homer's Odyssey the noose is used to punish women. After his long absence spent warring and wandering, Odysseus returns to Ithaka and murders the men who have been pestering his wife, Penelope, for years. After the bloodbath he orders his wife's disloyal servant women to clean up the mess and then tells his son, Telemachus, to \"hack them with your swordblades till you cut \/ the life out of them.\" But Telemachus has other plans: \"I would not give the clean death of a beast \/ To trulls who made a mockery of my mother \/ And of me too\u2014you sluts, who lay with suitors.\" And then he performs a bit of rope work:\n\nHe tied one end of a hawser to a pillar\n\nAnd passed the other about the roundhouse top,\n\nTaking the slack up, so that no one's toes\n\nCould touch the ground. They would be hung like doves\n\nOr larks in spring\u00e8s triggered in a thicket,\n\nWhere the birds think to rest\u2014a cruel nesting.\n\nSo now in turn each woman thrust her head\n\nInto a noose and swung, yanked in air,\n\nTo perish there most piteously.\n\nTheir feet danced for a little, but not long.\n\nAs the maidens swung in their cruel and ultimate nests, the men went to Mel\u00e1nthios (Odysseus's turncoat goatherd), who was also hanging from a beam by rope. They cut him down, sliced off his nose, ears, and genitals, and then tossed them to the dogs. Only then, Homer tells us, \"Their work was done.\"\n\nIn ancient Rome punishments were also spectacles, but they rarely involved hanging by rope. Executions were more likely to involve shoving the accused off the Tarpeian Rock, decapitation, crucifixion, or being thrown to wild animals. The Romans also had a clever punishment for parricides\u2014the condemned was sewn into a sack, at times with animals, including snakes and dogs, and tossed into a body of water. Strangulation, perhaps by rope, was one possible punishment, but as with the Greeks, it was strongly associated with women. All those executed were stripped naked beforehand, so executed women were shielded from the public's view by curtains; thus, their death by strangulation could be heard but not seen. Fourth-century writer Pacatus writes that hanging \"is a feminine death, unworthy of a man,\" and the Roman historian Livy describes the death of one man who hanged himself, Quintus Flavius Flaccus, as \"the most disgraceful death imaginable.\" Men were not supposed to dangle from a rope; they were to throw themselves onto their swords.\n\nHanging may have been a punishment among the Assyrians, and some historians point to two examples from the Book of Esther to support this argument. The first comes from Esther 2:23, when two men accused of attempting to kill the king are \"both hanged on a tree.\" In Esther 7:9\u201310 King Ahasuerus's Prime Minister Haman is put to death on a \"gallows fifty cubits high\" that Haman himself had built in order to execute Mordecai. In the King James Version of events Haman is \"hanged,\" and in the New International Version he is \"impaled.\" It's likely that he endured the latter punishment of impalement first and then had his body hanged on display for the public to gaze upon, a postmortem display intended to further disgrace the executed. This manner of punishment would be supported by Mosaic Law in Deuteronomy 21:22\u201323 (NIV): \"If someone guilty of a capital offense is put to death and their body is exposed on a pole [or tree], you must not leave the body hanging on the pole overnight. Be sure to bury it that same day, because anyone who is hung on a pole is under God's curse. You must not desecrate the land the Lord your God is giving you as an inheritance.\" Joshua was a fan of hanging bodies, putting them on display in order to further disgrace the dead\u2014he does so with the bodies of the King of Ai and the five anti-Gibeonite Kings. And yet none of these examples fully supports the idea that hanging by the neck until death occurs was a form of judicial or extrajudicial punishment in the Old Testament.\n\nBut there are, in fact, two perhaps more significant examples of people hanging by rope until they die in the Bible\u2014one in the Old and one in the New Testament. Although both are suicides, how they are remembered and discussed shapes, I believe, how hanging is subsequently viewed in medieval Europe\u2014the next destination in our journey. The first example of suicide by rope occurs in II Samuel when Ahithophel, a counselor of David, joins David's son Absalom when he rebels against his father, trying to take David's kingdom. After the initial rebellion Ahithophel counsels Absalom to attack David again before David's forces are able to regroup. Absalom ignores his advice. Foreseeing Absalom's future demise and, therefore, his own, Ahihtophel takes his leave. What he does next is explained tersely in II Samuel (NIV): \"When Ahithophel saw that his advice had not been followed, he saddled his donkey and set out for his house in his hometown. He put his house in order and then hanged himself.\"\n\nThere are other suicides in the Old Testament\u2014Abimelech, son of Gideon; Samson; Saul and his squire; and Zimri\u2014but Ahithophel's is the only one involving a rope. The other suicides involve either swords or fire. In some ways Ahithophel's hanging death foreshadows Absalom's own death, as he is ultimately killed after his hair gets caught in a tree. But the importance of his story, for this book at least, is that Ahithophel was a turncoat, and therefore, his death was viewed as disgraceful. In Psalms 41:9 (KJV) David writes of his former counselor: \"Yea, mine own familiar friend, \/ in whom I trusted, \/ which did eat of my bread, \/ hath lifted up his heel against me.\" In other words, Ahithophel betrayed David, a move that has led some to refer to him as \"the Old Testament Judas.\" Theologians would eventually say quite a bit about Ahithophel, in part because his betrayal of David typologically anticipates that of Jesus and Judas.\n\nJudas and the Noose\n\nThe story of Judas Iscariot is, of course, better known, but it shares a prophetic connection with the story of Ahithophel. In the Gospel of John Jesus declares during the Passover meal, presaging his own demise, \"I speak not of you all: I know whom I have chosen: but that the scripture may be fulfilled, He that eateth bread with me hath lifted up his heel against me\" (KJV, 13:18). Jesus echoes Psalms 41, David's lamentation about those who have turned against him, asserting that his imminent betrayal will be, in a sense, a fulfillment of prophecy. This story of betrayal is part of a long literary tradition. Some critics argue that gospel writers like Matthew may have been aware of this trope and that some may have been aware of Homer's Odyssey (and, therefore, the story of the treacherous goatherd Mel\u00e1nthios mentioned earlier). In each of these stories the betrayer dies an outcast, a disgrace.\n\nIndeed, Jesus is ultimately betrayed by \"He that eateth bread\" with him, and his betrayer dies shortly thereafter. But of the various versions of Judas's death, Matthew 27:5 is the only one to mention suicide by hanging. \"Throwing down the pieces of silver in the temple,\" the author writes, Judas \"went and hanged himself.\" In Latin this reads recessit et abiens laqueo se suspendit, or he \"went away and hanged himself with a noose.\" This line from Matthew is a simple, almost casual line, and of the various descriptions of his death, it's the least gruesome. In the Acts of the Apostles he buys a field with the money and then \"his body burst open and all his intestines spilled out.\" If that weren't dramatic enough, in the apocryphal Gospel of Judas, Judas has a vision that the other disciples stone him to death.\n\nThroughout medieval Europe it was common for Judas's death to be associated with the noose. And even though the Bible doesn't indicate where Judas hanged, his death is often (like Jesus Christ's) associated with a tree in visual representations. In an early portrayal of Christ's crucifixion, a relief panel housed in the British Museum and dating from around 420 AD, Judas is depicted hanging from a tree, a noose around his neck. This depiction of Judas has a clear message: Judas is a dastardly Christ-killer. The tree bends down from the weight of Judas, but the other figures all focus on Christ. Alongside the noble death of Jesus Christ (who looks directly at the viewer) is the ignoble death of Judas, who looks away in shame. The simple noose around his neck holds him forever fixed between heaven and hell. This panel also draws a relationship between death by hanging and death on the cross. The cross is, perhaps, a heroic death and the noose a shameful one, a message underscored by the work of Christian theologians across millennia.\n\nPanel from an ivory casket, circa 420 AD.   \nUsed with permission of the Trustees of the British Museum\n\nTracing commentaries on Judas's death across the centuries reveals a critical mass of opinions that reinforce this message. In the fourth century St. Jerome wrote that Judas's suicide by hanging was more offensive to God than his betrayal of Christ\u2014it was his greatest sin. St. Ambrose, Jerome's contemporary, writes that Judas \"strangled himself with the cord of his own wickedness . . . O the unseemly cord of the betrayer.\" Writing in the fifth century, Pope Leo the Great notes that Judas's death was all the more horrendous because he did not seek repentance for betraying Christ: \"despair dragged thee to the halter. Thou shouldest have awaited the completion of thy crime, and have put off thy ghastly death by hanging, until Christ's Blood was shed for all sinners.\" These and other statements by the Fathers of the Church were recopied and corroborated throughout the subsequent thousand years. But in the thirteenth century Thomas Aquinas, in his Catena Aurea (a collection of biblical glosses), cites Origen (c. 184\u2013253) as saying that Judas was, essentially, possessed by the devil and gave into despair. He writes that Judas \"received that more abundant sorrow supplied to him by the Devil, who sought to swallow him up, as it follows. And he went out, and hanged himself.\"\n\nIn general, though, people were fascinated by Judas in the Middle Ages, in part because the Bible leaves so much out of the story\u2014what were his motivations? What was his background? Who was this man so central to the narrative of Jesus Christ? His story of betrayal and suicide inspired paintings and sculptures, folklore and creative literature. And as the story was told across the Mediterranean world and into Europe, differing opinions emerged about which kind of tree Judas hanged himself on. Early legends claim the fig tree was Judas's gallows; later versions say it was the elder, the aspen, the tamarind, wild carob, or the Judas tree. In each version, though, the tree deteriorates and\/or dies after he hangs himself from its limbs. For example, a Sicilian tradition has it that the fig tree has not flowered since Judas hanged himself upon it; in Greece the tradition has it that the same tree was once tall but has bent low since his suicide. In England, France, and Germany some believed that Judas hanged himself on an elder\u2014a legend that is referenced by Marlowe, Ben Jonson, and Shakespeare\u2014and according to some, this explains the tree's bitter fruit. What's interesting about these arboreal legends is that they reinforce the belief that Judas hanged himself and that, like Christ, he died on a \"tree.\"\n\nAs a literary character, Judas appeared in many apocryphal stories. In Middle English Judas appears in Jacobus de Voraigine's Legenda Aurea or Golden Legend (c. 1270), the South English Legendary (c. 1300), and the Towneley Manuscript's Suspencio Iudae play, among others. These stories are concerned with Judas's motivations\u2014why he did what he did\u2014and opinions on his motivations run the gamut from inexplicable maliciousness to necessary plot device in the Christ narrative. In the Golden Legend, for example, after his death by hanging, Judas's soul erupts from his belly in a horrible fashion.\n\nThus, by the late Middle Ages, Judas's death by hanging is often depicted as not only ignoble but sinister. In a fourteenth-century image from Italy Judas is hanging from a gallows with feet dangling above the ground and the silver in a bag in his hand. A string running from the bag wraps around his neck, and a little black devil sits on his left shoulder. (It's interesting to note that in the twelfth century Bernard of Clairvaux referred to Judas's noose as the \"noose of avarice\" or avaritiae laqueo.) In other works Judas's hanging is associated with Hell and its punishments. Art historian Lee R. Sullivan suggests that in the late Middle Ages the image of Judas served as an icon of avarice, treachery, and contempt for authority and Christianity. Sullivan examines a glass panel of Judas's hanging produced in either Alsace or southern Germany sometime between 1520 and 1530, claiming that it is meant as a warning to rebellious German peasants in the wake of the Peasants' War (1524\u20131525). Sullivan asserts that \"an independent representation of Judas's suicide . . . makes a perfect statement about the inevitable result of such a transgression.\" Judas is a traitor, and traitors will hang\u2014and the Devil will receive their souls.\n\nFrom a Catholic Church Book of Hours (MS M.739, fol 23 r),   \nGermany, possibly Bamberg, 1204\u20131219.   \nUsed by permission of Pierpont Morgan Library\n\nIt's significant (and perhaps goes without saying) that Judas's hanging death is intimately connected to Christ's crucifixion. As noted above in the fourth-century panel, Judas's tree and Christ's cross are depicted in the same moment, in the same image. They are meant to be viewed together, to be compared and contrasted. Often when Christ's crucifixion is depicted we also bear witness to the crucifixion, on either side of him, of the two thieves. But this is not always so: curiously, in a Book of Hours from the thirteenth century that I saw in the Morgan Library the thieves are not crucified\u2014they are hanged.\n\nTurned Off\n\nJudas's death by rope might have affected how hanging to death as judicial punishment was viewed and understood during the Middle Ages. In Christian cultures Judas's supposed hanging could have contributed to a belief that such a death was nefarious and despicable, a death for thieves and traitors. Depictions of Judas's hanging death may have shaped how some viewed hanging executions in medieval Europe, but the belief that hanging was an ignoble death may also have originated from the actual method and practice of hanging itself. It was a painful and potentially gruesome way to die in public.\n\nDetail from the illumination of Aelfric's Genesis (c. 1050), BL MS Cotton Claudius B.IV f.59r.\n\nWhen crucifixions were banned\u2014most likely in the fourth century under the newly Christian emperor Constantine\u2014hanging executions became more common. And by the eleventh century The Vocabulary of Archbishop Alfric indicates that hanging executions had become common and public. In our popular imagination we think of medieval punishment as drawn from a hodge-podge from gruesome to gruesomer\u2014mutilations, beheadings, boiling, drowning, breaking on the wheel\u2014but the reality is that during this period hanging was the most common form of execution. This is true especially of late medieval Europe (England, Germany, Italy, and France, for example).\n\nTypically hangings took place outside of city walls (like at Tyburn outside of London). Oftentimes a gallows would be on a hill or at a crossroads. The condemned would have to travel there, either walking or riding on the back of a cart, wearing either a tunic or full dress; sometimes the victim would wear the noose around his neck during his travel to the site. After arriving at the execution site the victim climbed a ladder or remained in the cart. His hands were bound in back or front. A simple noose, a slipknot, was then tightened around his neck. This noose was typically made of rope, though sometimes chains were used. The rope was attached to a rudimentary gallows\u2014two poles with a cross-beam. Then the ladder or cart was moved away\u2014this was called \"turning off\"\u2014and he was left to die by slow strangulation. In some cases the victim was lifted or pulled up into the air off the ground rather than being turned off. If the condemned was lucky, his friends would pull down on his legs in order to hasten death (or he would pass out and be presumed dead only to revive later on). It was uncommon for a hood or cap to be placed over the victim's head, so onlookers saw it all\u2014contorted face and mouth, jerking body, bowels evacuating. Some onlookers took relics, such as splinters from the gallows, pieces of the rope, or body parts of the hanged\u2014a tradition that persisted well into the modern era. These relics, they believed, could cure and heal and, perhaps, protect. Often, though, the body remained intact and in place for all to see\u2014until the weather, wind, and birds finished their work.\n\nHanging was considered a \"disgraceful\" mode of punishment, reserved for thieves and the lower classes in part because it involved such a prolonged death, while decapitation by the sword was \"honourable.\" This appears to be the general consensus across Europe. C. V. Calvert notes that in medieval Germany \"the substitution of the sword for the halter was considered a favour in some cases.\" The mode of punishment was important because it telegraphed to onlookers the rank or class of the victim\u2014the confined nature of the slow strangulation of the hanging death (and the ignominy of the rotting corpse) was less desirable than the quick cut of the blade\u2014as well as the severity of the crime. But not all hangings were the same; some were more ignoble than others. In thirteenth-century Germany as well as in France a unique process of execution was reserved for Jews, whereby victims were hanged upside down between two dogs or wolves. Those with power and money, however, could escape punishment altogether. Many would claim the \"benefit of clergy\" by reading a passage from the Bible, thus proving their literacy and status. The passage they read was typically the 51st Psalm (which became known as \"the neck verse\"), and, thus, they would be exempt from the harshest secular courts' penalties.\n\nDuring the Middle Ages a hanging execution was a public spectacle, a community gathering that took place in front of hundreds of onlookers. So pervasive were these spectacles that, as art historian Mitchell Merback notes, many late-medieval painters based their paintings of Christ and the two thieves on their own experiences with public executions. They painted what they saw, and what they saw, from the most mundane hanging to burning at the stake or drawing and quartering, was often brutal by today's standards.\n\nBut Esther Cohen notes that \"one cannot dismiss public executions as expressions of sadism and barbarity alone. The deliberate causation of physical suffering can qualify as barbarism only if one accepts modern perceptions of and attitudes towards pain.\" Cohen rightly points out too that people suffered more in the Middle Ages\u2014there was no anesthesia to speak of\u2014and most experienced some intense pain \"absolutely intolerable to modern sensitivities\" at least once in a lifetime. The notion that pain should be avoided is a modern invention. For the condemned, suffering was viewed as necessary for receiving grace and salvation. Jesus Christ provided an excellent model for such behavior.\n\nA public hanging was also an expression of state power. Before the advent of the press, governments had to assert their authority via processions, festivals, and, of course, public executions. Executions sent a strong message to the people about the church and\/or state's ultimate authority and about who (or what) would be protected or not. In Discipline and Punish Michel Foucault notes that \"the public execution . . . is a ceremonial by which a momentarily injured sovereignty is reconstituted. It restores that sovereignty by manifesting it at its most spectacular.\" Hanging was just such a spectacular demonstration of power. It was, Foucault writes, a kind of performance: \"In the ceremonies of the public execution, the main character was the people, whose real and immediate presence was required for the performance. An execution that was known to be taking place, but which did so in secret, would scarcely have had any meaning. The aim was to make an example, not only by making people aware that the slightest offence was likely to be punished, but by arousing feelings of terror by the spectacle of power letting its anger fall upon the guilty person.\" The noose, of course, was central to this spectacle.\n\nAs hanging executions developed throughout the Middle Ages they gathered with them the requisite customs and accoutrements that shape the popular imagination of the practice\u2014the gallows, the crowd, the victim (penitent or otherwise), the hangman, and the rope knotted about the neck. There need be little more for a hanging to take place. It is an act requiring simple technologies, so simple that all those \"accoutrements\" are not technically necessary for a hanging to occur\u2014Judas did it alone. But by the end of the Middle Ages those accoutrements are unquestionably there. They too are part of the spectacle and ritual, part of the pattern of humans creating a space for other humans to die, and in a way that seems different from the ritualistic Iron Age hanging of Tollund Man.\n\nYet it also feels universal: there is something elemental about depriving a human of oxygen. A living person has a rope placed around her neck and is left to hang by that rope until she strangles to death, her legs kicking at the air, seeking support, some solid ground upon which to stand and perhaps save herself. She is drowning on dry land. This image of the jerking body of the hanged human signifies justice for some and tragedy for others. It is also an essential moment during which the human body grasps for the most basic need\u2014breath. Dangling bodies kicking for life are at the center of medieval poet Dante Alighieri's version of hell. After pilgrim Dante and guide Virgil pass through all the circles of hell, bearing witness to unimaginable suffering, they reach the last circle, where a three-faced Lucifer is frozen with the bodies of three traitors (Brutus, Cassius, and Judas Iscariot) hanging out of his three mouths, forever struggling to get free, forever suffering the pain of Lucifer's moving jaws. This is the center of hell, a place for history's most dastardly traitors. But as Virgil explains to Dante, \"'That soul up there who suffers most of all \/ . . . is Judas Iscariot: \/ the one with head inside and legs out kicking.\" The two travelers must then climb down the body of Lucifer, who is fixed forever in ice. Dante writes, \"We climbed, he first and I behind, until, \/ through a small round opening ahead of us \/ I saw the lovely things the heavens hold, \/ and we came out to see once more the stars.\"\n> revolutions\n> \n>  \nChapter 4\n\nAt the Crossroads:   \nThe Spectacle of Hanging   \nin Colonial New York\n\nWhen Europeans explored and colonized the so-called New World, they carried their histories and cultures with them. On ships, sailors perfected their knot-tying skills in order to ensure safety in difficult weather and rough seas. When they arrived in port some tossed to shore heaving lines made from wrapping turns like those used in a hangman's knot. Travelers on ships brought their languages, foodways, religions, politics, and even their punishments. Hanging executions were common enough in Europe. In the period of England's \"Bloody Code\" (roughly 1688\u20131815) there were 222 crimes (including murder, rape, robbery, arson, and counterfeiting) that could potentially lead to the noose, though they might also lead to \"transportation\" to one of the colonies or a stint in the military. The first European-administered hanging in North America may have been that of eight Native Americans in August 1572 by the Spanish in retribution for killing a group of Jesuit missionaries. In British North America hanging executions were around from the earliest days of settlement: the first was likely Daniel Frank, hanged in 1623 for stealing a calf in Virginia. And the first in Massachusetts Bay Colony was John Billington, a Mayflower passenger, hanged on September 30, 1630, for murder.\n\nThe noose traveled on board immigrant ships across the rolling Atlantic as both a cultural technology and an icon of brutal memories. In her 2008 novel A Mercy Toni Morrison imagines how this memory shaped the lives of colonists. The noose is a ghostly presence for a \"mail-order bride\" named Rebekkah, who witnessed many hangings in seventeenth-century England. Rebekkah thinks she has left these experiences behind but hasn't\u2014the memory of what she has witnessed is ever-present. Rebekkah remembers,\n\nThe first hangings she saw in the square amid a happy crowd attending. She was probably two years old, and the death faces would have frightened her if the crowd had not mocked and enjoyed them so. With the rest of her family and most of their neighbors, she was present at a drawing and quartering and, although she was too young to remember details, her nightmares were made permanently vivid by years of retelling and redescribing by her parents . . . it was clear in her household that execution was a festivity as exciting as a king's parade.\n\nMorrison's fiction depicts one reality for many colonists\u2014that they carried memories of public hangings with them to the cities and towns of the New World.\n\nIndeed, immigrants always bring the ideas of their old world into their new one. They foster confrontation and collaboration, collision and contact at the crossroads. Manhattan Island is perhaps America's greatest crossroads and has, from its inception, been so unstable that across centuries those with power on this island have felt compelled to assert themselves and their authority through very public displays: the great skyscraping monuments to capitalism, the New Colossus in the harbor, and, in colonial America (before the people granted their authority to a document, the Constitution) authority asserted itself quite effectively by hanging someone by his neck until he was dead. And usually this was done in a public space, perhaps at a crossroads, where the message would be seen and felt.\n\nThe first nonindigenous settler to come to Manhattan Island was Jan Rodrigues, a man born in Santo Domingo to a Portuguese father and Congolese mother\u2014a precursor to the ethnic heterogeneity of the island that persists to this day. Rodrigues lived in Manhattan for over a decade before the Dutch established a permanent settlement in 1624. And when they did, a free black community developed and soon became the largest free black community in the seventeenth-century North. These early African Americans could own property and develop small economic enterprises. In fact, during the 1650s there were free black farms along the Bowery from today's Prince Street up to Astor Place. Free black farmers sold their wares in weekly markets, where the port cities' diverse inhabitants rubbed elbows and competed for economic gain. And yet these free blacks lived alongside an enslaved black community.\n\nThe slave population was initially small, but as the Dutch colony grew, more farm labor was required. Many white colonists who came to work farms turned to trade, and by the time the English took over the colony in 1664, 20 percent of the population was enslaved. In addition to a new flag, the English brought their laws that required stricter controls on all black people. They also began the process of making white slavery virtually illegal in the colony. This shaped not only the lives of enslaved blacks in New York but also those of free blacks, who became increasingly less free as the seventeenth century bled into the eighteenth. Free blacks weren't allowed to vote, be jurors, testify, serve in the militia, and, in some cases, own property.\n\nAnd yet slavery in New York City was not like that of the plantation South. First of all, there were far fewer slaves in New England and in the Middle colonies. These people were not, generally, brought from Africa\u2014slave owners made more money further south. In the early eighteenth century about 70 percent of slaves in New York came from other New World colonies in the West Indies or in the South. Most slaves arrived in small groups and weren't crammed into the hulls of ships. They often worked as they traveled on these ships and learned a lot while doing so. The skills they gained at sea were often transferred to work in the ports, where slaves were employed as sailors and related naval industries\u2014ship building, sail making, and rope making.\n\nIn the North there were no grand plantations; most slave owners owned only a few slaves, housing them in their attics or cellars. Despite this physical proximity, black slaves and whites lived in separate worlds. But slaves had some freedom of movement, and this helped them develop connections across the city. The urban infrastructure, the many taverns, and simple cover of darkness provided ample possibilities for fostering communication and community. As was the custom in many Atlantic port taverns, white and black people mingled and drank, sometimes fought and sometimes sang. Proprietors weren't supposed to sell alcohol to slaves, but many were willing to overlook legal status when money was being offered.\n\nIn general these early African Americans were a cosmopolitan group\u2014some spoke several languages\u2014and had shared maritime experiences with some of their free black and lower-class white tavern-mates. At various times throughout the latter half of the seventeenth and the early years of the eighteenth century authorities tried to regulate such interracial and cross-class gatherings as well as gatherings among slaves themselves. Such laws weren't always effective, but stifling communications among slaves would become paramount after New York's first slave revolt on April 6, 1712.\n\nThe revolt began on Maiden Lane, in the present-day financial district. At one time this street was on the edge of the city and it was so named, the story goes, because at one time a stream flowed there, and it was popular for young women to do the washing and for young men to watch. But there was no courting this night, as a group of mostly Coromantine slaves, free blacks, and at least two Native Americans had assembled on the street carrying hatchets and guns and swords\u2014whatever weapon they could muster. They swore a blood oath, and some rubbed their clothes with a powder that was supposed to provide protection. At about two o'clock in the morning two slaves belonging to a baker named Peter Vantilborough set fire to his house while their armed coconspirators waited in the street. When a general panic ensued and white people came out of their houses, the rebels set upon them. Nine were killed and at least seven were wounded.\n\nGunfire woke up city residents, and shortly thereafter Governor Robert Hunter summoned citizens and troops to take up arms. The rebels ran; some hid in the town, but others raced to the woods north of the city. At least six killed themselves rather than being caught and tortured and\/or executed. Perhaps they knew about an incident from a few years earlier when two slaves were convicted of killing a Long Island family of seven and were tortured to death\u2014one was burned alive while the other was hung in chains and then impaled. Or, more likely, they had simply lived long enough in the Atlantic world to have known what was in store for them.\n\nThe revolt, according to a report in the Boston News-Letter, gave New York \"no small consternation.\" More than seventy slaves were arrested and forty-three brought to quick trials in April and May. In the end fifteen were hanged (one of whom was a pregnant woman whose execution was postponed until she'd given birth). Two were burned alive, and one, according to the record, was burned slowly for eight or more hours. Another slave, named Robin, was hung in chains while still alive. But the most gruesome of all punishments was that meted out to a slave named Claus, who was broken on the wheel, a process that involved stretching the condemned out on a wheel and then breaking his limbs. The victim was left in anguish to a slow and eventual death. In addition to the executions, the memories of some of the executed were further denigrated through the public display of their bodies and heads.\n\nThe Ritual of Hanging Crosses the Atlantic\n\nSuch large-scale and brutal punishments were atypical for the American colonies. In general colonists were less likely to reach for the noose than their relatives back in England, despite the fact that there were no prisons to speak of until the late eighteenth century. Actually, prisons were impractical in growing colonies: the entire community had to pay for imprisonment, and a prisoner would be unable to support her family, creating another expenditure for the community. The consensus, then, was that punishment should be public and should humiliate the convicted in an effort to reform. Popular colonial punishments included whipping, sitting in the stocks, clipping ears, or forcing people to wear letters denoting the crime they had committed, such as \"D\" (drunk), \"T\" (thief), or \"A\" (adulteress), made famous by Nathaniel Hawthorne. If none of this worked, there was the noose.\n\nColonists took executions seriously and believed there must be a pedagogical intent to them. Not only should a public hanging punish the criminal, but it should also warn others and act as a deterrent for future crimes, an argument one still hears from contemporary death penalty advocates. Each colony made its own laws about which crimes warranted the noose, and these laws changed over time. Initially crimes against morality, rather than property, were more likely to receive death sentences in New England. Historian Stuart Banner notes that \"blasphemy and idolatry were in principle capital crimes in Connecticut, Massachusetts, and New Hampshire; adultery was capital in early Connecticut, Massachusetts, and New York; sodomy and bestiality were capital throughout the region, even for the animals involved.\" But such executions became few and far between as New England and the colonies in general focused less on policing morals and more on making money. Concurrently, over the course of the eighteenth century there were more instances of executions for crimes against property.\n\nProtestant communities in colonial America continued, like their European forebears, to observe the ritual of public executions, an event witnessed by most colonial Americans at least once in their lifetime. Executions were held outside and sometimes in front of crowds that numbered into the thousands. In 1701 Esther Rodgers was hanged for infanticide in Boston in front of between four and five thousand spectators. Sarah Bramble was hanged in New London in front of about ten thousand in 1753. Daniel Wilson was executed in Providence for rape in front of more than twelve thousand people two years before the Declaration of Independence was signed. Crowds attending hangings in New York City grew so large that officials moved hangings to islands in the harbor; people then chartered boats and crowded along docks to gain the best vantage points. Hangings were mass gatherings (historian Stuart Banner claims they were the largest gatherings of any sort) for the ritual reenactment of community values and norms. Public hangings also reinforced, as they had in Europe, the values of the state and church. On the one hand, the state had the authority to punish criminals, and on the other, the church had the authority to assist in the criminal's salvation or damnation. A public execution was, then, a grand act of education and, possibly, indoctrination.\n\nEarly American execution attendees were mostly serious and solemn, in contrast to their English counterparts. Children were often present at executions, and religious leaders encouraged their parents to bring them. For Christian ministers a scheduled death was an excellent opportunity to teach the central tenets of Christianity\u2014God's punitive and redemptive power. The work of preparing the way for execution day began, sometimes, weeks beforehand, when ministers met with a condemned criminal in hopes of saving him or her. This would be followed by the execution sermon, which was delivered in church on the Sunday before (sometimes with the condemned criminal present) or at the scaffold on execution day.\n\nAfter the sermon the condemned might speak, and the hope of the minister and the audience was that she would confess her guilt and be saved before dying. Sometimes onlookers would ask questions of (or say a prayer with) the condemned, and the condemned would respond. Thus, just as in medieval Europe, the execution was a place where a criminal could repent, reconnect with God, and die a good death\u2014a result that onlookers desired. It's important to remember that in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century America people did not view condemned criminals as distinctly different from themselves\u2014they were human beings as themselves and had gone astray, like anyone could. Likewise Stuart Banner writes, \"Most colonial Americans assigned responsibility for crime to the criminal himself rather than to his environment. Among writers on the subject, humankind was often understood as intrinsically depraved, as having a natural tendency toward evil.\" So when someone committed a crime it was because they weren't being responsible for their actions, and then the community was obligated to punish them. For some, Puritans in particular, addressing criminal behavior meant keeping the community intact and on course.\n\nAnd yet the community was also obligated to assist or at least encourage the sinner to repent. Whether this would happen was a source of dramatic tension befitting the greatest theatrical production. If it all went smoothly, then the condemned would offer a heartfelt confession, and the execution would be deemed successful because it fostered \"conversion.\" Conversion might also mean a reassertion or reintegration of morality into a community\u2014a way of fostering community cohesion. John Winthrop famously underscored this belief in his \"Modell of Christian Charity\" when he claimed that the Puritan community would be one body knitted together by their Christian love, a vision of people from different classes, of different sexes, but with one mission. He wrote, \"We must delight in each other, make others' conditions our own, rejoice together, mourn together, labor and suffer together, always having before our eyes our commission and community in the work.\" They are joined together by love, by mission, and by belief. And public punishment was the hard edge of this love, but it was also a mechanism for the community torn apart to be stitched back together.\n\nThe punishments for slave rebellions tested this noble justification, though. There are moments when communities demonstrate no desire whatsoever to reintegrate. I should note that many of the condemned in early America were foreigners, in part because it was easier to get a conviction for such persons. It is also clear, especially in the southern colonies, that the list of executable offenses became especially long for black people, a list that often included conspiracy to commit crimes or rebellion. Slave resistance was met with swift punishment; sometimes slaves were gibbetted, branded, and, for persistent runaways, hamstrung. On September 9, 1739, after white colonists in South Carolina put down the Stono Rebellion, forty accused rebels were summarily executed and their heads placed on posts along the road to Charleston. Cutting up the body of the rebel or criminal and making it visible for public consumption was nothing new, of course, and had long been practiced in public spaces and crossroads throughout Europe.\n\nBut violent responses to threats on the community that went beyond singular hanging executions weren't always about slavery. In 1692 nineteen people were hanged (and one pressed) in Salem, Massachusetts, because of \"witchcraft\" (at least fourteen people had been hanged for the same charges in colonial America prior to that year). Of course, \"witch hunt\" has become a watchword for an outbreak of hysterical recrimination. The relationship of the communal hysteria in Salem to what the colonists carried with them across the Atlantic is worth noting. Salem had much in common with the pogroms and massacres of medieval and Early Modern Europe, though it integrated the European-style public execution into its rituals. Twenty years later the revolt executions in New York demonstrated again the ways that spectacles could be used to effectively \"other\" whole classes of people\u2014to attempt to eternally situate them in a lower social location. These executions had much in common with latter-day lynchings; indeed, there was no desire in 1712 to reintegrate black people into the community. In many ways 1712 prepared the way for America's future work in the art of tying knots and hanging people. In many ways 1712 prepared the way for 1741.\n\nNew York's Second Slave Rebellion\n\nBetween May 11 and August 15, 1741, authorities in the city of New York hanged twenty-one people and burned thirteen others at the stake. One man slit his throat rather than face the torment and humiliation of public execution. Of those executed, four were white and thirty were black; all had been accused of participating in a plan to incite a slave rebellion that would effectively overturn the colonial government.\n\nThe executions made an already extraordinary spring in this bustling coastal colony all the more extraordinary. The city was just pulling out of a brutal winter and was on edge because Great Britain and Spain were fighting the War of Jenkins' Ear, and hundreds of troops had left the city to fight; many feared a Spanish invasion while they were away. The war began, in part, because Spanish coast guards chopped off the ear of a British merchant ship captain. When he showed said ear to Parliament, the course was set. But the war wasn't really about an ear; it was about Atlantic world rivalries, the struggle for prominence in a growing global economy, setting political limits, establishing allies, and creating hierarchies. It was the kind of struggle that played out in little and big ways throughout the North American colonies over the course of the eighteenth century\u2014a struggle for order within communities and without.\n\nThe crisis that led to those thirty-four executions began on February 28 with a simple case of robbery. Investigators traced the crime back to three black slaves, named Caesar, Prince, and Cuffee, who, it turned out, had an ongoing relationship with a white tavern keeper named John Hughson, in whose basement some of the stolen property was found. Hughson's hardscrabble waterfront dive stood either in or just south of what is today called Zuccotti Park at the corner of Liberty and Trinity Place.\n\nInvestigators' main source was Hughson's sixteen-year-old indentured servant, Mary Burton. She claimed that not only did she know who was involved in the robbery but also that black men spent a lot of time in the tavern. In fact, she explained, one black man, Caesar, was in a relationship with a white prostitute named Peggy Kerry, and they had a child together. Hughson's tavern, investigators learned, was a place where laws and norms were flaunted. Mary Burton said she could tell them more but feared for her safety. Shortly thereafter Prince and Caesar were arrested and John Hughson and his family interrogated.\n\nThe information about Hughson's tavern would have piqued the interest of colonial authorities, for sure, but when the dots were connected to the events that followed, that interest turned into hysteria. What came next was a series of fires that threatened to destroy the entire infrastructure of the colonies. The first fire engulfed Fort George, the city's defense from the sea, on the day after St. Patrick's Day. And then there was another and then another\u2014thirteen fires in all, spanning the course of a few weeks. One Sunday morning during this burning time a white colonist claimed to have overheard a black slave named Quack exclaim, \"Fire, Fire, Scorch, Scorch. A little damn it, by-and-by\" as he walked along Broadway with a group of friends. Indeed, something strange seemed afoot.\n\nA grand jury began an inquest into the events on April 14. It was led for the most part by a ladder-climbing lawyer named Daniel Horsmanden, who was eager to make a name for himself in the city. Horsmanden was suspicious of the fires and suspected a conspiracy, especially given Quack's statement and the fact that a slave named Cuffee was seen fleeing one of them. Meanwhile officials urged laws to curtail assemblies of black people in the city and stepped up night patrols. And in late April a proclamation was published announcing that any white person who could \"discover\" anyone involved with the fires would get one hundred pounds if they were convicted. If a slave did so, he would be free and his owner compensated. And a free \"Negro, Mulatto, or Indian\" who did so would receive forty-five pounds.\n\nHughson's indentured servant Mary Burton took the stand on April 22 and told tales of miscegenation in Hughson's waterfront tavern, late-night inter-racial carousing, and, most startling of all, a plot to overthrow the colonial government and replace it with one ruled by King John Hughson and Governor Caesar. A city census from around 1737 \"counted 8,667 New Yorkers: 6,947 whites and 1,719 blacks\"; this meant that about one in five New Yorkers was black, and most were slaves. Black people were in a clear minority, and yet rebellion was still a possibility. The people in New York would have heard about slave rebellions outside of Charleston (1739), in Antigua (1736), and on St. John's (1733). For her testimony Burton was offered her freedom and one hundred pounds. So she kept talking, and over the spring and summer of 1741, 20 white people and 142 black people were arrested.\n\nIn court defendants weren't allowed attorneys, and much of the evidence\u2014or all of it, really\u2014was based on confessions from folks stuffed into the basement prison at City Hall. In this uncommon case the courts relied on an uncommon tool\u2014evidence from black people. Slaves and free blacks were told that if they offered evidence against another slave or free black, they could avoid the harshest penalties. Historian Michael Kammen notes that what emerged was \"a pattern of terror and intimidation in which blacks were offered pardons only for 'telling the truth,' which really meant confessing and implicating others. Denials and professions of innocence went unheeded.\" And yet much of what Horsmanden and company were able to wring out of the defendants had roots in Mary Burton's testimony.\n\nIn early May Caesar and Prince were convicted and became the first persons implicated in this crisis to hang by their necks until dead. But as spring slipped into summer, the executions began in earnest: generally burnings were held in the afternoons and evenings and hangings in the morning. When Quack and Cuffee were burned near the African Burial Ground, an enormous crowd gathered to watch, anxious to see them executed. After they had been chained to the stake they were questioned, and both began confessing all manner of things\u2014including responsibility for setting fires\u2014and accusing over thirty people in hopes of winning a reprieve or sentence reduction. Neither was in the cards for them: they were engulfed in smoke and flame.\n\nIn early June John Hughson, his wife, and Peggy Kerry were convicted and sentenced to death for \"confederating with the Negroes . . . and encouraging them to burn the town and kill the inhabitants.\" The three were carried to their execution in a cart. This was, as with most early American executions, a very public journey from jail to the site of execution, typically a location with few visual obstructions and an ability to accommodate throngs of onlookers. Sometimes executions would take place at the scene of the crime. The condemned were usually told to look down and not make eye contact as they traveled toward their imminent demise\u2014in a sense, underscoring a symbolic break with the community. But John Hughson stood up in the cart on his way to the gallows, gazing upon the crowd as if looking for some sign of possible rescue, and \"one hand was lifted up as high as his pinion would admit of, and a finger pointing, as if intending to beckon.\" Or maybe he was looking at the people who were about to kill him. \"At the gallows his wife stood like a lifeless trunk, with the rope around her neck . . . she said not a word and had scarce any visible motion.\" Peggy apparently was about to say something before they were to be executed, but Mrs. Hughson \"gave her a shove.\"\n\nThe hanging proper would have utilized technologies that had changed very little from the Middle Ages. One method was to have the condemned climb a ladder, to bind her hands, and then to place the noose around her neck. The noose used was most likely a traditional slipknot, as there's no clear indication that the hangman's knot was in use yet. The rope was attached either to a simple gallows fashioned out of two poles and a cross bar or to a tree. In colonial America most towns built gallows for specific hangings, though larger towns might have them in place at all times. After the condemned climbed the ladder and the noose was adjusted, the ladder was pulled away, and he or she strangled to death.\n\nThe ladder was eventually replaced by a cart, as it seems to have been for the executions of the Hughsons and Peggy Kerry. Their procession would have ended with the cart being pulled up to the gallows, the rope attached, and the beast of burden pulling the cart whipped. The three were then quickly jerked off the cart and hanged. Some reformers thought using a cart would lead to a quicker death; however, the use of the cart required a shorter gallows and, thus, the condemned suffered a short drop and, most likely, still died of prolonged strangulation. Others believed that if you could situate the noose beneath the left or right ear rather than behind the head, it would result in a quicker death\u2014most likely by fracturing the spinal column. The people handling all of this technology, the hangmen, weren't experts but rather locals with little experience; often it was the sheriff or some other known member of the local community.\n\nThe execution of Levi Ames from \"The dying groans of Levi Ames, who was executed at Boston, the 21st of October, 1773 for burglary.\" This is a good example of Colonial execution. Note the presence of both the military and the clergy. Library of Congress\n\nWhen the condemned was declared dead, family members could claim the body. But the bodies of the executed were generally never claimed. In London they were often given to surgeons for dissection, but in the colonies they were typically buried in a communal grave, if they were buried at all. Hughson and Caesar suffered the double ignominy of being hanged in chains on an island in the collect pond, just north of the city (and close to today's Federal Courthouse). But a curious thing happened to the bodies of John Hughson and Caesar as they hung in chains. Horsmanden writes that Hughson's \"face, hands, neck, and feet, were of a deep shining black, rather blacker than the negro placed by him.\" His hair, he wrote, began \"curling like the wool of a negro's beard and head, and the features of his face were of the symmetry of a negro beauty.\" His body also began to swell. Conversely, Caesar became \"bleached or turned whitish.\" It seemed as though the two had \"changed colors.\" Hughson became \"as black as the devil.\" Eventually, though, time and nature took its course in the heat of the New York summer, and Hughson's body exploded with \"pail fulls of blood and corruption.\" It's clear that Hughson was gibbeted as a message to all white people who might collaborate with enslaved Africans\u2014and yet his body turned black while Caesar's turned white, seeming to belie, ultimately, the division of race.\n\nThese executions have only the noose in common with the religiously oriented executions of New England mentioned above. For white colonists there seems to be more at stake. When a young man commits bestiality there are moral concerns, but in New York there are economic ones as well. Indeed, the intended message of these public executions was that blacks and whites shouldn't try to rebel, shouldn't even consider it, or they will pay with their lives. But the intended message of a public execution was not always received. Oftentimes the condemned subverted the intentions of authorities with their behavior as they were led to the gallows or tied to the stake. Some proclaimed their innocence. Others reacted with anger and vengeance, striking out at spectators. One man burned at the stake in New York that summer claimed to have been involved in slave rebellions at St. John's and Antigua, as if to suggest that he had always been rebellious and would remain unrepentant. Around noon on Saturday, July 18, six black men were executed. One refused to speak when asked questions, while another, a slave named Fortune, acted \"like a mountebank's fool, jumped off the cart several times with the halter about his neck, as if sporting with death. Some conjectured he was intoxicated with rum.\" The New York Weekly Journal described his behavior as \"unparalleled impenitence and impudence as to amaze spectators.\" Others were dutifully penitent\u2014or at least that's how they were perceived\u2014and thus earned the respect of onlookers. The American Weekly Mercury gave details of a pious \"Spanish Negro\" who prayed at the gallows, \"making use of his beads, with a crucifix in his hand, which he often kissed, and crossed himself, after the manner of the Roman Catholics. He to the last denied that he was guilty.\"\n\nThere was continued talk on the streets and in the papers of the war and the possibility of a Spanish invasion. This led some involved in the court proceedings to believe there was a greater conspiracy that involved the Spanish. The magistrates of New York \"found\" evidence of a \"popish\" plot and accused a man named John Ury of being a Spanish priest in disguise. They believed Ury had recruited Hughson, whom he had converted, along with many slaves, to Catholicism. But Ury denied all accusations on the scaffold and was the last to hang on August 29. When he \"appeared at the gallows with a very composed countenance, he kneeled down and prayed very devoutly. And in his prayer to God he denied the facts witnessed against him, so he prayed that it would please almighty God to cause some visible constraint upon the witnesses to manifest to the world, that they had been witnessed against him was false.\" According to one newspaper, he then gave a prepared speech: \"I am now going to suffer a death attended with ignominy and pain; but it is the cup that my heavenly father has put into my hands, and I drink it with pleasure. It is the cross of my dear redeemer, I bear it with alacrity; knowing, that all that live godly in Christ Jesus must suffer persecution; and we must be made in some degree partakers of his sufferings, before we can share in the glories of his resurrection.\" Ury claimed his innocence and that he knew nothing of the conspiracy, that he didn't even recognize his courtroom accusers. \"I depart this waste, this howling wilderness,\" he exclaimed, \"with a mind serene, free from all malice, with a forgiving spirit.\" And then he entreated, \"No longer delay; seeing the summons may come before you are aware, and you, standing before the bar of a God, who is a consuming fire out of the Lord Jesus Christ, should be hurled, be doomed to the place where their worm dies not, and the fire is never to be quenched.\" Ury removed his wig and handed it to a friend, who helped him adjust the noose around his neck and the cap over his head. Through it all he remained composed, cool, and calm. And then the cart pulled away, and John Ury likely strangled to death.\n\nThe plot, the hysteria, the scare\u2014call it what you will\u2014fell apart as Mary Burton began accusing high-ranking white people and her reputation came into question. Not to mention the fact that many slave owners were losing money as their slaves, their property, were executed. In early August Cadwallader Colden, one of the city's most prominent citizens, received a mysterious letter from an author who claimed to be from Massachusetts and noted the similarities between the Salem witch trials and what was happening in New York. The writer claimed to be a \"well-wisher to all human beings and one that ever desires to be of the merciful side.\" Some wondered if the letter was not from a disgruntled New Yorker.\n\nAs summer slipped into fall, the proceedings became increasingly unpopular and would soon come to an end. When all was said and done, thirty-four people had been executed, five white men were pressed into military service, and over seventy people of African descent had been transported out of the colony, most to the brutal slavery of the West Indies, where they could only expect a few more years of life. Pardon wasn't uncommon in the colonies; it was at the governor's discretion. The overall pardon rate in the New York colonies for capital offenses was 51.7 percent, and 72 percent of slaves were pardoned in this case. That more weren't executed was likely due to the fact that they didn't actually kill anyone and so few were actually involved. On November 11 Mary Burton received her last payment and, thus, her freedom from indentured servitude\u2014she was never heard from again.\n\nThere is no single agreed-upon narrative of what happened in New York in 1741. Some argue that the trials and executions were the result of the dismantling of an actual scheme devised by slaves and poor whites to rob and pilfer from New York's wealthiest. Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker claim that what happened in New York was a part of a series of revolutions that spread throughout the Atlantic world, what they call \"a Caribbean cycle of rebellion,\" and they cite \"more than eighty separate cases of conspiracy, revolt or mutiny, and arson\u2014a figure probably six or seven times greater than the number of similar events that occurred in either the dozen years before 1730 or the dozen after 1742.\" In New York the organizers were \"soldiers, sailors, and slaves from Ireland, the Caribbean and Africa.\" They argue that the \"cooperative nature of work in the port\" fostered social relations and rebellious networks. In the end New York authorities tried to regulate the taverns and reinforce racial boundaries\u2014\"promoting a white identity that would transcend and unify the city's fractious ethnic divisions.\" But others argue that the convictions were based on hysteria and that many innocent people died. Winthrop Jordan calls what happened \"a classic witch hunt,\" and Mary Burton, an \"imaginative informer.\" Philip D. Morgan claims that what we really might be looking at is a case of white racism and a desire to see rebellion where there is none. It should be noted too that many of the confessions were gained through the promise of rewards or of the cessation of torture.\n\nWas there an actual conspiracy and was this an example of lower-class collaboration and an attempt to transform a colony in the New World? Was it, perhaps, an attempt to make a new world? One thing is certain: many people were hanged, and most of them were people living on the margins of the community\u2014free blacks and enslaved Africans, poor people and immigrants.\n\nDaniel Horsmanden sincerely believed that black slaves and freemen, under the direction of whites, were plotting to destroy New York City, or at least that's what he says in the book he published in 1744 with the lengthy title A Journal of the Proceedings in the Detection of the Conspiracy formed by Some White People, in Conjunction with Negro and Other Slaves, for Burning the City of New York in America, and Murdering the Inhabitants. Horsmanden's report of the events of that year is the most thorough extant source on the event and a fascinating contribution to the genre of crime literature, but it must be read with caution. Horsmanden had a lot riding on these prosecutions. First of all, he had been on the losing side of a trial that has become a seminal event in American legal history\u2014the 1735 trial of printer John Peter Zenger, who was accused of libel but found innocent of the charges, a case viewed by many as a foundational event for establishing a free press in America. So for Horsmanden, the prospect of uncovering a grand slave conspiracy offered the possibility of redemption from that loss. He argued for the initial investigations, sat on the Supreme Court, and doled out sentences. Contemporary readers must keep a sharp eye out when reading the pages of this \"journal,\" for it is hard to tell what can be trusted and what cannot; thus, the debate continues about whether there was a plot in the first place. Was it a fabrication? Is this a work of fiction? Was Horsmanden using the convergence of a variety of alarming events to his advantage?\n\nNonetheless, his book is a dramatic example of gallows literature, and amidst its problematic pages two things stand out to me: the author's relative erasure of the actual executions and his clear attitudes about race. The conspiracy trials are particularly important because they lead to one of the most intense episodes of mass hangings in early America and offer an important case study for examining the ways in which race becomes an important social category in America. One way to read what happened in 1741 is that it is the story of how hysteria turns into scapegoating. But it is also about how racial categories are formed, how blackness is equated with crime and, I will argue, with the noose itself. As historian of American slavery Ira Berlin claims, \"Race is not simply a social construction; it is a particular kind of social construction\u2014a historical construction.\"\n\nAnd yet the 1741 conspiracy court could not understand \"the monstrous ingratitude of this black tribe\" whose \"slavery among us is generally softened with great indulgence; they live without care, and commonly better fed and clothed, and put to less labor, than the poor of most Christian countries.\" They could not understand why any enslaved person in their fine city would want to change her circumstances\u2014either through rebellion or robbery. Not only could they not conceive of why she might wish to rebel, at one point during the trial Attorney General Richard Bradley asserted that there was no way any slave could have organized the rebellion herself. As a group they were, he claimed,\n\nstupid wretches seduced by the instigation of the devil, and Hughson his agent, to undertake so senseless as well as wicked enterprise . . . it cannot be imagined that these silly unthinking creatures . . . could of themselves have contrived and carried on so deep, so direful and destructive a scheme, so that we have seen with our eyes and have heard fully proved, they had prepared for us, without the advice and assistance of such abandoned wretches as Hughson was\u2014that never to be forgotten Hughson, who is now gone to his place, as did Judas of old to his.\n\nHughson, like the Judas of legend, hanged. His memory would be forever denigrated because he was friends with, conspired with, was in contact with black people. This was the message sent by New York authorities: there is no place for \"mixing\" in this community. They desired fixed divisions of race and class in the city. But reality is more complicated, people are more complicated, and this will always lead to conflicts at the crossroads of cultures and economic interests. Whites never truly imagined a place for black people in their community; they could work for them, be near them, live near them, but they would never be truly integrated into their sense of self or nation. Perhaps, then, the ethnic and national diversity fostered a sense of white solidarity and black otherness. And in order to do so, and with the help of the noose, whites fostered a destructive and spectacular violence. Natalie Zemon Davis writes that rather than fall into such \"rites of violence\" as a means for securing safety and community, \"we must think less about pacifying 'deviants' and more about changing central values.\" In a sense she says that we should reflect on how we learn to hate and how we learn to kill. These things do not come out of thin air.\n\nSigns and Symbols\n\nI moved to New York City shortly after I graduated from college in 1999. On my first night in Brooklyn I was trying to fall asleep in the August heat of my top-floor tenement apartment. Lying on two towels on the floor, the only bed I had at that point, I discovered that if I raised my head just so, I could see the blinking light of the North Tower of the World Trade Center. To the right of that light a lone star and then an airplane headed for a safe landing at LaGuardia. Two years later I climbed up to the roof for a better view: on that day there was only smoke and ashes where grand towers once stood. Burnt pages of computer paper floated on currents, helicopters circled, and, beyond, nothing but blue sky. Those buildings, which once seemed so firm in their push to heaven, had buckled under the weight of too much hate. There was a lot of death in that place, in that moment. And yet that spit of land hugged by the East River and the Hudson is no stranger to violent death.\n\nToday that violent history is mostly paved over, buried beneath skyscrapers and years of living. It's difficult to find it, to find even a glimpse of what was once there. It's almost impossible, like trying to understand why and how humans can be so violent. Lower Manhattan has seen its share of spectacular violence. Situated at the mouth of a river that goes deep into a landscape of great resources, it is and has been for centuries a place where people come together to trade\u2014a commercial crossroads. As such this space, jutting out into one of the finest harbors on the Eastern Seaboard, has also been a crossroads of cultures and politics. Lower Manhattan gathers people together to do both awesome and horrible things\u2014to create culture through the trade of stories and languages, to create empire through the accumulation of wealth, but also to produce very public displays of violence. Not surprisingly there's a conflict over memory at Ground Zero and in Lower Manhattan and how the violence of 9\/11 is to be remembered and memorialized. To some, Ground Zero should be a graveyard; to others it should be a testament to American enterprise and ingenuity winning out over evil deeds. To some, Ground Zero is the present; to others, Ground Zero is the past.\n\nIf you walk east from Ground Zero and cross the street to Zuccotti Park at Liberty and Trinity Place, you will walk where, in 1741, a group of African slaves and freemen and a smattering of poor white sailors gathered in Hughson's Tavern. Keep walking eastward down Liberty and cross Broadway. Shuffle over to Maiden Lane and Williams Street, about to where the 1712 Rebellion began. Stay eastward and a bit southward as you make your way down to 75 Wall Street, where a slave market once stood. Today it's sophisticated condominiums, a rooftop lounge, and modern amenities.\n\nTurn up Water to Fulton Street and the South Street Seaport area, a manufactured vision of nineteenth-century New York City full of upscale commercial outposts\u2014Guess, Coach, Abercrombie, Superdry, Brookstone. It is a fake space: a far cry from the seafaring past it represents, but then again it is tapped into the global marketplace of our day. And there are alehouses still and many languages spoken. But most of the ships around this \"seaport\" are museums\u2014history repackaged for easy consumption.\n\nTurn back inland, toward the city, and make your way up Fulton and go north up Broadway, over to City Hall Park. In 1741 most of what is today City Hall Park was the commons; it was also a likely site for the gallows. There's nothing marking that gallows, though there is a prominent statue in honor of Nathan Hale, America's favorite hanged man, who was likely hanged near the present-day United Nations. It's curious how much is remembered about Hale, he of the famous line about having only one life to give for his country.\n\nFrom City Hall Park, walk over to the corner of Chambers and Centre, where the burnings took place, and look north to where the collect pond stood, just outside the city walls. In the middle of that pond was an island, and on that island Caesar and Hughes were gibbeted. They were served the double ignominy of being gibbeted but also being left to decay outside the city proper. Today this is Thomas Paine Park, just above Foley Square. A sign at the park explains that this would have been a freshwater swamp during Paine's time in New York City and that it was surrounded by several British prisons for Revolutionaries, including the Bridewell, where many died from \"wind and cold exposure while waiting for trial.\"\n\nThis park is close to where contemporary justice is dispensed in New York City: One Police Plaza and the New York State Supreme Courthouse, which looms in all its granite glory over this convergence of streets and traffic islands and crosswalks with \"The true administration of justice is the firmest pillar of good government\" inscribed above its Corinthian columns. There is some justice in this space: the spring that fed the collect pond (where Hughson and Caesar were hanged in chains) today feeds a fountain, part of a sculpture called \"Triumph of the Human Spirit,\" dedicated \"to all the unknown and unnamed enslaved Africans brought to this country including the 427 Africans excavated near this site.\" It is there because in October 1991 construction workers discovered human remains at a building site near Duane and Elk Street, just a stone's throw away. Archaeologists rushed in and soon discovered that this was the site of New York's old African Burial ground, where as many as 20,000 black people had been buried during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Back then the 6.6-acre site was just outside of city limits, a place deemed appropriate for the burial of black people in a majority white city. Archaeologists quickly learned a lot about the people buried there\u2014that some died of disease, many labored strenuously, and many early African Americans were able to retain elements of their cultures. Human remains were found with heads to the west so they would face homeward, buried with objects and with coins covering eyes.\n\nThe discovery of this burial ground sparked a tremendous controversy, as many in the African American community saw the potential desecration of the remains as one more example of white racism and just another attempt to ignore a complicated history. It was a tumultuous time for race relations in the city. In the 1980s three black men were killed by mobs\u2014Willie Turks (1982), Michael Griffith (1986), and Yusef Hawkins (1989). And in August 1991, the death of seven-year-old Gavin Cato, son of Guyanese immigrants, by a car in a motorcade for the leader of the Chabad Lubavitch Hasidic sect, sparked three days of unrest in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. The discovery of all those remains was just one more indignity. After much protest, architects for the construction site reworked plans to incorporate a memorial at the site. And in 2003 a group of African American New Yorkers held a traditional burial of some of the remains at the memorial.\n\nThe memorial of dark granite is dramatic. To enter, you pass an inscription that reads, \"For all those who were lost. For all those who were stolen. For all those who were left behind. For all those who were not forgotten.\" You then walk down a circular path lined with numerous symbols representing the cultural and religious heritage of the people buried here. On the ground are listed the age and sex of some of those buried: Burial 22, child between 2\u00bd and 4\u00bd years; Burial 348, child between 1 and 2 years; Burial 105, man between 35 and 45 years; Burial 284, man between 21 and 28 years. In the center of the circle a fountain gurgles\u2014the water that brought those men and women to this continent. The water slips into a narrow passage or chamber, which, when you walk through, makes a sound like that of water splashing against a boat, the ghostly sounds of a slave ship.\n\nIf those construction workers hadn't paused from their work, those bodies may have been forever lost beneath some glassy skyscraper. They may have been lost beneath the metropolis, rebuilding and rebuilding, growing into something new, leaving the past buried beneath steel and concrete\u2014a bedrock of bones. In fact, in and around the African Burial Ground National Monument there could be some ten to twenty thousand remains. But building and destroying is the lifecycle of the city, so there they rest, I suppose. There is always a frontier, always a new world to explore in a metropolis. It is a space where people come and go and do. And those people coming and going and doing are bringing with them whatever they learned from wherever they came.\n\nRanger Cyrus Forman of the US National Parks Service, one of the many caretakers of the site, feels a deep responsibility to this history, stating, \"My job is to educate or to mitigate the possibility of violence. But education is just one of the things we do. We are also a place for the living to pay respect to the dead. The fact that the burial ground was lost for one hundred ninety-seven years meant that people couldn't have a place to come and ask the oldest ancestors and to speak to them and worship them. The most amazing thing for me is when I'm at the memorial and I see a lawyer on his way to court or a messenger on her way through the day and they stop and nod in such a way that I can tell that it's a pause for their ancestors, for the past.\"\n\nWhen Forman speaks about the people buried here he calls them the city's \"African founding fathers and mothers.\" And when he talks about colonial America he notes that these were the people whose skills helped farm the fields, shoe the horses, and build the boats that connected New York to the Atlantic world. These people literally built the city, filling swamplands, shaping its topography. Many retained African cultural practices, as evidenced in the burial ground itself, a sacred and communal space for New York's early Africans. And these people came from as near as Morocco and as far as Kenya\u2014early New York was a melting pot of African cultures. To center this experience, to center this way of viewing history may not be a new idea for some scholars, but for a lot of visitors who take tours with him, it is. Sometimes, Forman says, people cry when he's giving a tour. Some cry out of sadness; children, especially, he's noticed, will cry because of a deeply felt empathy. But others cry out of anger that they are just now learning and feeling the story of the first black New Yorkers, some of the earliest African Americans.\n\nThere's another memorial in Lower Manhattan that has caused a lot of controversy, tears, reflection, and debate. On September 11, 2010, when right-wing Dutch politician Geert Wilders spoke at a protest to prevent the construction of an Islamic cultural center at Park 51, close to Ground Zero, he said that \"no place in the world is as vibrant as New York City.\" If you live in New York City, he claimed, you can be whatever you want to be. He told the worshipful crowd that his opposition to the construction of the cultural center was rooted in tolerance and \"a tolerant society is not a suicidal society. A tolerant society like your New York should defend itself. We should never give a free hand to those who want to subjugate us.\" For the sake of those who died on 9\/11, he said, we should not allow the mosque here. \"In the name of freedom,\" he shouted, \"no mosque here!\" With his aggressively dyed blond hair and his dogged attacks on Islam, Wilders is an unlikely spokesperson for tolerance. About a year later, at the end of December 2011, a noose was found a block away by a construction foreman at Ground Zero. The noose was hanging on the 64th floor of 1 World Trade Center, the Freedom Tower.\nChapter 5\n\nHanging Hannah Occuish   \nin Post-Revolution America\n\nPerhaps the youngest victim of the noose in the recorded history of the United States was twelve-year-old Hannah Occuish, who was executed on December 20, 1786. Hannah's story begins, in a way, in 1633, when about 80 percent of the Pequot Indians died from disease; at that point the population was reduced to about 3,000. Four short years later disagreements with English colonists threatened to completely destroy the community when a Pequot attack on an English town prompted a violent reply. Before dawn on May 26, 1637, an alliance of English soldiers and Narragansett and Mohegan Indians attacked a Pequot fort along the Mystic River, setting fire to the fort and killing those who fled. Ultimately only 7 were left in the fort, and between 307 women, children, and old men were dead. Captain John Underhill wrote, \"Great and doleful was the bloody sight to the view of young soldiers that never had been in war, to see so many souls lie gasping on the ground, so thick, in some places, that you could hardly pass along.\" The Pequot community lost half of its already diminished population. The rest escaped and blended in with other tribes, but some were sold into servitude in Bermuda, and many were parceled out to tribes allied with the English, such as the Mohegan and Narragansett. Puritans saw it as divine retribution, but contemporaries have likened the massacre and aftermath to genocide.\n\nHannah's story is the residue this genocide, if we can call it that. In many ways this loss shaped her social identity; her body was an archive of tragic community trauma, a history that she may have known little about but nonetheless affected her greatly. One sociologist, Ron Eyerman, defines cultural trauma as \"a dramatic loss of identity and meaning, a tear in the social fabric affecting a group of people that has achieved some degree of cohesion.\" It's not necessary for everyone in the group to have experienced the trauma for it to affect the group, especially if the event is often rehashed and retold; it then becomes an integral part of a collective memory. By the time Hannah was born in Groton, Connecticut, to a Pequot mother and black father, this collective trauma would have been sewn deep into the fabric of what was left of the Pequots.\n\nWe know little of Hannah's early life save that she was raised by her mother, Sarah, who was an alcoholic. Hannah's entry into the public record, though, was rather auspicious. When she was about six years old, along with her brother Charles, she was accused of assaulting a young girl in order to steal \"her clothes and a gold necklace which she had on.\" The girl, covered in blood, escaped to tell her parents. Town leaders investigated the incident and thought it best that they \"bind them both out.\" In other words, Hannah and her brother may have been forced into indentured servitude. This was a common punishment for misbehaving children in eighteenth-century New England, especially for Native American children. Officials could indenture a child (a girl until age eighteen or a boy until twenty-one) if they thought their parents could not care for them\u2014sometimes a rather arbitrary determination. Hannah's mother didn't like the idea at all and took her daughter to the home of a widow named Mrs. Rogers, who lived just outside of New London. She told the woman and Hannah that she'd return in a few days, apparently after she had figured out her next move. If she went back to Groton, what would happen to Hannah? Where could she take her daughter and son? But months passed before Hannah's mother returned, and when she did, she didn't have a plan except to beg the woman to keep Hannah. The woman agreed, and there's no indication that Hannah ever saw her mother again.\n\nAbandoned by her mother and already stigmatized by a liminal racial identity, Hannah's life would have been tenuous at best. She struggled to form positive relationships\u2014Mrs. Rogers was abusive, and other children were afraid of her, not surprising given the reason she had to leave Groton in the first place. Hannah gained a reputation in the community for lying and thieving.\n\nAll of these events and forces led to the crime for which she was condemned to death. On the morning of July 21, 1786, the body of six-year-old Eunice Bolles was found \"in the public road leading from New-London to Norwich, lying on its face near to a wall.\" It appeared that the murderer had tried unsuccessfully to cover her\/his tracks, covering the head and arms with some stones. \"Upon examining the body the skull appeared to be fractured; the arms and face much bruised, and the prints of finger-nails were very deep on the throat.\" The Connecticut Courant reported that \"the head and body were mangled in a shocking manner.\" Authorities searched for the perpetrator. When they questioned Hannah, she claimed that she'd seen four boys in a garden close to where the body was found, and shortly thereafter she heard the garden wall fall down. That must have killed Eunice, she told them. But the boys were never found, and fingers began pointing in Hannah's direction.\n\nThe next day she was questioned again. Despite her youth, none of the adults in Hannah's life were notified of the charges against her, and given her tenuous place in the social hierarchy, one wonders whether it would have mattered or if they would have cared. In the fashion of such investigations at the time, she was taken to where Eunice was killed and told what had happened there. Hannah \"burst into tears and confessed that she killed her; saying that if she could be forgiven she would never do it again.\"\n\nHannah apparently revealed even more details, claiming that she saw Eunice as she was walking to school and called after her, promising Eunice a piece of calico. Then Hannah \"struck her on the head with a stone which she had taken for the purpose, and repeating the blows the child cried out, 'Oh, if you keep beating me so I shall die.'\" Soon the child stopped moving for a moment and then stirred. Hannah then choked the girl to death. Her motive, she said, was that the little girl had gotten her in trouble five weeks beforehand. Apparently Hannah had taken some of her fruit when they had picked strawberries together.\n\nHannah's trial took place in early October in the New London County Superior Court with Judge Richard Law presiding. Judge Law appointed an attorney named Timothy Larrabee to counsel Hannah. She pled not guilty. The magistrate asserted that it was a premeditated crime based on the strawberry dispute. The court claimed that Hannah must have known that killing Eunice was wrong because she tried to make the murder appear to be an accident and then claimed she had committed her crime with \"malice aforethought.\" She was depicted as a depraved human, \"marked with almost everything bad,\" despite the fact that the legal age of discretion at the time was fourteen. When testimony was over, the judge summarized the evidence to the jury, and although he noted that she had been raised poorly, he also acknowledged evidence of premeditation and asserted that to not hang her would be to say that children can murder with impunity. On October 7 the jury returned a guilty verdict.\n\nAnd then, when the judge read her sentence, he explained, \"Nothing remains but to pass the painful sentence of this court\u2014which is, that you should be returned hence to the gaol from whence you came, and from thence be carried to the place of execution\u2014and there be hanged with a rope by the neck, between heaven and earth, until you are dead, dead, dead and may the Lord, of his infinite goodness and sovereign grace, have mercy on your soul.\" Some in attendance cried upon hearing the sentence, but Hannah, to the shock of all, seemed hardly aware of the significance of the judge's words. Timothy Larrabee petitioned the Connecticut General Assembly for a reprieve on Hannah's behalf; he cited her youth, that she hadn't had a Christian upbringing, that she didn't know her left from her right. Larrabee claimed she hadn't intended to kill Eunice, just to beat her, but when Eunice cried out, Hannah struck her hard to keep her quiet. Lastly, Hannah's pathetic attempt to conceal the body demonstrated that she didn't know right from wrong. But to no avail: his petition was rejected on October 26.\n\nHannah's apparent ignorance continued during her final days in jail, a sign, perhaps of her stress, her youth, or her ignorance. And then, according to the Connecticut Courant, \"about a fortnight before her execution, when she seemed to be more anxious, and on being asked by those who went to see her, how long she had to live? She would tell the number of days with manifest agitation. On the day before her execution, she appeared in great distress, saying that she was distressed for her soul; and continued in tears for most of the day, and until her execution.\"\n\n\"Fashioned of the Same Spirits\"\n\nIt is upsetting to think that a twelve-year-old girl was condemned to death during a period that is often referred to as the Age of Enlightenment. Writers during this period sparked political rhetoric that fostered the American Revolution; they also sparked a conversation about crime and punishment. By the late eighteenth century in the United States and in Europe there was a growing movement to ban public executions. This movement was led by middle- and upper-class people who argued that public punishments were brutal and that they brutalized the viewer, fostering more violence rather than deterring it. This line of reasoning ran parallel to arguments against the use of torture to extract confessions and to punish; instead, enlightened thinkers favored the use of prisons as a way to reform criminals. Steven Pinker writes that in recent decades some writers and scholars have mentioned the Age of Enlightenment with a \"sneer,\" scoff at its naivet\u00e9 (\"We are all rational beings capable of solving any problem!\"), and blame the Enlightenment for twentieth-century atrocities. And yet, he notes, we do a disservice to this period of vibrant intellectual growth if we write it off completely. Consider what came before\u2014consider the Salem witch hunt, consider those slaves burned alive and broken on the wheel in New York\u2014all punishments made at the behest of civil governments. Because of the Enlightenment, slowly but surely those governments that practiced such punishments were often publicly condemned.\n\nOut of the Enlightenment milieu were born ideas that many hold dear today; indeed, intellectuals and citizens at the end of the eighteenth century articulated ideas about \"human rights\" and penned groundbreaking documents like the Declaration of Independence and the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. Also in this period the first organizations combating the Atlantic Slave Trade were formed, the earliest human rights advocacy organizations whose descendants are Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International.\n\nWhy and how did these transformations of conceptions of human dignity occur? One argument is that people were becoming more literate. In England, for example, literacy rates were on the rise throughout the eighteenth century and into the nineteenth. Historian Lynn Hunt suggests that this increased literacy spurred a change in sensibilities\u2014that people began to care for individual human beings in ways they had not before. As human beings began recognizing themselves in other human beings, she argues, sentiment and care grew, and this, she claims, fostered the development of Western conceptions of human rights: \"reading accounts of torture or epistolary novels had physical effects that translated into brain changes and came back out as new concepts about the organization of social and political life.\"\n\nThese changes would lead to active questioning of time-honored practices: how to educate young people, how to organize governments, and how to punish criminals. In fact, many began to question the punitive nature of justice, acknowledging that public punishments like whippings, the stocks, and even executions granted no possibility for the social transformation of convicts, no opening for them to become productive members of society. Humans who believed in the rights of man confronted the structures that had cemented public executions and public torture.\n\nThe Enlightenment also spawned attention to the technologies of executions throughout Europe and America. The guillotine was introduced in France in 1792 and promoted as a humane tool of execution because it resulted in an instantaneous death. The problem of dispatching human beings humanely was more complicated when the ready tools were gallows and noose, but prison officials seem to have worked to improve their methods. In England and in America rudimentary drops were being used. Many early drops were short, collapsible platforms situated on top of an already constructed scaffold. The condemned stood on a piece of wood or drop supported by a beam or two. When the beams were pulled out of the way, either by pushing them by hand or pulling them out with a rope, the drop would fall. Since the sixteenth century most of London's condemned were executed publicly at Tyburn on what was affectionately known as Tyburn's Triple Tree, a simple triangular gallows that utilized the cart method for \"turning people off,\" sometimes several at once. In 1760 a trapdoor drop was used at Tyburn for the execution of Earl Ferrers. The trapdoor didn't work well, and Ferrers didn't drop far enough and, thus, was subjected to a prolonged strangling death. That trapdoor was never used again. In 1783 a sophisticated new gallows with drop was unveiled at London's Newgate prison, and an image of it appeared in Gentleman's Magazine along with an explanation. This gallows, readers were told, was meant to \"strike serious awe into the hearts of the most obdurate and heartless.\" Beyond that, the gallows drop was a technological advance\u2014the swiftness of the drop \"being much more sudden and regular than that of the cart being drawn away, has the effect of immediate death.\" The same technology was finding its way to the United States, though most executions were still of the cart and simple gallows variety.\n\nBut one of the most significant contributors to the process of transforming seemingly fixed public punishments was an Italian named Cesare Beccaria. Before the turn of the century his short work Of Crimes and Punishments was published in at least twenty-eight editions in Italian and nine in French, despite having been banned by the Pope. An English edition appeared in 1767, and soon afterward it was published in Charleston and Philadelphia. Beccaria's thoughts on punishment offered a radical shift from what came before and helped shape the way some Americans understood the role of punishment in the late eighteenth century. Beccaria attacked torture as a mechanism for extracting confessions, noting that torture was essentially judging and punishing the accused before trial\u2014punishment proportional to the crime should only come after there was conclusive proof that the accused was guilty.\n\nHe was also critical of the death penalty and believed it should be reserved only for someone who threatens the \"security of a nation\" and whose continued existence could foster open rebellion; it should also be permitted when there has been a total breakdown of law and social norms. Under a stable government, Beccaria argued, the death penalty was ineffective, serving as a spectacle to some but teaching nothing. He observed that a criminal will weigh the risks involved and choose to commit a crime if she knows that the outcome could be a moment of pain and then death. Conversely, if the criminal knows she could be committed to prison and hard labor for the remainder of her life, another decision might result. More importantly Beccaria argued that it was absurd that a state would kill someone for killing, that it was a savage example at the very best. That the public despises the hangman should indicate something\u2014that we know it is wrong. To those who argue that the death penalty has always existed, Beccaria notes that history is a \"vast sea of errors.\"\n\nBeccaria's treatise, which urges humans to evolve beyond death as punishment, led to reforms throughout Europe. Leopold, Grand Duke of Tuscany, abolished capital punishment entirely in 1789 largely due to Beccaria's influence. His essay traversed the Atlantic and had a profound effect on punishments in the new nation. But Historian Louis P. Masur notes that it wasn't just Beccaria who sparked the debate after the Revolution but rather that it was emerging on its own. He writes, \"The experience of the Revolution and the problem of how to make punishments consistent with the objects of republican, Christian institutions sparked the initial opposition to the death penalty in the early Republic.\" The noose looms over the early days of the nation as it did over the signers of the Declaration of Independence, who were, in a sense, signing their own death warrants\u2014for if the Revolutionaries had lost, they may have faced the gallows. Executions were common on both sides of the Revolutionary War. There is, of course, Nathan Hale (hanged by the British on September 22, 1776), but General Washington signed off on the deaths of both British and continental soldiers, retribution for one and discipline for the other. Later, the postwar crime wave (often involving former soldiers) gave many leaders pause as they struggled with a burdened legal system and an attempt to legitimize capital punishment in the new republic. Ironically, over the period of March 2 to May 11, 1786 (just months before the Bolles murder and the Occuish trial) the New Haven Gazette serially published a translation of Beccarria's treatise on the dubious benefits of capital punishment.\n\nExecution Day\n\nOn December 20, 1786, the day of her execution, Hannah Occuish, like many condemned men and women before her, was the center of the public performance of an execution sermon. The sermon was delivered by a young Yale tutor with a Unitarian background named Henry Channing, who was also a candidate for a job at New London's First Congregational Church. This would have been a significant moment in his early career. And that makes the sermon all the more interesting: Channing's sermon seems crafted not only for Hannah but also for her audience. As I've said, most execution sermons were meant to instruct listeners to stay on the right path (and Channing does this), but he also admonishes the congregation, claiming it is their duty to take care that others do as well, to support them. Hannah, he says, was a clear failure in this duty. This is striking. So too is the fact that he chose Jeremiah 6:8 as the passage on which he would be preaching\u2014Jeremiah, that gnarly prophet of the sixth century BCE who annoyed all of Jerusalem with his insistence that they repent from their wicked ways (I once heard a preacher liken him to a fly buzzing in your ear). In chapter 6 Jeremiah shouts that if his listeners didn't repent, they would be destroyed by Babylonian invaders\u2014which did happen in his lifetime. Verse 8 reads, \"Be thou instructed, O Jerusalem, lest my soul depart from thee; lest I make thee desolate, a land not inhabited.\" Three verses later Jeremiah continues, \"I am full of the fury of the LORD; I am weary with holding in: I will pour it out upon the children abroad, and upon the assembly of young men together: for even the husband with the wife shall be taken, the aged with him that is full of days.\"\n\nHannah, Channing claimed, is a member of \"our guilty race\" and committed a crime that \"freezes the mind with horror.\" The root cause, he suggested, was her \"uninstructed mind.\" She was a girl who \"repeatedly declared to me, that she did not know that there was a God, before she was told it after her imprisonment.\" This was shameful, he claimed, and thus he attempted to educate the audience so there would be no more Hannahs. God was using this event, he asserted, to instruct the community\u2014to hold family devotions, to teach their servants to read, to bring them to church, to encourage good behavior and discipline bad, and to be a good example. Channing stressed the significance of what is learned early in life, that it has the potential to shape the future and that it is the duty of parents and masters to direct a young person's education. He suggested that a community is responsible for everyone in their midst and that, as a community, they had neglected Hannah. Invoking Jeremiah's admonition to the people of Israel, he said that a \"Nation, a family, or an individual\" who doesn't pay attention to the obvious instruction this horrible circumstance presents, \"their national blessings will be bitterness in the latter end.\" Adults are responsible to their families and their children but also to all children in their community.\n\nChanning, of course, admonished Hannah as well, telling her directly, \"the time for you to die is come . . . in about two hours, your eyes will be shut by death . . . you will soon see that there is a GOD who loveth goodness and good people; but is angry with the wicked every day, and will punish forever those whose sins are not pardoned before they die.\" And then, \"You are now going to be hanged until you are dead.\" He called on her to repent and ask for forgiveness, saying that this was her last chance. \"Remember, if he has mercy upon you, it will be from his own goodness; not from any good thing which he sees in you: \u2014He sees nothing in you but wickedness.\" Despite his critique, the Congregationalists hired him.\n\nHistorian Katherine Grandjean suggests that Channing's sermon was a challenge to racial categories and assumptions. He presents Hannah as capable of redemption, one of the rhetorical methods that many religious people in New England sought in order to shape public thought about racial categories. Grandjean points to a moment in his sermon when Channing proclaims, \"Think not that crimes are peculiar to the complexion of the prisoner, and that ours is pure from these stains. Surely an idea so illiberal . . . cannot find a place in the breast of a generous youth.\u2014Know, my brothers, that that casket, not withstanding its color, contains an immortal soul, a Jewel of inestimable value.\" Here, Grandjean writes, Channing seems to challenge \"the notion that skin color determined mental ability or interior worth.\"\n\nGod's vengeance and grace, it seems, are equal opportunity. Over a decade before Occuish was executed, a teenaged enslaved African in Boston named Phillis Wheatley wrote a now-famous poem entitled \"On Being Brought from Africa to America\" (1773):\n\n'Twas mercy brought me from my Pagan land,\n\nTaught my benighted soul to understand\n\nThat there's a God, that there's a Saviour too:\n\nOnce I redemption neither sought nor knew.\n\nSome view our sable race with scornful eye,\n\n\"Their colour is a diabolic die.\"\n\nRemember, Christians, Negros, black as Cain,\n\nMay be refin'd and join th'angelic train.\n\nWheatley's poem suggests to some critics a kind of apology for slavery. But this poem is also a searing attack on racist attitudes many whites held. She is not inherently evil because of her skin color; indeed, she is just like any other human being capable of religious awakening. Like Hannah, she is not condemned from birth.\n\nThis was, though, an increasingly unusual concept. The Enlightenment desire to \"improve\" everything from social ills to execution technologies also seemed to foster a desire to organize and categorize life\u2014from plants to rocks, from animals to humans. This taxonomic impulse led to the development of racial categories that were becoming engrained in American popular culture by the end of the eighteenth century. In Notes on the State of Virginia (1785) Thomas Jefferson drew sharp distinctions between Native Americans, blacks, and whites. He presented America's original inhabitants as culture creators and excellent orators, but\u2014in a dig at Wheatley\u2014he claimed black people have no culture and said that \"their existence appears to participate more of sensation than reflection.\" Jefferson posited a kind of great chain being that is informed by race. As he saw it, black people are less rational, less intelligent than whites or even Native Americans; this lack of intelligence, he claimed, was the main reason that if slaves are ever emancipated, they must be separated from whites. He wrote all of this in the context of describing the legal code of Virginia, which conferred the punishment of death by hanging for treason and murder (rape and sodomy being crimes that would lead to dismemberment).\n\nThese attitudes about race found their way into gallows literature, a genre growing ever the more popular. As the eighteenth century wore on, printers published fewer sermons like Channing's and more stories about condemned criminals. Evidence of this trend can be found in an appendix to Channing's sermon\u2014a lengthy biography of the life and crimes of Hannah Occuish. Salacious crime narratives had greater cultural cache than execution sermons in a diverse and democratic republic. Readers in late-eighteenth-century America wanted stories of thieves and rapscallions rather than pious penitents. At the same time there was a greater focus on criminals who were outsiders, foreigners, and racial others. In particular, there were more depictions of African American males as \"brutes\" and \"rapists,\" a stereotype that comes into its own after the American Revolution.\n\nLiterary critic Jeannine Lombard points out that from the late eighteenth century to the heyday of the movement to abolish slavery, black people were most frequently read about as human chattel (in advertisements for slave sales or runaway notices) or as condemned criminals. In other words, in popular depictions black people were either chained or noosed. There were notable exceptions, of course\u2014writers like Phillis Wheatley or great orators like Prince Hall and Lemuel Haynes\u2014but most published texts about people of color in this period were negative. And yet the over sixty portrayals of black men as condemned criminals (which comprised about one-third of the published gallows texts from 1674 to 1800) also allowed them an opportunity to craft a voice in the public sphere, even if they weren't the actual authors of the texts. The problem was that this voice associated black people with crime and vice. For example, \"The Last Words and Dying Speech of Edmund Fortis\" (1795) was published a year after the execution of Fortis, a black man convicted of rape and murder. Like earlier execution sermons, these last words were published in an effort to educate. Fortis (the narrator) offers details of his life\u2014his birth into slavery, his escape, and his life on the road. He was an itinerant thief, and his petty crimes led to bigger crimes and, ultimately, the crime for which he was to be hanged. In prison he had a miraculous conversion and greeted death as one who has been saved.\n\nOver ten years later the dying words of John Joyce, convicted for murdering one Mrs. Cross, offers a similar message, though directed at a black audience. He claims that to \"People of Colour . . . the murder of Mrs. Cross, speaks as with a voice of thunder.\" And then he enumerates a list of stereotypes about \"People of Colour\": they are sinful, alcoholic, dishonest, lustful, and enjoy too many \"mid-night dances and frolics.\" Joyce urges other \"People of Colour\" to change their ways before it is too late. Curiously, the impetus for publishing this text was to assuage the fears of white people in the community and to combat stereotypes. The confession\u2014if these were his actual words\u2014was meant to support the idea that the cause of the crime was the moral limitation of an individual rather than the innate characteristic of a group.\n\nBut did readers receive that message? And did they comprehend Channing's chastising? Lynn Hunt's suggestion that a rise in literacy rates and the popularity of the novel in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries also gave rise to Western conceptions of human rights is worth reconsidering here. Indeed, creative literature elicited sympathies and educated people about the intricate lives of others; such reading may have fostered common cause and concern. So what happened to people who read gallows literature in the late eighteenth century? Did the same sense of camaraderie or humanitarian impulse occur, or did these texts work against the appeal to human sentiment of creative literature? Perhaps readers sympathized with a criminal's fate, but the text may have also done the subconscious work of categorizing other human beings.\n\nGrandjean notes that sermons like Channing's demonstrate that in early America \"race was neither monolithic nor inevitable. It was not unquestioned. It was the product of a thousand choices, made silently by a quite ordinary public.\" But choices were made, and therein lies the problem. What Henry Channing was saying, in a nutshell, was that Hannah Occuish never received the attention she deserved as a human being until she completely ruptured the social contract by killing another human being. He suggests another version of the role of communities in the early days of the United States of America, that the community is a body \"knitted together,\" as John Winthrop, one of the first \"New-Englanders,\" wrote years before. But law and social reality butted up against these particular Christian interventions. Hannah Occuish, though, was a poor outcast and likely mentally ill or developmentally delayed. Poverty and powerlessness exacerbated these circumstances. Thus, by virtue of her age, class, and race, she was an especially vulnerable human being in New England culture.\n\nA few hours after listening to Channing's sermon young Hannah Occuish and members of the New London community processed from the church to the gallows, which had been built behind the town meetinghouse. They walked uphill and through a port town still recovering from the ravages of the Revolution. This, of course, was the town where Nathan Hale taught before giving one of his lives to America. And it was nearly destroyed, with help from none other than Benedict Arnold, during the 1781 Battle of Groton Heights. From the Meeting House Green, where the gallows was erected and where their walk ended, Hannah and the spectators would have been able to see down to Winthrop's Cove and the Thames River beyond. Hannah said very little at the gallows; one account claims she appeared afraid and seemed to want somebody to help her. But just before the noose was placed around her neck, she thanked the sheriff for being kind to her while she was in prison. Shortly thereafter Hannah Occuish's brief life came to an end. As it was throughout her life, there was no one there to help her.\n\nThere may have been some dissent in Connecticut about the execution of a twelve-year-old girl and perhaps about whether capital punishment was a just punishment at all. The Connecticut Courant concluded their report with lines that seem to echo Channing's sermon: \"The unhappy fate of this young girl is particularly to be lamented, as it is to be charged principally to a want of early instruction and government.\u2014'Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not depart from it.'\"\n\nA year later Dr. Benjamin Rush, one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence, wrote a landmark statement on the practice of public punishments and executions in America, asserting that public punishments like hangings have a negative effect on society, that they promote rather than deter crime. They make witnesses less sympathetic to human suffering and destroy the sympathetic feelings that could lead people to do good and to care for others. Rush argued that we must \"love the whole human race,\" despite the choices of the guilty, because those who are being executed are just as human as the witnesses: \"They are bone of their bone, and were originally fashioned of the same spirits.\" Rush favored private punishments: penitentiaries where criminals would receive physical punishments, hard labor, and the cleansing power of lonely and silent reflection. He argued that the penitentiary could be life affirming, the opposite of capital punishment. Rush predicted that public punishments like whipping, stocks, clipping ears, and, potentially, executions would one day be considered \"as marks of the barbarity of ages and countries, and as melancholy proofs of the feeble operation of reason, and religion, upon the human mind.\"\n\nAfter the Revolution laws began changing, and the number of capital offenses dropped. In the 1780s and 1790s robbery, rape, and counterfeiting were less likely to be treated as capital crimes. Rush's home state was ahead of the curve: in 1786 robbery, burglary, and sodomy were no longer capital crimes in Pennsylvania; those convicted of such crimes would get ten years hard labor. In 1794 Pennsylvania banned capital punishment for all crimes save first-degree murder. What's more, the solitude of the penitentiary\u2014of the kind, more or less, that Rush imagined\u2014began to replace some public punishments. By the end of the century many states had some form of penitentiary, and opposition to public hangings mounted. What's more, overall rates of executions in the United States had dropped significantly\u2014from about 1.5 per 100,000 people per year in 1700 to about 0.5 per 100,000 in 1800.\n\nSo how was it that a twelve-year-old was executed in public in the early moments of the new republic amidst the rhetoric of the Enlightenment and changing opinions about the death penalty, especially in the Northeast? Nancy Steenburg, an historian of juveniles in Connecticut's eighteenth- and nineteenth-century judicial system, told me that \"it's a disturbing case because in most others when the accused is that young they either found them non compes mentis or they didn't execute them.\" Steenburg added that it was typical for officials to take into consideration the age of a white child caught up in the judicial system but to severely punish African American, Native American, or Irish immigrant children.\n\n\"There was that so-called questionable period or gray area between seven and fourteen,\" she said. \"Hannah was in that period. Look, around the same time of the Hannah case a nine-year-old boy committed what certainly looked like murder, but they didn't charge him with murder. He had been to church. Certainly knew the difference between right and wrong, and they didn't charge him with anything. And then there's Hannah.\"\n\n\"It's a strange moment for the new nation,\" I said. \"Who gets to be in and who doesn't.\"\n\n\"She would never have been in. No one tried to teach Hannah\u2014that's the thing, Jack. She was either mentally disabled by fetal alcohol syndrome or it was because she'd been treated slightly better than the cows and the pigs and the chickens.\"\n\nOne thing that troubled me was Hannah Occuish's apparent moment of recognition, her delayed realization that she was going to die and that death is a permanent state. It troubled me because the available record does little to explain her actions and do little for me as a writer two hundred years later. How could she do what she did? How did she get to the place where she would react so violently to a young girl who apparently took her strawberries? Beyond the social history of the Pequot community in Connecticut and the obvious difficulties faced by an abandoned mixed-race child in eighteenth-century America, what other factors may have shaped her life?\n\nSteenburg mentioned fetal alcohol syndrome as one of many possibilities. If we can believe what the record tells us about Hannah's mother, then Hannah may have had a condition that would fall under the contemporary umbrella term of Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder (FASD). This term covers everything from the most severe cases to the least. FASD can lead to behavioral issues like aggressiveness and impulsivity and even a lower developmental age. Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) research from 2011 indicates that the brain structure of children of mothers who abuse alcohol actually look different; their shape and thickness are unlike \"normal\" brains. The effects of these changes to the brain can be found in children with visible (facial) abnormalities and those with only cognitive\/behavioral symptoms. Each year about eighty thousand women in United States drink regularly throughout their pregnancies; many of these woman engage in other risky behaviors and often get little prenatal care. The result is that after birth there are increased risks for both mother (postpartum depression) and child (developmental delays, behavior issues, and, just as in Hannah's case, foster care placement). Notably, research has also shown that individuals with FASD are disproportionately represented in correctional systems. The study focused on data from Canada and found that the number of undiagnosed cases is quite high and that \"youths with FASD were nineteen times more likely to be in prison than youths without FASD on any given day in 2008\/2009.\" Hannah's struggles are still with us, we who are \"fashioned of the same spirits.\"\n\nThis point was driven home when, as I was writing about Hannah, something interesting happened: because Connecticut repealed the death penalty in April 2012 as a punishment in future trials, a group of death row inmates are now trying to have their sentences overturned, arguing that death sentences are arbitrary and that there is significant evidence that they are racially biased. A key witness for these defendants, a Stanford University professor named Jon Donahue, noted that minority defendants who kill white people are three times as likely to get the death penalty as are whites who do the same. Hannah Occuish\u2014or maybe it's Henry Channing\u2014is telling me to pay attention across time and space.\nChapter 6\n\nMeteors of War:   \nDeath by Hanging and   \nthe End of Slavery\n\nBy the middle of the nineteenth century, judicial executions in the Northeast had become mostly routinized and private. Indeed, as of 1835 New Jersey, New York, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and Rhode Island executions were being held inside jails with a select few witnesses. As rates of execution declined overall, there was also a seemingly progressive movement to move executions behind closed doors. Louis P. Masur writes that \"by instituting private executions, legislators eliminated an occasion for public gathering, imposed control over public space, and precluded the open expression of certain passions and emotions. They also fashioned a new illusion of an ordered, consensual society that replaced an earlier depiction of hanging day as a ritual that affirmed communally shared civil and religious values.\"\n\nBut public hangings were not a thing of the past in other states, especially in the South. Though uncommon affairs in the nineteenth century, when public executions did happen they were well publicized and well attended. A Pendleton, South Carolina, newspaper noted that at three hangings that took place in the mid-1820s crowds were larger than for any other public event they had ever witnessed. People traveled from afar, sometimes on special trains, to the site of execution, where they could buy food and drink as well as literature about the condemned. Young and old, rich and poor, slave and free rubbed elbows and shared this public space. And when it was all over, some even took home relics. As they had in medieval and premodern Europe, some people still believed a piece of hanging rope contained magical properties, that it could cure a toothache or calm a horse or nagging wife.\n\nIn the South public executions were still considered an important way to maintain discipline among slaves. It was common for masters to encourage\u2014or force\u2014slaves to attend hangings of other slaves. One spring a South Carolina slave named Charles Ball was encouraged by his master to attend the double hanging of a black slave named Frank and a mulatto woman named Lucy who had killed a white man. The gallows was a large tree in the middle of a field, providing multiple vantage points. Before the execution a white man preached a sermon, and then a black man delivered what was called an \"exhortation.\" Then a cart moved forward, leaving the two people to commence their slow deaths. After about half an hour they were cut down and buried on the spot. Ball explained that the hanging he witnessed took place on a Thursday but that attendees stayed on afterward for a weekend of \"music, dancing, trading in horses, gambling, drinking, fighting.\"\n\nAs seen in Chapter 4, when threats were made to a slavery-supported economy, public hangings ensued\u2014the years just before the American Civil War were littered with nooses. In the early nineteenth century, slave revolt was on the minds of many white Americans because time and again slaves would use violence as a means to end slavery. In 1800 Virginia slave Gabriel Prosser had organized what would have been a widespread rebellion. He collected swords and planned to set Richmond on fire, raid the state armory, take the governor hostage, kill white citizens, and demand an end to slavery. But someone revealed the conspiracy to officials and Virginia Governor Monroe, who called in troops while whites organized special courts to investigate the conspiracy. Gabriel was captured and hanged alone on October 10 at the Richmond gallows; other conspirators were hanged via the cart and tree gallows method. In all, twenty-seven slaves were hanged for their roles in the Prosser conspiracy. Two years later another conspiracy scare (again involving slaves in Virginia as well as North Carolina) would lead to the hanging deaths of at least another twenty-five slaves.\n\nDivinely inspired slave Nat Turner led a rebellion in Southampton County, Virginia, in 1831, leading to the deaths of approximately 60 whites. In the aftermath state and federal troops killed at least 120 black people, both slave and free. In some instances the heads of suspected rebels were cut off and displayed on pikes. And then what can only be described as a general hysteria of lynching erupted as whites sought retribution on any person of color they encountered. In her Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861), Harriet Jacobs wrote that \"drunken mobs of white men roamed the countryside,\" and slave dwellings, including Jacobs's own, were raided and plundered, and men and women were whipped in the streets \"till the blood stood in puddles at their feet.\" Nat Turner was hanged from a tree in Jerusalem (now Cortland), Virginia, and his body then turned over for dissection, but he was readily fetishized. Historian John W. Cromwell asserts that \"he was skinned to supply such souvenirs as purses, his flesh made into grease, and his bones divided as trophies to be handed down as heirlooms.\" Ultimately eighteen slaves and one free black were hanged.\n\nIn June of 1822 Ball's fellow South Carolinian, a free black named Denmark Vesey who bought his freedom after winning a local lottery, was implicated as the ringleader of a rebellion conspiracy in Charleston, South Carolina. The rebellion was supposedly planned for Bastille Day, when slaves and free blacks would take over the city arsenals, gather slaves from nearby low-country plantations, and slay the white people, thereby taking control of Charleston. A slave named John confessed that every black man had a role to play and was to meet in certain places but that there was no predetermined signal for revolt, only that they were supposed to meet up at midnight. Vesey and others planned to eventually lead slaves to Haiti, where they would presumably be free. John also claimed they had communication with slaves all the way up to Columbia and that there were also poor whites who would join the revolt. Ultimately they were sold out by two slaves, Peter Desverneys and George Wilson, who were offered freedom and money.\n\nCharleston, a city built by and on the backs of enslaved Africans, was a fitting place for such a conspiracy to foment. Slaves in nineteenth-century Charleston had a certain degree of social mobility not unlike slaves in eighteenth-century New York City. Urban servitude provided more opportunities for geographic movement than their rural counterparts had; many Charleston slaves were \"hired out\" by their masters and spent time working away from the owner's supervision. For example, ringleader Denmark Vesey had once belonged to a Captain Joseph Vesey, who bought young Denmark (whom he first named Telemaque) while trading slaves in the West Indies. Denmark Vesey had years of maritime experience while enslaved, was a skilled worker, and was literate. Others involved in the conspiracy shared similar experiences and skills, and several were members of Charleston's African Church. This urban mobility had serious cultural ramifications as well. Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker note that it spawned a multicultural community and a multicultural plot, a kind of Pan-Africanness or racial identity in Charleston, similar to that observed in early New York City.\n\nBut Charleston's slaves did not have free rein. There was always the possibility of the rude discipline of the city's workhouse, or \"House of Correction.\" Masters sent their unruly slaves there, carrying notes telling the men in charge of \"correction\" how many lashes they were to receive. Masters paid 25 cents for the services the workhouse provided. In fact, slaves and free blacks in nineteenth-century Charleston had much to complain about and much to rebel against. And yet, as with the New York Conspiracy of 1741, some historians believe there was no plot during the summer of 1822 and that it was a product of white fear and paranoia, a result of the racism of the empowered populace. Whether it was real or imagined, the results were similar to what happened in New York\u2014Charleston officials held two courts, arresting over 131 slaves and free blacks, releasing 30, transporting 37 outside the United States, and acquitting 23. Two people died while in custody, and the courts carried out sentences of death on 35\u2014more blacks were executed in Charleston that summer than \"in any other Southern slave conspiracy.\"\n\nVesey and five others (Rolla Bennett, Batteau Bennett, Ned Bennett, Peter Poyas, and Jake Blackwood) were hanged on July 2 at a place called Blake's Lands just beyond the city limits. The condemned traveled in a cart up King Street to this remote spot along the Cooper River, chosen, perhaps, so there wouldn't be many witnesses. But many people, black and white, did attend the execution. The apparent coconspirators were likely all hanged from trees at Blake's Lands, and their bodies were given over to the surgeons. An oral history claimed Vesey wasn't hanged along with others at Blake's Lands but rather alone from an oak tree on Ashley Avenue and that he was hastily buried in the nearby potter's field. David Robertson says that those in charge weren't above intentionally \"misidentifying Vesey's execution site\" so he wouldn't be made a martyr or his burial site become a site of mourning or pilgrimage.\n\nOn July 12 two more conspirators were hanged at the Lines, the northern city limits, a place of crumbling War of 1812\u2013era fortifications that had been built across the Charleston Peninsula from the Ashley to the Cooper River. This was the same site chosen for the most spectacular hanging to result from the Vesey conspiracy trials, the public hanging of twenty-two condemned men on July 26. An enormous crowd gathered to watch this mass hanging (the hordes of people spooked a horse before the execution began, trampling a young boy). One witness, John Adger, wrote that one could say \"the whole city turned out on this occasion.\" Adger believed that the extraordinary event of so many people set to be executed at once was \"a sight calculated to strike terror into the heart of every slave.\" And it was a terrifying sight, but not in the ways city officials had imagined it would be. The condemned men were to stand on one of three long benches placed against the walls of the Lines, where nooses had been thrown over from the other side; it was a most basic gallows. But the drops were short, perhaps only inches, and the men gasped for air and kicked their feet\u2014a ghastly scene. Captain William P. Dove of the city guard was forced to shoot each one.\n\nWhat was meant to be a quick demonstration of the government's ultimate authority was instead a poorly managed affair that didn't take into consideration the gruesome spectacle of the simultaneous strangulations of twenty-two human beings. There was opportunity to correct these mistakes, though, when, four days later, four more were hanged and then, on August 9, the last, William Garner, was executed. Some city officials patted themselves on the back for a job well done. One claimed, \"It is consoling to every individual . . . to be able to say that, within the limits of the city of Charleston, in a period of great and unprecedented excitement, the laws, without even one violation, have ruled with uninterrupted sway; that no cruel, vindictive, or barbarous modes of punishment have been resorted to; that justice has blended with an enlightened humanity.\"\n\nBut not every white citizen of Charleston concurred. A series of letters from Charlestonian Mary Lamboll Beach to her sister Elizabeth Gilchrist in Philadelphia offer a unique and private perspective on the events of the summer of 1822. Beach strikes a level-headed tone and notes that there were many rumors about the conspiracy, including one that \"the black women were to be put to death that the men might have white wives, some say all the young ones to be spared and the old women and children put to death.\" After the large execution Beach appeared upset and confused by the state of affairs in Charleston. She claimed that at first she felt like the executions were necessary but then wondered whether freeing her own slaves would ensure \"safety to us and themselves . . . but this can never be done in my day.\" She continued, \"I understand they behaved with great firmness\u2014they all died on one or rather a continuation of three gallows in one\u2014A deathlike silence reigned over the city at the time. Oh! That God in his mercy may have enabled them as the thief on the cross by faith to look to that blood which alone can save us.\" Her tone insinuates a sense of forgiveness and quite possibly an understanding of why these men may have wished to rebel. In an earlier letter Beach lamented, \"Ah! Slavery is a hard business, and I am afraid we shall in this country have it to our bitter cost some day or other.\"\n\nWhat does the noose represent to those witnessing the executions of Denmark Vesey or to Gabriel or to Nat? It seemed to be reinforcing ultimate control over black human beings but also over an egalitarian vision of human rights that threatened the slave regime. In each situation it was a fearful response to the possibility of black people asserting their humanity and their rights as human beings. Historian Bertram Wyatt-Brown likens these responses to a religious ritual, with dubious court trials and convicted men and women serving as \"sacrifices to a sacred concept of white supremacy,\" as if the fickle gods might imprison white people if not for these offerings. He claims these scares\u2014real or otherwise\u2014are also akin to the heresy trials of the Reformation era and antipeasant backlashes in medieval England. Wyatt-Brown notes that \"perceptions of social imbalance led to frantic demands for group conformity to the traditional moral values.\" For those in power, these scares helped them reassert their authority or \"heroism,\" and in some cases they were able to capitalize on scares by gaining valuable resources\u2014like more guns (or the establishment of a military college), for example. In a sense, he says, whether the insurrections were real or imaginary doesn't matter; what matters is that white people responded to the possibility of black people overturning slavery with fear and with the noose.\n\nHanging John Brown\n\nWhere does John Brown fit onto this continuum? His December 2, 1859, execution turned a once-maligned abolitionist into a martyr for a cause and heightened tensions between the North and the South that never waned\u2014not until over 750,000 soldiers had died. Depending on your perspective, John Brown's plan was bold, courageous, treasonous, foolhardy, or insane: launch a nighttime raid on a federal munitions depot in Harpers Ferry, Virginia, head for the hills with a mobile maroon army, and launch raids into the South, using the rough terrain of the Appalachian Mountains to escape all pursuers.\n\nAround midnight on October 16, 1859, Brown and his army of twenty-one men began a raid on that tiny mountain town, nestled on a slim peninsula skirted by the Shenandoah and Potomac Rivers. Save for walls surrounding the armory and arsenal, the place was virtually unguarded. They rolled out, well-armed, from their gathering place, a small farmhouse in Maryland, and made their way across the Potomac and into the town. Brown and company quickly took over the two bridges leading into the town and seized the US armory, arsenal, and rifle works. He sent a small party out to neighboring plantations in an attempt to free and arm slaves and began to gather a hodgepodge of hostages. The word got out that something was going down in Harpers Ferry, and ragtag militias and armed men came to town, taking potshots at the abolitionists. Then things began to fall apart. Eventually Brown, along with a few of his men and several key hostages, moved into a small engine house within the armory grounds. The building had high windows and was fairly secure. But about thirty-six hours after the raid began, federal soldiers under the command of Colonel Robert E. Lee and Lieutenant J. E. B. Stuart surrounded Brown and his men.\n\nAnd this is the thing that has always made historians wonder: Why did Brown take so long in Harpers Ferry? Why did he wait? And what was he waiting for? Many explanations have been given through the years\u2014that he panicked, that he thought the slaves were going to join in, that he reached a point of debilitating indecision. Or perhaps he realized the only thing he could do at that point was to die well and to do so publicly\u2014to use his day in court to give the United States of America a tongue lashing and then to die a martyr. Did he realize, laying there with bullets whizzing by, that he had an opportunity to use the noose to show the nation that the South would stop at nothing to maintain slavery? Did he realize that the noose was a tool at his disposal, a tool that might start a war that would end slavery?\n\nMaybe\u2014maybe\u2014he was thinking this when about a dozen US marines under the command of Robert E. Lee captured him in that engine house. Or when he said to a group of men interviewing him a day after that capture: \"You had better, all you people at the South, prepare yourselves for a settlement of that question. . . . You may dispose of me very easily. I am nearly disposed of now; but this question is still to be settled\u2014this negro question, I mean; the end of that is not yet.\" Maybe he was thinking this when he was charged with first-degree murder, conspiring to incite slave rebellion, and committing treason against the state of Virginia. Maybe he was thinking this when he pled innocent because he didn't believe he had done anything wrong or when he announced, in his final courtroom speech (really, his gallows speech), that \"if it is deemed necessary that I should forfeit my life for the furtherance of the ends of justice, and mingle my blood further with the blood of my children and the blood of millions in this slave country whose rights are disregarded by wicked, cruel and unjust enactments,\u2014I submit; so let it be done!\"\n\nAnd maybe he was thinking this when Judge Richard Parker ordered that \"he be hanged by the neck until he be dead.\" Parker was specific in his directions too: he wanted Brown to hang not in the jailhouse yard but in public. He wanted folks to see him die. Perhaps Brown wanted that as well. He certainly seemed to say as much when he wrote his brother Jeremiah from jail in Charlestown a few weeks before his execution and claimed he was prepared to die and that he realized now that he was \"worth inconceivably more to hang than for any other purpose.\"\n\nThe last act in John Brown's Harpers Ferry drama was set to begin. Three states jostled to have the honor of providing the rope that would form Brown's hangman's noose. Missouri, Kentucky, and South Carolina each sent a length of home-state cord. With characteristic hyperbole, Brown biographer (and ardent abolitionist) James Redpath wrote that they longed \"to strangle the fearless man who had dared to beard the lion which the nation dreaded in its oldest and strongest den.\" South Carolina's rope was made from cotton, of course. Kentucky's offering was sent by Zeb Ward (a former prison director) direct to Virginia Governor Wise. Ward wrote, \"I send you . . . this morning a rope made expressly for the use of John Brown & Co. Kentucky will stand pledged for its being an honest rope\u2014I had it made in her behalf and send it to show we are willing and ready to aid our mother state in disposing of those who may attempt to destroy & overthrow her government. . . . The hemp of which it is made was grown in Missouri\u2014a state that Brown had troubled much, and made at Frankfort, Kentucky. I had it made for the express purpose.\" After testing, or so the story goes, the cordage from South Carolina and Missouri were deemed too weak, and Kentucky's entry won out. The victorious rope was displayed in the sheriff's office the week before the hanging.\n\nA local carpenter named David Cockerell constructed the gallows, finishing it by Wednesday. For the rest of the week it stood in the yard of the new Baptist church. One reporter noted that it was a typical gallows, nothing extraordinary, \"uprights, crossbeam, and trap.\" The trap door was hinged and held up by a taut rope that, when cut, released the drop and killed the condemned. Gawkers gazed upon the immense structure and tried to carry away relics, pieces of wood, splinters.\n\nOn the morning of the execution the scaffold and gallows were disassembled and transported to a nearby field on the edge of Charlestown. The contraption was rebuilt on a little rise in the middle of the field that offered a good view of the surrounding countryside. One journalist, David Hunter Strother (a.k.a. Porte Crayon), climbed up on the scaffold and claimed \"the view was of surpassing beauty. On every side stretching away into the blue distance were broad and fertile fields dotted with corn shocks and white farm houses glimmering through the leafless trees\u2014emblems of prosperity and peace.\" Just about seven miles away was the gap in the mountains at Harpers Ferry, carved for centuries by the mighty Shenandoah and Potomac. From up on the scaffold that morning a good eye would have also spied soldiers on the surrounding hills. The area was on heightened alert and encircled by troops for about fifteen miles. Many feared an attack or an attempt to disrupt the state's bidding. Train travel was halted and outsiders sent packing.\n\nIt was an unseasonably warm morning, the sky bright and blue and the air crisp. A mountain haze filtered the sunlight but disappeared as the day wore on. Everywhere, it seemed, perceptions were sharpening, things were becoming clear. In the morning edition of the Boston Daily Advertiser the editors noted that John Brown's execution \"will prove no ordinary occurrence. And, after all, much as we may now regret it, perhaps it will turn out, in its ultimate consequences, to have done more to hasten the extinction of slavery than any other event of the present century.\" With the rope selected and gallows erected, all John Brown had to do now was die a good death. As he walked out of the jailhouse at 11 a.m. into the light of the forenoon, he passed a note to a guard at the jail named Hiram O'Bannon. It read, \"I, John Brown, am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away but with blood. I had as I now think vainly flattered myself that without very much bloodshed it might be done.\"\n\nBrown was escorted out of the front of the jailhouse at the corner of George and Washington Streets by Sheriff Campbell and jailer John Avis. They were his only escorts to the execution grounds; he didn't want a minister. In a letter written from the Charlestown Jail to Reverend James W. McFarland of Wooster, Ohio, Brown wrote, \"There are no ministers of Christ here. These ministers who profess to be Christian, and hold slaves or advocate slavery, I cannot abide them. My knees will not bend in prayer with them while their hands are stained with the blood of souls.\" In another letter he noted that he'd prefer his \"religious attendants be poor little, dirty, ragged, bare headed, and barefooted slave boys and girls led by some old grey headed slave mother.\" This letter may have had something to do with the legend that developed that he bent down to kiss the child of a slave on his way out of the jailhouse. It's a good story but would have been impossible given the circumstances, because no civilians could get anywhere near the man. In another sense, though, Brown broke with gallows traditions. He didn't decline the gallows sermon because he was somehow evil or out of some devil-may-care attitude; rather, it was because he believed himself morally superior to any minister who might pray or preach on his behalf.\n\nBut when Brown stepped out of the jailhouse there were no \"slave boys and girls\" waiting to escort him to the gallows; instead, he was greeted by a number of soldiers under the command of General William Taliaferro. With his arms tied behind his back above the elbows, Brown climbed aboard a long furniture wagon, nothing but a flatbed that carried a large pine shipping box that contained his coffin made of black walnut. He sat upon the box for the short, maybe ten-minute ride to the field of execution. Brown wore a floppy black hat, ratty black coat and pants, and carpet slippers. One observer noted that he looked like the typical \"Western farmer.\" Strother was more explicit, writing, \"He wore the same seedy and dilapidated dress he had at Harpers Ferry and during his trial,\" he wrote, \"but his rough boots had given place to a pair of particoloured slippers and he wore a low crowned broad brimmed hat.\" Another observer claims that hidden beneath that coat was the noose, already positioned around his neck.\n\nJohn Brown riding to the gallows on his coffin,   \nFrank Leslie's Illustrated Paper, December 17, 1859.   \nLibrary of Congress\n\nTwo white horses pulled the long, narrow furniture wagon, a wagon that belonged to a local undertaker and furniture maker named George W. Sadler. John Avis sat next to Brown in the back, and Sadler and his assistant, Louis P. Starry, sat in front. There was a third man, but no one is positive about who that may have been. Some have claimed it was W. W. B. Gallaher, a local man who worked for the New York Herald. As they rode along, Brown looked out upon the countryside, all stubble and stick, nature in its early winter dress, lovely when set next to the backdrop of the Blue Ridge Hills rising in the distance. \"This is a beautiful country,\" he said. \"I never had the pleasure of seeing it before\u2014that is, while passing through the field.\"\n\n\"Yes,\" replied Captain Avis.\n\nBrown continued, \"It seems the more beautiful to behold because I have so long been shut from it.\" In this spate of Indian summer the warm sun cast its rays over rolling hills here at the northern edge of the Shenandoah Valley.\n\nMr. Sadler spoke up. \"You are more cheerful than I am, Captain Brown,\" he said.\n\n\"Yes,\" Brown answered, \"I ought to be.\"\n\nMounted soldiers stood in the woods to the left of the gallows, picket guards toward the rear, and troops in the field in front of the scaffold. Colonel John Preston of the Virginia Military Institute, describing the scene in a letter to his wife, said that troops \"were distributed over the field, amounting in all to about 800 men. . . . The whole enclosure was lined by cavalry troops posted as sentinels, with their officers\u2014one on a peerless black horse, and another on a remarkable-looking white horse, continually dashing round the enclosure.\" Seeing all the soldiers, Brown wondered aloud where the \"citizens\" were. He was told they weren't allowed to be there; Governor Wise had ordered no one be allowed into the field except those with the military, despite Brown saying he'd give no dying speech.\n\nYet Brown had spent his last days writing countless letters and his now-famous last note that he slipped to the prison guard. He'd already given what amounted to a gallows speech in the courtroom. The citizens had heard from him already, and they were about to hear from him again, in a way. But there were citizens present within the field, quite a few, in addition to those peering in from the streets and from the tops of buildings. There were soldiers on hand and a number of journalists who were granted last-minute permission to enter the field; Brown's execution was witnessed by an uncanny cast of characters, including pro-slavery advocate Edmund Ruffin, who'd told locals he'd be more than happy to serve as hangman. Ruffin would later affirm his place in history by firing a round at Fort Sumter from Cummings Point, just across the harbor from Charleston\u2014and eventually commit suicide rather than submit to Yankee rule. At Brown's execution Ruffin was with a company stationed about fifty yards from the gallows, closest to it. Future Lincoln assassin John Wilkes Booth was also stationed close to the gallows. Booth had volunteered with militia troops out of Richmond just to be on hand to witness Brown's death.\n\nThe wagon halted next to the scaffold, and Brown was the first to mount it. He did so with a coolness that one soldier witness remarked made him look like \"he had been going to dinner: he did not exhibit the slightest excitement or fear; not a muscle moved, nor was there the slightest nervous excitement.\" A journalist from a Baltimore newspaper said he looked like he was walking upstairs to go to bed. Thomas Gordon Pollock, who would later serve under General Lee and die during Pickett's Charge at Gettysburg, noted that Brown \"stept up the ladder of the scaffold with an almost hurried step\u2014and seemed to think he was giving an important fact to his biographer and was preparing a martyr's crown for himself.\" Once up on the scaffold, David Strother noted, Brown took a good last look around, perhaps at the distant mountains where his army was to have fought to liberate the enslaved. In a letter to his wife, Mary Ann, eyewitness Thomas L. Jackson (later nicknamed \"Stonewall\") wrote that John Brown \"behaved with unflinching firmness. . . . Brown had his arms tied behind him, & ascended the scaffold with apparent cheerfulness. After reaching the top of the platform, he shook hands with several who were standing around him.\"\n\nA relative calm and peace had settled upon John Brown while in jail; he noted in several letters that he'd never been happier. In a November 22 letter to his children in North Elba, New York, he wrote, \"I feel just as content to die for God's eternal truth and for suffering humanity on the scaffold as in any other way\" and then urged his children to be of \"good cheer.\" Apparently he exuded this serenity while awaiting his execution. Even Ruffin commented on Brown's composure in his last moments. He wrote, \"His movements & manner gave no evidence of his being either terrified or concerned, & he went through what was required of him apparently with as little agitation as if he had been the willing assistant, instead of the victim.\" Brown took off his hat and stood firm as the sheriff pulled a white cap over his head and \"placed the hangman's noose about his neck, adjusted the knot under the left ear.\" He was led to the drop, the \"halter hooked to the beam,\" and his ankles secured. Sheriff Campbell asked if he wanted a handkerchief to drop as a signal to cut the rope. \"No,\" he said, \"but don't keep me waiting longer than is necessary.\" These were his last words, \"spoken with that sharp nasal twang peculiar to him, but spoken quietly and civilly, without impatience or the slightest apparent emotion.\"\n\nBrown stood there on the trap door and faced south, the direction of the land of those who wished him dead and those whom he wished to free. The soldiers then paraded around and into their positions for about ten minutes \"as if an enemy were in sight,\" one journalist wrote with mild disdain. Brown remained steady and still throughout these troop movements, this pregnant tension. Someone whispered to Strother that he could see Brown shaking, to which he answered that, no, the scaffold was shaking because of the \"footsteps of the officers.\" And then Colonel F. H. Smith, who was in charge of the military at the execution site, quietly told the sheriff, \"We are ready,\" and the officers left the scaffold.\n\nJohn Brown ascending the scaffold,   \nFrank Leslie's Illustrated Paper, December 17, 1859.   \nLibrary of Congress\n\nThe sheriff did his duty and cut the cord with a small hatchet. With that, the trap door fell and Brown dropped\u2014only about two feet. His body swayed, and there was a \"slight grasping of hands.\" And just like that, Colonel Preston wrote his wife, \"the man of strong and bloody hand, of fierce passions, of iron will, of wonderful vicissitudes, the terrible partisan of Kansas, the capturer of the United States Arsenal at Harpers Ferry, the would-be Catiline of the South, the demi-god of the abolitionists, the man execrated and lauded, damned and prayed for, the man who in his motives, his means, his plans, and his successes, must ever be a wonder, a puzzle, and a mystery\u2014John Brown\u2014was hanging between heaven and earth.\" In the quiet after the drop, after his movements ceased, there was only the sound of the rope and wood beam stretching under so much weight. And in that moment John Brown did, perhaps, become more important to the movement to end slavery in the United States, a cause to which he had dedicated his life at an abolitionist meeting in Hudson, Ohio, twenty-two years before.\n\nHis pulse was checked several times, and he was finally declared dead after thirty-five minutes. He was cut down and placed in a black walnut coffin, in which he was eventually transported to the train station in Harpers Ferry and escorted by his wife back north. One reporter claimed, \"All the arrangements were carried out with a precision and military strictness that was most annoying.\" Colonel Preston broke the silence: \"So perish all such enemies of Virginia! All such enemies of the Union! All such foes of the human race!\" \"So I felt,\" he wrote to his wife, \"and so I said, with solemnity and without one shade of animosity, as I turned to break the silence, to those around me. Yet, the mystery was awful, to see the human form thus treated by men, to see life suddenly stopped in its current, and to ask one's self the question without answer\u2014'And what then?'\" The question suspended in the air and was to be taken up again in that same Shenandoah Valley a few years later.\n\nOthers, though, knew the answer to that question: northern abolitionists had already decided what Brown's death meant to them. After his execution meetings were held, sermons given, and church bells tolled in places like Syracuse, Boston, Providence, Albany, and even little Perrysburg, Ohio, where businesses closed early and church bells rang for an hour. In Albany, New York, one hundred guns were fired between noon and one o'clock. Of course, there were other, vastly different opinions of the man. On the day Brown was executed the Great Emancipator, Abraham Lincoln, said, \"Old John Brown has been executed for treason against a state. We cannot object, even though he agreed with us in thinking slavery wrong. That cannot excuse violence, bloodshed and treason. It could avail him nothing that he might think himself right.\" A day later an editorial from the Raleigh, North Carolina, Register demanded that the gallows be burned because \"The Yankees have no objection to mingling money making with their grief, and they will, unless Brown's gallows is known to have been burned, set to work and make all kinds of jimcracks and notions out of what they will call parts of Old John Brown's gallows and, sell them. Let the rope which choked him, too, be burned and the fact advertised, or we shall see vast quantities of breast pins, lockets and bracelets, containing bits of the 'rope which hung Old Brown' for sale.\"\n\nAnd yet, on the fiftieth anniversary of his hanging Katherine Mayo wrote that Brown's raid and subsequent execution \"had, like a touchstone, suddenly revealed the country to itself.\" It would take countless more deaths before the majority of the country would recognize the implications of the slave regime\u2014that the only way it would be dismantled was by violence.\n\nJohn Brown's Resurrection\n\nShe said she trusted me. And just like that, the white-gloved curator of the Jefferson County Museum took a tiny piece of hemp rope out of a glass case and placed it on the table where I was working. I stared at it, awestruck, that this might actually be a piece of Brown's noose but also surprised by how seemingly insignificant the fuzzy little ball of hemp looked. I had to sneeze but desperately held it back. That piece of rope isn't the only memento mori in the Jefferson County Museum's collections. There are others, of equal significance but decidedly more substantial. The wide open, white-walled, and windowless space is dominated by the Sadler furniture wagon, the one that carried John Brown, along with the others who were executed, to his death. It's a handsome and sturdy cart built for utilitarian purposes, to deliver furniture and coffins. It was a workhorse, in a sense. Like the pike in the left-hand corner of the museum, made for Brown's raiders to distribute to those who wished to join them, it was made with purpose.\n\n\"Just keep it on the table here,\" she said. \"You can get a better photo this way.\" She places a; tiny card next to the rope fragment that explains it was donated by Lucy Ambler.\n\nA rope supposedly used to hang John Brown.   \nMassachusetts Historical Society\n\n\"Okay, but I know this rope might be valuable, and I just want to be careful with it. Makes me nervous!\"\n\n\"Well, we're fairly certain it's the real deal, but then again, you could probably circle the equator with the amount of rope purported to have been from the noose that killed John Brown.\" I heard that old saw from at least three different people in the Harpers Ferry\/Charlestown area. Everyone's sister, brother, cousin, or aunt claims to have a piece of that rope. One writer says that during the war every soldier that passed through the area obtained a piece of the rope or scaffold, \"enough to build and rig a large man-of-war.\" Inevitably there are numerous stories about what happened to the rope, and each teller claims theirs is true.\n\nToday the Massachusetts Historical Society has a rope, with the noose that was used to hang John Brown still intact. It was given to the society by William Roscoe Thayer, president of the American Historical Association in 1918. But the rope that hanged John Brown can also be found in the West Virginia State Museum, and pieces of it can be found elsewhere. A John Brown archive created by West Virginian Boyd B. Stutler is a trove of Brown rope lore: Stutler may have even had a piece of the rope himself. One letter in the Stutler Archive claims that a rope found in the attic of the jailor Avis's home in 1907 could be it. The wife of the assistant to the undertaker who prepared Brown's body for burial in New York City claims that the noose was still around his neck when it arrived. A man who claimed to have accompanied the body north asserted that he had the rope and would do nothing with it until he heard from Brown's wife. He added, \"I do not wish to believe in relics, and I have very little superstition\u2014but the rope by which a Christian climbed into heaven is the next best thing to the ladder which Jacob saw.\"\n\nHow did Brown become a martyr to the extent that his execution would be a source of not just relics but also holy relics? In the moments after Brown was captured at Harpers Ferry there was talk of lynching him. Instead, though, Brown was given a trial, a death sentence, and then a month to prepare for his death. Governor Wise was able to prepare for Brown an execution befitting a captive king. The area was on lockdown. Fifteen hundred troops were called up, and enough spectators put pen to paper that we have a good idea that what happened that December morning in Charlestown was nothing short of a spectacle meant to send a message to abolitionists that the South's \"peculiar institution\" would persist. But was that the message that Brown's execution ultimately delivered? Was it a fearsome spectacle that would keep others from getting violent ideas in their heads? Or did the fact of Brown's stoicism and bravery on the scaffold serve to reinforce his potential martyrdom\u2014the simple frumpy farmer, all alone on the scaffold, facing the many troops with a firmness that belied his frame? Henry David Thoreau later wrote, \"No theatrical manager could have arranged things so wisely to give effect to his behavior and words.\" John Brown was hanged for murder and treason in what was meant to be an ignoble death, but instead Brown disrupted the narrative, intentionally or otherwise. His death is now generally remembered not as the ignoble death of a thief in the Middle Ages or of a sexual \"deviant\" in seventeenth-century New England but rather as something more complicated. For many, John Brown did exactly what Ralph Waldo Emerson said he would do: \"make the gallows glorious, like the cross.\"\n\nBut in the immediate aftermath of his failed raid this was not Brown's reputation. In the weeks immediately following the raid on Harpers Ferry opinions of Brown were uniformly negative. Fiery pro-slavery advocates and lukewarm abolitionists condemned the man and his actions. Notably, the northern press did their best to placate southerners by describing Brown as \"mad\" and his comrades-in-arms as a \"squad of fanatics.\" Even the antislavery New York Tribune wrote that the raid on Harpers Ferry was \"the work of a madman.\" The majority of Brown's financial backers\u2014Thomas Wentworth Higginson and Theodore Parker excepted\u2014distanced themselves from him. But public opinion began to shift, and Brown gained some vocal supporters. One of the first to side with Brown was Thoreau, who, in an October 30 public address in Concord, proclaimed him a martyr following in Jesus Christ's footsteps. \"I am here to plead his cause with you,\" he told the audience. \"I plead not for his life, but for . . . his immortal life; and so it becomes your cause wholly, and is not his in the least. Some eighteen hundred years ago Christ was crucified; this morning, perchance, Captain Brown was hung. These are the two ends of a chain which is not without links. He is not Old Brown any longer; he is an Angel of Light.\"\n\nThoreau's pronouncement was aided and abetted by the old man himself, who seemed to understand his new and powerful position. Over the course of his last days in jail John Brown met with countless visitors, many of whom wanted to argue with him over slavery and, in the case of some minister, save his soul. Brown met the public in another way\u2014through the pen and page, writing countless letters and, consciously or otherwise, participating in the gallows literary tradition.\n\nBrown offered his own \"true confession\" of his deeds. But unlike some writers in the gallows literature genre, Brown does not seek forgiveness; instead, he constructs a martyr's narrative in the classic model of his own Christian faith. In a letter to his wife and children on November 8, 1859, he wrote, \"Remember, dear wife and children all, that Jesus of Nazareth suffered a most excruciating death on a cross as a felon, under the most aggravating circumstances. Think also of the prophets and apostles and Christians of former days, who went through greater tribulations than you or I, and try to be reconciled.\" A week later he wrote in another letter that he doesn't feel \"degraded by [his] imprisonment, [his] chains or prospect of the Gallows.\" Indeed, he notes that the method of his death says nothing about his character. In another letter he proclaimed, \"Men cannot imprison, or chain; or hang the soul. I go joyfully on behalf of millions that 'have no rights' that this 'great & glorious'; 'this Christian Republic,' 'is bound to respect.'\" In that last clause Brown mocks Supreme Court Justice Roger B. Taney's 1857 decision in Dred Scott v. Sanford that African Americans have no rights as US citizens. For Brown, slavery was the \"sum of all villainies,\" and he was proud to die if it would lead to abolition. \"Let them hang me. I forgive them,\" he writes Christ-like, \"for they know not what they do.\"\n\nPrint after painting \"The Last Moments of John Brown,\"   \nThomas Hovenden, 1885. Library of Congress\n\nThe transformation of Brown's reputation, at least in the North, continued after his execution. The day after his execution the editors of the New York Daily Tribune proclaimed that \"Slavery has killed John Brown. . . . John Brown and slavery were foes to the death. Slavery for the moment is the victor.\" They claimed that his manner of defeating slavery was \"unfit\" and his raid \"utterly mistaken\" but that his death would only serve to strengthen his memory. \"History will accord an honored niche to Old John Brown.\" He will, they wrote, \"live in a million hearts . . . his memory will be fragrant through generations. It will be easier to die in a good cause, even on the gallows, since John Brown has hallowed that mode of exit from the troubles and temptations of this mortal existence.\" John Brown had made the gallows noble, for sure. To some, though, he made the gallows holy. At Shiloh Presbyterian in New York City a man stood up and announced that \"Christ died on the cross, but his influence lived.\" Another man made a direct comparison between Brown's execution on the gallows and that of Christ's on the cross. And at a Boston gathering Brown was compared to Jesus and Virginia Governor Wise as Pontius Pilate. Brown's narrative had been reinforced through the typology of Christ.\n\nBrown's resurrection was also assisted by the apocryphal story that he had kissed a black slave child on his way out of the jail, captured in an 1863 Louis L. Ransom painting that was copied and widely published by Currier and Ives, a Thomas Satterwhite Noble painting called \"John Brown's Blessing\" (1867) and later in Thomas Hovenden's \"The Last Moments of John Brown\" (1884). John Brown, wizened elder, leans over to kiss the child of, we are to assume, a black slave; here he is no mad prophet or insane lunatic, as many claimed he was in the immediate aftermath of his raid on Harpers Ferry. In Hovenden's painting he is a measured man of peace, a martyr about to give up his body for the cause of freedom.\n\nMaterial manifestations of John Brown's \"Christ-ness\" in the accoutrement of his execution, like the rope, became relics like those collected and traded among medieval pilgrims. One story floated around that the sheriff sent a piece of the scaffold to James Redpath, labeling it \"A Bit of the True Cross, a Chip from the Scaffold of John Brown.\" P. T. Barnum tried to get his hands on some of Brown's clothes and perhaps even the noose but ultimately only obtained some of the weapons used in the raid. At his American Museum he displayed, along with his wax figure of Brown, a knife used by one of his sons and several of the pikes made for the raid on Harpers Ferry. The scaffold too was a hot item. According to Joseph Barry, who bases his story on \"trustworthy sources,\" David Cockerell, the carpenter who constructed the scaffold, knew that it might be sought after and, thus, he disassembled it shortly after the hanging and used it to build a porch. As such, it escaped the hands of relic hunters for a while. An item ran in the New York Times on February 26, 1884, that claimed the hidden scaffold was, in fact, discovered at a Charlestown home, perhaps confirming Cockerell's story. What happened next, though, is uncertain. Barry claims that later on someone from Washington, DC, purchased it and that there was some attempt to rebuild it at the 1893 World's Fair in Chicago (John Brown's Fort was actually rebuilt there). Pieces of the scaffold are floating around still, apparently; a few are on view at the John Brown Museum in Harpers Ferry.\n\nBy the war's end the rope that made John Brown's noose had been freighted with meaning, and unlike medieval relics, these meanings were mostly political. Confederate and Union soldiers each wanted to touch the infamous noose, probably for opposing reasons. Indeed, Union soldiers marched to a song that narrated Brown's struggle and death. This was an important reversal; the shame of the ignoble death was erased, and as Emerson claimed, the noose and gallows became sacred relics.\n\nIn Brown's case, then, the noose became a positive rather than a negative symbol. It was transformed into a rallying point for abolitionist sentiment and a point of departure for transforming the nation. But in this work, where were the enslaved people? Where was Denmark Vesey, Nat Turner, or Gabriel Prosser? One need only look to what happened to Brown's comrades in arms to get a sense of the value placed on the lives of black Americans. On December 16, 1859, four more men were executed: John Cook, Edwin Coppoc, Shields Green, and John Copeland. The bodies of the two white men, Cook and Coppoc, were surrendered to their families. The same civility was not rendered to Green and Copeland. They were quickly buried, and an hour after burial Winchester Medical College students dug up their bodies for research. Copeland's family appealed to an Ohio senator for help recovering his body; Union soldiers burned the college down three years later. Their bodies were never recovered, and their deaths were given little attention in comparison to that of John Brown.\n\nExecution of the Lincoln Conspirators, Alexander Gardner.   \nLibrary of Congress\n\nIn one version of \"John Brown's Body,\" a verse exclaims that \"They will hang Jeff Davis to a sour apple tree!\" The verse, coming as it does after verses celebrating Brown, implies exacting retribution for John Brown's death by hanging the Confederate president. Although Jefferson Davis was in fact guilty of committing crimes that would typically lead to the noose and the gallows, he didn't hang despite being leader of a \"government\" that facilitated the war and represented the interests of southern planters and slavers. He served two years in jail and was released on a bond posted in part by one of Brown's former supporters, Gerrit Smith. He became a college president (Texas A&M), like his former general and the man who captured John Brown, Robert E. Lee (Washington College).\n\nHerman Melville's poem \"The Portent\" describes Brown's execution as a foreboding and forbidding moment in American history. Brown hangs \"from the beam \/ Slowly swaying,\" casting his shadow across the Shenandoah Valley. Beneath the execution hood, Melville writes, is Brown's anguished face, one \"portent\" of the nation's future pain. Another \"portent\" is Brown's \"streaming beard\" peeking out from beneath the hood. The hanged man, noose around his neck, is also \"The meteor of the war,\" violence trailing in his wake. Melville's poem paints Brown's hanging as a moment foreshadowing the war. But there were other warnings, weird signs of the violence to come, and these signs could be seen all over the state of Virginia.\n\nAnd what was Brown's execution a portent for? Remember Brown's words to his captors: \"You may dispose of me very easily. I am nearly disposed of now; but this question is still to be settled\u2014this negro question, I mean; the end of that is not yet.\" The American Civil War didn't settle that question\u2014the Civil War that supposedly began in 1861 but actually began much earlier than that and certainly did not end in 1865. Its years of violence are noose-filled, rough strands of a complicated narrative that could include the slave rebellions and conspiracies of New York City, Virginia, and South Carolina; the hanging of forty suspected Unionists in Gainesville, Texas; the lynching of black men during New York City's 1863 Draft Riots; the execution of twenty-two Confederate deserters at Kinston, North Carolina; the execution of Andersonville's Henry Wirz; and all the mayhem of the Reconstruction years, including the apparent mass hanging of twenty-four men, women, and children in Pine Bluff, Arkansas. The one most remembered, though, is the grand execution of the Lincoln Conspirators in 1865. That hanging was, once again, an incredible display of political and military power\u2014as well as technological advances. Execution technologies had developed, and this is evident in Alexander Gardner's famous photos of the executions of the Lincoln conspirators. The conspirators were put to death on a large scaffold with what could be described as a platform drop\u2014the drop was held up by two poles that were pushed out simultaneously\u2014and ropes tied into hangman's knots.\n\nBut the noose stayed in the picture and played an important role in the racial violence that manifested in the following decades; the war did not resolve the issue at its heart. The noose that was a talisman for Union troops would become a symbol for reasserting white supremacy and undermining the kind of world Brown imagined.\nChapter 7\n\nThe Noose in the Museum:   \nHanging and Native America\n\n\"Are you willing to put that noose around your neck? Are you willing to go to that place?\"\n\n\"What do you mean?\" I ask.\n\n\"You come here to learn about the noose, but this is much bigger than the noose. This is more about you than it is about the noose. But this is a story about the Dakota people.\"\n\nI'm bewildered, and it isn't just the slot machine's flashing lights and perpetual high-pitched song, the multiple flat-screens projecting the Vikings-Titans game, the smoke, or the bizarre juxtaposition of oxygen-tanked white people on a Dakota reservation in Flandreau, South Dakota. There is something that I don't know or can't understand, something that is bigger than the story I'm researching: a noose used to hang a Dakota man named Caske at the end of the 1862 US-Dakota War is in the archives of the Minnesota State Historical Society. When the Society began putting together objects for an exhibit commemorating the 150th anniversary of the war, they invited representatives of the Dakota community, many of whom responded negatively to the noose. They didn't want it on display, didn't want people to see it. They want it back. And some Dakota want to destroy it. This is not John Brown's noose\u2014not at all.\n\nJ. B. Weston looks out in the direction of the slot machines, points at a dark-suited security man walking by, and says, \"He's a descendant of Caske. This is very real for us. You come in and get your story and go home. You write your books, but what does it all mean? This is very real to me. I work every day for the Dakota people.\"\n\nHe points to some kids sitting at a bar booth close by. \"I'm doing this for those kids because they are lost. Alcoholism is real. Drug use is real. This noose you want to know about, it's much bigger than just the turns and the knot.\"\n\n\"I understand,\" I tell him, \"that's why I'm talking to you. I want to learn. I want to know more.\"\n\n\"You can't just talk about the knot.\"\n\n\"I agree. And I don't think you're listening to me.\"\n\n\"No, you're not listening to me.\"\n\nThere's a pause, and the awkwardness between us settles in like skunk-spray through a window in springtime. I'm not going to win this battle, I think to myself. But what am I trying to win? Why am I trying to win? Is it that I want him to trust me?\n\nOne time a man I was interviewing accused me of being an operative of one of his longtime rivals, an accusation that said a lot about him. I pulled out my phone and said I was calling my mother and he could talk to her and that my word is my word and that if he didn't believe me, well, my mother could set him straight. He relented.\n\nBut this isn't that kind of situation, I was realizing. It's not about trust\u2014J. B. has no reason to trust me, and any phone call to my mama or my grandmamma wouldn't matter. This is about truth. A truth that, for all intents and purposes, I just can't understand because\u2014as he rightly says\u2014I know nothing about the Dakota people that I haven't read in a book. The Vikings score, and J. B. takes a drag on his cigarette.\n\nHe looks straight at me. \"You're just dabbling. This is every day for me.\" The violence in the room resonated\u2014the organized violence of the football game, the generational violence of the kids, the ghosts of a violent history walking across the casino floor. As I traveled about Minnesota and into South Dakota, I heard on the radio again and again updates on the trial of a Minnesota man accused of funneling money and men to the Somali militant group al-Shabaab and the arrest of a Bangladeshi man who tried to blow up the Federal Reserve building in Manhattan. The noose is a link in a long chain of violence.\n\n\"You need to think about what it means to put that noose around your neck.\"\n\nI'm listening to J. B., and the Vikings are playing, and the slots and the smoke, but I was also thinking that life is so sad. That this is so intense. That this is an \"hour of lead.\"\n\n\"Don't you know it's a long way from your head to your heart?\" Weston says, not waiting for me to reply. \"All this may be overwhelming for you, but it's the truth.\"\n\nAnd the truth is that 1862 is right now for the Dakota people, and what that means for this book, for this symbol, is that for the Dakota people the noose is not only a symbol of racial oppression; it's a symbol of genocide\u2014indeed, it was meant to be a tool of genocide. But the Dakota are still here, and the Dakota have to deal with this symbol in a way that I can't begin to understand. This is not my story, Weston was saying. And yet if I want to be honest, I have no right to tell it from any other perspective than my own.\n\nHow the West Was Won\n\nWhen the 1862 US-Dakota War is spoken of or mentioned in American history books (if it is mentioned at all) the narrative will mostly focus attention on the six-week-long war and perhaps the spectacular executions at its conclusion. But the events begin, in many ways, in 1492 or 1493, when Columbus penned his first letter to the Spanish Court, a letter to Luis de Sant\u00e1ngel, and thus initiated centuries of European discourse about who these New World people were and what was to be done about them. Either they were people to be saved\u2014Christianized\u2014or they were to be killed. Any writer lumping Native Americans, American Indians, or the indigenous peoples of North America into a single traceable narrative commits the grave sin of producing reductionist history, and yet the story can be told over and over again in what we now call the United States of America, a story of colonization and violence, of conflict, of treaties made and broken, and of white folks, missionaries mostly, with imagined good intentions. Pick most any geographic location, and you'll likely find this narrative. It's the same story more or less for Algonquin, Zuni, Cheyenne, Cherokee, Choctaw, or Hannah Occuish's Pequot.\n\nI've reduced this story into a short paragraph as a gentle reminder because when we talk about 1862, we have to begin with 1492. The reasons for the war are greater than that one moment would allow. The immediate reason why many Dakota went to war was because they were starving and felt they had nothing to lose. They had already lost much of their homeland.\n\nThe Dakota (which means \"allies\") are often called by a name bestowed upon them by whites\u2014\"Sioux,\" a term that may be a bastardization of an Ojibwe word that means \"snake.\" Today some use the term, while others despise it. They call themselves the people of the Seven Council Fires (Oceti Sakowin). This includes the Dakota in the east (Mdewakanton, Wahpekute, Sisseton, Wahpeton), the Nakota (Middle Dakota\/Yankton and Yanktonais), and the Lakota (Tetons). Today Dakota people live all over but especially in Minnesota, South Dakota, Nebraska, and Canada; Nakota in South Dakota; and Lakota in North and South Dakota. Dakota people believe they are from Minnesota or Mni Sota Makoce, the land where the water reflects the clouds. They don't believe they emigrated there but that they are literally from there, brought down from the stars to Bdote, where the Minnesota and Mississippi Rivers meet. Dakota people put no truck in the Bering Strait story, that somehow they are descendants of those intrepid pioneers who crossed over from Asia so long ago.\n\nIn a sense, historians Gwen Westerman and Bruce White write, there are two competing stories about this place called Minnesota. From the European-American view pioneer settlements are part of the story of westward expansion, the various gold rushes, the Oregon Trail, the coming of the railroad and telegraph line, the reach of civilization, the opening up of new lands. To most white Americans this place is simply the state of Minnesota, founded in 1858. For Native Americans it is their lost homeland. There's an obvious and serious gap in the telling of those two stories.\n\nBeginning in 1805 these two competing \"stories\" clashed when the Dakota entered the first of a number of treaties with the US government. The treaties that would have the greatest impact on the Dakota of Minnesota were signed in 1851 at Traverse de Sioux (near modern-day St. Peter) and Mendota. With those two treaties, the Dakota sold about 35 million acres of land. The treaties called for setting up reservations on the north and south sides of the Minnesota River on a swatch of land about ten miles wide and eighty miles long. The Sisseton and Wahpeton bands would move to what was called the Upper Sioux Agency, near the mouth of the Yellow Medicine River, and the Mdewakanton and Wahpekute bands would move to lands near Redwood Falls at the Lower Sioux Agency. In 1858 Dakota leaders were invited on an extended visit to Washington, DC, where they were required to sign another document giving settlers access to the land on the north side of the Minnesota. After these treaties they were left with scraps of Mni Sota Makoce, the seedbed for their community and culture.\n\nThe Dakota were told that the treaties stipulated yearly \"annuity\" payments for the price of the land as well as goods to help them adjust to the change in their economy, culture, and way of life. When Dakota leaders signed the treaty they also signed a document that called for a large sum of money to go directly to white traders. These traders claimed the Dakota owed them monies for goods purchased. Many of these claims, it seems, were false. Traders often charged exorbitant prices for goods, and they had used those prices when the treaties were signed.\n\nThis process was part of what some call the \"Indian System,\" begun in the funk of Washington politicking (congressmen horse trading for lucrative positions and land claims) and that fertilized the West with its muck and mire. In theory the federal government was using its power and money to help Native Americans become self-sustaining farmers, but rather than bettering the lives of the Native Americans the Indian System was meant to serve, it only made them worse. The bureaucracy established to work with Native Americas, specifically the Office of Indian Affairs, was essentially set up to benefit whites who wanted to get rich quick.\n\nThere were three primary ways money was made from this exploitive system. The first was by people making claims for destruction of property by Native Americans. Many such claims went uninvestigated and, of course, could never be enforced against white men. Contractors also made money from the system, receiving monies for construction, supplying goods to the reservations, and so on. Lastly and most relevant to what happened in Minnesota were the traders who were notorious for claiming for debts that didn't exist. Because of these myriad boondoggling possibilities, jobs and contracts linked to the Indian System were sought-after prizes. Agents of the government would often hire relatives and friends.\n\nIn addition to making immediate money off the government, the Indian System was a good long-term investment because agents often had first dibs at land, putting them at the forefront of land speculation in advance of the railroad, obtaining parcels that made them and their families quite wealthy. Nichols notes succinctly that \"the Indian System mirrored the basic drives of American society\u2014social mobility, the acquisition of wealth, unrestricted capitalism, and political activism.\" On the losing end of this system, of course, were the people the system was meant to benefit.\n\nIn the fall of 1861 a Washington-appointed investigator named George E. H. Day was sent to Minnesota to investigate allegations of corruption on reservations throughout the state, including the Dakota reservations along the Minnesota River. Day found dishonest traders, people receiving salaries for work they never did, excessive expenditures, and Dakota people living in squalor. He wrote President Lincoln that he had \"discovered numerous violations of law & many frauds committed by past agents & a superintendent.\" Day claimed he could \"satisfy any reasonable intelligent man that the Indians whom I have visited . . . have been defrauded of more than 100 thousand dollars in or during the four years past. . . . The whole system is defective & must be revised,\" he pleaded, \"or, your red children, as they call themselves, will continue to be wronged & outraged & the just vengeance of heaven continue to be poured out & visited upon this nation for its abuses & cruelty to the Indian.\"\n\nDay was not the first, nor the last, to warn the federal government. Reverend Henry Whipple, Episcopal Bishop of Minnesota, wrote Lincoln three months later about the conditions his \"heathen wards\" faced. Whipple believed the government had good intentions but that unscrupulous people had stymied them. Prior to signing treaties, the Dakota had access to resources that would have helped them continue their way of life, but now they had been disconnected from those resources. This, Whipple said, had led not only to material losses but also to social and cultural ones\u2014a breakdown of old customs and relations\u2014compounded by whiskey and greedy agents. The remedy, he argued, would be to employ only men \"of purity, temperance, industry, and unquestioned integrity,\" to place Native Americans under US jurisdiction, provide enough resources so that they can live sustainably, offer ample resources to schools, and appoint a commission to investigate the situation. It's not clear whether Lincoln grasped the seriousness of Whipple's letter. He had a lot on his plate\u2014a civil war, of course, as well as preparations for the Homestead Act of 1862, which offered \"free land,\" 160 acres to be exact, to settlers willing to live on and farm it for at least five years.\n\nThings only got worse for the Dakota. After a poor harvest and a harsh winter, the Dakota at Upper and Lower Sioux were near starving and eagerly awaiting their annuity and goods payments that were supposed to arrive by the end of June. They didn't come, in part due to a Washington bureaucracy caught up in the Civil War. On July 14 about five thousand Dakota showed up at the Upper Agency and demanded food from Agent Thomas J. Galbraith. After some hemming and hawing, Galbraith relented and handed out food. At the Lower Agency some goods were dispersed in June, but supplies were running low for the Dakota in August. This time agents refused requests for goods or demands that traders extend credit. Many traders and shopkeepers felt they'd been too kind already. One of them, Andrew J. Myrick, quipped, \"If they are hungry, let them eat grass.\"\n\nOn August 17, 1862, four young Wahpeton men traveling home from an unsuccessful hunting trip passed the farm of Robinson Jones near Acton. They saw some hen eggs in the grass near a white farmstead; one of them picked them up. Another told him not to, that they belonged to the whites. The first man smashed them on the ground, saying that he was a coward, afraid to take eggs from a white man even though he was starving. With that, the second man said that he wasn't a coward; he'd go kill the white man. Another version of the story is that the men requested food but were denied. Regardless, soon after they passed by that house those four Dakota men were racing back to their community on stolen horses, having killed Jones and his wife as well as Howard Baker, Viranus Webster, and fifteen-year-old Clara Wilson. Dakota elders were alarmed by the news, believing the whites would exact harsh retribution for these deaths. Given the sorry state of affairs, some decided the only option was to declare war\u2014they were starving, their lands and way of life had been taken away from them, and they had little to lose at that point. Others appealed for peace, saying that war would make things much worse than they already were. Still others, especially Dakota of mixed heritage, struggled with the competing cultural narratives in their lives. The war party pressed on and sought the support of Chief Taoyateduta (or Little Crow), the one man who, if they were to have any chance at success, had to be swayed.\n\nTaoyateduta (Little Crow).   \nLibrary of Congress\n\nSeveral chiefs as well as the four young men woke Taoyateduta from his sleep just before dawn on August 18. They told him what had happened and of their desire to go to war. He blackened his face and covered it in mourning. He knew the outcome would not be good. Someone accused him of being a coward. Years later Taoyateduta's son Wowinape gave an oral account of his reply to this stinging remark. It is telling: \"Braves, you are like little children; you know not what you are doing . . . the white men are like locusts when they fly so thick that the whole sky is a snowstorm. You may kill one\u2014two\u2014ten; yes, as many as the leaves in the forest yonder, and their brothers will not miss them. . . . You will die like the rabbits when the hungry wolves hunt them in the Hard Moon (January). Taoyateduta is not a coward: he will die with you.\" The next day Taoyateduta led a group of Dakota in an attack on the Lower Sioux Agency. Forty-four white people were killed, including a number of US soldiers trying to squelch the uprising. Trader Andrew Myrick was found dead with his mouth stuffed full of grass. Warriors then let loose on white settlers throughout the Minnesota River Valley, murdering men, women, and children. Though it was not all helter skelter massacre\u2014many settlers were simply taken captive, some settler communities closed ranks and fought back, and still others escaped the area as quickly as possible.\n\nMinnesota Governor Alexander Ramsey called on his predecessor, Minnesota's first governor and a former trader, Colonel Henry H. Sibley, to lead forces from St. Paul to the Minnesota River Valley. Sibley had made his fortune from the Indian System; he played a central role in getting the Dakota to sign the 1851 treaties. But Sibley took his time organizing an army and traveling south. The press howled, calling him \"the undertaker\" because his troops generally showed up after a battle and played clean-up crew. When Sibley finally arrived many Dakota warriors lost the desire to fight against superior numbers and weapons. After a decisive defeat in the Battle at Wood Lake on September 23, 1862, those Dakota warriors most engaged in the fighting, including Taoyateduta, fled westward to Dakota Territory or northward into Canada. In the end between four hundred and six hundred settlers and soldiers and sixty Dakota were killed over the course of about six weeks.\n\nIt's important to remember when telling this story that there was never unified support for the war among the Dakota. In some ways the Dakota community had already been disrupted and fractured by the treaties and the traders. So-called Farmer Indians had given up their old economy and culture for the white one. This created tensions between those retaining Dakota lifeways and those abandoning them. To be fair, both choices were likely made in an effort to survive, but the use of violence against the settlers, many of whom the Dakota considered their friends, further exacerbated these tensions. Those with mixed heritages were often torn by competing ideologies and genealogies; some sided with the whites, while some sided with the Dakota. Ultimately many believed that when the fighting was over, to simply have Dakota blood would make one guilty in the eyes of white Minnesotans. If the Dakota who fought against the whites lost, they thought, all the Dakota would suffer.\n\nSo when around two thousand Dakota people surrendered on September 26 at a place called Camp Release (near modern-day Monte\u00advideo), those surrendering tried to make it clear they wanted peace. One man went so far as to wrap himself in the American flag as the soldiers marched into camp. Whites who had been held hostage were handed over to the American soldiers, and the Dakota men of fighting age were separated from the women, children, and the elderly, who were marched to Fort Snelling. As they marched with military escort they met mobs of angry whites with clubs and scalding water. In Henderson a white woman grabbed a nursing baby from a Dakota woman and smashed the child on the ground. A soldier pulled the woman away, but the baby died shortly thereafter.\n\nSibley quickly organized a commission to try the Dakota men who were suspected of being involved in the fighting. The five-member military commission tried 392 men in six weeks. Legal scholar Carol Chomsky claims that trials were problematic in many ways: \"The evidence was sparse, the tribunal was biased, the defendants were unrepresented in unfamiliar proceedings conducted in a foreign language, and authority for convening the tribunal was lacking.\" Furthermore, the Dakota on trial weren't treated as members of a sovereign nation. Some of the trials lasted less than five minutes, and all were conducted in English.\n\nConsider the case of Caske. Caske was charged with the murder of a white man named George H. Gleason as well as \"sundry hostile acts against the whites between the said eighteenth day of August 1862 and the 28 day of Sept. 1862.\" Caske pled not guilty and claimed that Hapa, another Dakota man who was also with him, actually killed Gleason and that, on the contrary, he protected as many whites as he could. Caske had taken special care of Sarah Wakefield, the wife of a physician at Upper Agency. He noted that if he had committed any \"hostile acts,\" he wouldn't have given himself up. Wakefield supported Caske's claims and said he saved her life and that of her two children several times. Angus Robertson, another witness for the prosecution, also praised Caske and supported Wakefield's claims. But no matter. The commission\u2014all men who had been involved in the fighting\u2014found Caske guilty as charged and sentenced him \"to be hanged by the neck until he is dead.\"\n\nClearly something was going on here. Word had spread around the camp that Wakefield and Caske were more than friends, so perhaps this prejudiced the commission. But reading through the trial transcripts one gets the sense that Caske's was not the only problematic case. As they moved through cases, the trials got shorter and shorter; by the end of the six weeks 303 men were sentenced to hang. On November 9 the condemned were moved to a place called Camp Lincoln near Mankato. Along the way they were attacked by a mob in New Ulm, and two were killed.\n\nWhen word reached President Lincoln that federal troops were about to execute 303 Dakota men in Minnesota, the rush to the gallows came to a halt. Lincoln wanted his lawyers to review all the trial transcripts and to sign the warrant himself. Ultimately he winnowed the list down to thirty-nine men\u2014those who stood accused of attacks on civilians. But even then the guilt of the condemned men was questionable. Lincoln's private opinions of Native Americans are tough to pin down. Carl Sandburg tells the story of Captain Lincoln during the Black Hawk War, protecting an old Indian man who wandered into camp: when soldiers challenged him on it he basically said, \"Try me.\" The reality, though, was that he was very much enmeshed in the Indian System and he benefited politically from its existence. Certainly Lincoln prevented the deaths of many, but Lincoln chose expediency, and as literary historian Bethany Schneider writes, \"The only way to produce the benevolent, all-loving antiracist Lincoln who persists in fantasy if not in scholarly histories, is to hide the Indian bodies.\"\n\nAnd that's hard to do, considering what an enormous event the 1862 execution was. Rather than hang each man individually or even several at a time, carpenters constructed a large gallows in downtown Mankato, capable of hanging thirty-nine men simultaneously. A Mankato paper reported that \"the gallows, constructed of heavy, square white oak timbers, is 24 feet square, and in the form of a diamond. It is about 20 feet high. The drop is held by a large rope, attached to a pole in the center of the frame, and the scaffold is supported by heavy ropes centering at this pole, and attached to the one large rope running down to and fastened at the ground.\" Henry L. Mills, who was a soldier on duty, wrote years later that many men who had lost family begged for the chance to help build the gallows.\n\nAs the execution date drew near, the condemned thirty-nine were separated from the others. Caske was mistakenly among the thirty-nine; he had been exonerated, but his name was confused with that of man named Chaskadon (case number 121), who had been convicted of killing a pregnant woman. These Dakota men, chained two by two, became objects of curiosity for local media and ministers who visited often in the days before the execution. An account from the St. Paul Press reads like the gallows literature of the eighteenth century, regaling readers with stories of penitent Dakota men awaiting execution, commanding their children to become Christians and to bear no malice toward white people. \"Most of them spoke confidently,\" we're told, \"of their hopes of salvation.\" They lamented making the choice to go to war. Others, we learn, seemed woefully unaware of their impending deaths \"and laughed and joked apparently as unconcerned as if they were sitting around a camp-fire in perfect freedom.\" A reporter from the New York Times also noted behavior that he read as passivity and wrote, \"It was a sad, a sickening sight to see that group of miserable dirty savages, chained to the floor, and awaiting with apparent unconcern the terrible fate toward which they were approaching.\" Some writers wanted drama and repentance, not solemn contemplation or perhaps resignation and preparation for another kind of journey. The correspondent for the St. Paul Press was enraged by these men:\n\nThey all appeared cheerful and contented, and scarcely to reflect on the certain doom which awaited them. To the gazers, the recollection of how short a time since they had been engaged in the diabolical work of murdering indiscriminately both old and young sparing neither sex nor condition, sent a thrill of horror through the veins. Now they were perfectly harmless, and looked as innocent as children. They smiled at your entrance, and held out their hands to be shaken, which yet appeared to be gory with the blood of babes. Oh treachery, thy name is Dakota.\n\nWhat was this correspondent really witnessing? And who was he talking to? It's hard to read such a report as objective, though it's equally problematic to expect objectivity in those circumstances. But were all these men guilty? And if so, of what?\n\nOn the day after Christmas thousands poured into Mankato to witness what would be the largest simultaneous execution in US history. The sky was crystal blue, and the early snows had melted. Beneath sunny skies three to five thousand gawkers (along with about fifteen hundred soldiers) gathered wherever they could, seeking out the best vantage points\u2014rooftops, street level, some even gathered on the other side of the river for a clear view. But the crowd was relatively subdued, in part because two days beforehand martial law had been declared and bars closed.\n\nThe condemned men painted themselves with \"streaks of vermilion and ultramarine\" and began singing their death song as preparations began for the executions. One man, Tatemin (Round Wind), had been pardoned overnight, and he was placed with the other prisoners. At about seven o'clock their iron shackles were removed and arms pinioned. When this work was finished they stood as one and sang. Father Augustin Ravoux prayed with them or over them in the Dakota language. Caps of white muslin were placed on top of their heads, not pulled down yet, so they could still see to walk. This gave some of them pause\u2014the hoods were considered shameful because they prevented them from facing death \"without flinching\" and, thus, dying a noble death. But some of them kept singing.\n\nA depiction of the execution of the thirty-eight Dakota   \nmen at Mankato, Minnesota, December, 26, 1862.   \nLibrary of Congress\n\nAt ten o'clock the Dakota men were led to the gallows through a tunnel of infantrymen. As they walked up the steps to the scaffold, some began chanting again. The subdued crowd looked on as nooses were placed around the necks of the condemned and then adjusted. Some of them clasped hands. About fifteen minutes later Major J. R. Brown beat a drum three times, and Captain John Duly, who lost his family in the war, took a swing at the rope that would release the scaffold. The first blow was unsuccessful. He swung again, and the scaffold fell. One rope broke, and Hdainyanka (Rattling Runner) had to be hanged again. Many died instantly, while others struggled as they strangled to death in a scene like no other I've encountered in my research\u2014awesome in size, finality, and purpose. There's no indication that an effort was made to measure the height and weight of each condemned man. Rope lengths would have been mostly uniform and, therefore, it's likely that some men died from strangulation while others from the initial drop. The reporter for the New York Times captures some of this in an arresting sentence: \"Thirty-eight human beings suspended in the air, on the bank of the beautiful Minnesota; above the smiling, clear blue sky.\"\n\nThe bodies were then cut down and tossed into waiting wagons \"like pigs.\" Onlookers pushed forward, scrambling for what relics they could grab\u2014locks of hair, pieces of clothing, crucifixes\u2014the ornaments of lives lived. The bodies were carted to a sandbar alongside the Minnesota River and unceremoniously dumped into a four-foot-deep common grave. That night the shallow grave was opened. Local doctors, including Dr. William Worrall Mayo (after whom the Mayo Clinic is named), collected corpses, ostensibly for dissection. Some soldiers tried using one body for target practice until the body was confiscated and reburied.\n\nLincoln's \"Indian bodies\" had been sufficiently hidden just a few days before Lincoln's slave-freeing Emancipation Proclamation went into effect. Those Dakota men, though, didn't die anonymous deaths. They did not go quietly. As they stood on the scaffold before the axe fell, the men had called out their names to let the others know they were not alone, to speak their names into being, to bear witness. I am One Who Jealously Guards His Home. I am One Who Walks Clothed in Owl Feathers. I am His People. I am Red Leaf. I am Rattling Runner. I am One Who Stands on a Cloud. I am Wind Comes Home. I am Returning Clear Voice. I am Little Good Stars.\n\nMaterial Object, Spiritual Significance\n\nIn reading about this story of the largest simultaneous execution in US history, I discovered that the Minnesota Historical Society has, among its collections, one of the nooses used as part of that massive execution. I e-mailed one of the archivists and asked whether I could come to St. Paul and take a look at the noose. About a week later I got an e-mail from the Historical Society's senior curator telling me I couldn't see it; it's considered culturally sensitive material. They consider requests on a case-by-case basis, and so far only Dakota elders have had access to it. This came as a surprise. What was the problem? Are the Dakota the only ones who can see it? Why don't they want it to be displayed as a symbol of oppression, of their struggle? What makes it culturally sensitive?\n\nThis is where I started when I met with Ben Gessner, Collections Associate-American Indian and Fine Arts Collections at the Minnesota Historical Society (MHS), who looks to be in his early thirties. When we met I felt like I was looking at myself\u2014a younger, more intelligent and put-together, hipper version of myself. We both wear beards and the same uniform: shirt, tie, khakis, and hoodie. His shirt is flannel with a gray tie. But Gessner conveyed a composed confidence and took his time approaching the complexities of the Caske noose story.\n\nGessner told me he learned very little about the US-Dakota war growing up in Minnesota, in part because he grew up in southeastern Minnesota, so it wasn't a part of the community history in the way it was elsewhere but also because what little he was taught about it in his middle school history class didn't register. Then he went to college in Mankato. He noticed the monuments, heard some of the history. But still, like most Minnesotans, he didn't see this narrative as an intrinsic part of his own history, didn't see his place in the narrative. Then he came to work for the MHS, and all that began to change. He was asked to work on an exhibit about the war for its 150th anniversary. They began, he said, by searching the historical society's databases, looking for items related to 1862. That's when they came across the noose.\n\nFor MHS to bring this topic up and to make it a public exhibit is doubly difficult given that the founder of MHS was Governor Ramsey, the man who called for the extermination of the Dakota. But Gessner is no Polyanna\u2014he realizes that MHS is a problematic organization for many Dakota people because of that connection.\n\n\"And then we ask them,\" Gessner says in a sort of self-mocking tone, \"'So tell me about this noose\u2014should we put it on display?'\"\n\nThe noose was sent to the MHS seven years after the hanging and was accompanied by a letter from Captain J. K. Arnold, who served as adjutant at the hanging. Arnold claims he cut the noose off Caske with plans to send it to the family of one of his alleged victims. After he cut it off he hid it under his coat and then under his bed. \"If Arnold is to be believed,\" Gessner said, \"then the noose in the MHS collection was used to kill Caske.\" Gessner tells me that it's made of three-strand rope, about ninety-five inches long, with one frayed end and the other tied into a four-turn hangman's knot. He also confirms that I can't see it.\n\nIn the summer of 2011 MHS gathered together a number of objects from their collections to show to historians as well as some Dakota representatives to get feedback for a planned exhibit to mark the 150th anniversary of the war. Gessner said that there was a range of perspectives, from those who believed it should be shown as a testament to history, to those who felt like you didn't need to show it in order to tell the story, to those who believed that the noose's very existence is why suicide rates are high among Dakota people. In the end MHS decided not to include the noose in the exhibit and to only allow certain Dakota people access to the object.\n\nWhat will happen to the noose is unclear. Some Dakota people want to reclaim and, perhaps, destroy it.\n\nMany feel a deep connection to the noose. A Dakota woman I spoke to named Sandee Geshick said she always had a hunch that the noose existed, and when she finally saw it she \"felt deep sadness.\" The noose, she said, like anything used to kill another person, \"has a curse attached to it if it isn't disposed of properly.\" When she saw that it was in the MHS collection, \"I felt very bad for the people who took it and kept it. I think many others would say the same.\"\n\nTo Geshick and, perhaps, to other Dakota that noose is not viewed in the way that, say, the John Brown noose is viewed\u2014as a relic connected to an important figure or simply as an artifact from an important event. Caske's noose is a material object imbued with a spiritual significance\u2014like relics of Christ, for example\u2014but unlike Christian relics, holding onto it is disruptive to Caske and, perhaps, to the Dakota community. That's a significant difference. For the Dakota that noose is not just a symbol of those who died\u2014it is those people who died.\n\nGeshick didn't say it should be destroyed, necessarily; she said that it must be disposed of properly and mentioned a ceremony called the Wiping of the Tears. It is a ceremony that comes usually after the loss of a loved one. A year is spent concentrated on living a good life and praying and grieving. Then there is the ceremony. \"The person mourning has to move on because the deceased has to move on. The ceremony says it's time to move on with your life.\" The process is a kind of reconciliation with both life and death and is meant to take the person grieving to a place beyond anger and sorrow.\n\nUltimately the US-Dakota War artifacts in the MHS collection are vestiges of a problematic colonial ideology to many Dakota people. Gessner hears that criticism and claims to be working to transform not only the image of MHS but also how and what the museum preserves. The noose controversy has taught him a lot because he's been forced to view this artifact from a perspective beyond the merely intellectual.\n\n\"The noose is an object that I've had to handle that I don't particularly enjoy handling.\" Gessner paused, caught himself, and chose his words carefully. \"I'm trying hard not to speak for the Dakota people\u2014it's not my place. But I've had this range of people who've said, 'I feel really bad for you.' Because I've had to handle the noose, and people who've actually taken me through a ceremony because I've had to handle it. Then I've had people say they feel bad or forgive the rope because that wasn't the reason the rope was created in the first place\u2014somebody turned it into this weapon. There's a lot of very real compassion surrounding it.\"\n\nGessner says that typically museums are supposed to preserve objects in their collection. That's different from a traditional Dakota perspective, he says. For the Dakota stewardship could mean allowing something to degrade or, perhaps, feeding the object with sage and tobacco. It requires a completely different understanding, a different set of cultural lenses.\n\n\"Listen,\" he says, \"you can be interested in something and read every book about it and even have academic discussions about it, but living it is something different. Sometimes history is lived. I've been exposed to a lot. Before I thought I had empathy, but now I think I'm starting to truly understand where people are coming from when they make certain statements\u2014or I'm working on it.\"\n\nA Minnesota historian named Carrie Zeman told me that she thinks there is a way for the museum to show the Mankato noose without sensationalizing it. She said she \"tried to argue to them not that it wasn't an object of execution, but that there are other stories that the noose told besides 'I am an object that was used to kill people.' For example, there are stories about the rope used in the noose. We have the stories of the military people not having enough rope. And there was the story of Arnold taking the noose.\"\n\nIn a paper she wrote about the noose and other war-related curatorial controversies Zeman suggests a test of the authenticity of Arnold's story: get a coat like an adjutant general would have worn at the time and put the noose inside the coat. Would it work? \"If in fact this part of the claim seems improbable,\" she claims, \"then it calls into question the other claims, like that the noose is Caske's. The big idea is to get exhibit-goers thinking about attributions: that claims about history can and should be tested.\" Ultimately, Zeman writes, \"The story is the rope and spectacle, not the noose.\" She wonders why the executions had to be such a spectacle, noting that authorities went out of their way to get enough rope and to engineer an enormous gallows. Indeed, in the narrative of changes in execution technology, the Mankato gallows is decidedly an anomaly.\n\nSo does displaying the noose revivify that spectacle? Does displaying it cause further harm to a community that's already had far more than its share? Is the noose necessary for the museum to tell this story? The noose isn't the only execution artifact of questionable authenticity and taste floating around. There's a cane with a dagger hidden inside, supposedly carved from the wood of the gallows. And somewhere there's the axe that was used to cut the rope that held the gallows together and released the drops. Some have argued that it was at MHS and burned up in a fire in March 1881. Others believe it ended up in a museum in the Northeast, perhaps at Barnum's. But the strangest execution relic is a watch. In the wake of the execution someone cut off Caske's hair and turned it into watchband; it brings to mind the lamps supposedly made from the skin of Jews.\n\nStandard Brewing Company beer tray. n.d. Photo by Bob Fogt;   \nused with permission of the University of Minnesota Press,   \nfrom the collection of James and Ruth Beaton\n\nAnd then there's the beam. Apparently the Blue Earth Historical Society in Mankato has what, for a long time, some believed was a beam from the gallows. It is nineteen feet long and seems to fit the description of the timbers used in constructing the gallows. The museum itself issued a statement in 2012 saying the only real proof they have that the timber is from the gallows is a letter from the guy who donated it. These are important questions in terms of historical accuracy, for those with the time and resources to answer them, but are they the right questions? Such research does not, ultimately, answer the difficult questions like, \"What does it mean to kill another human being in such a mechanized fashion?\" And it does not change the legacies of that history. It is wood. It is detritus. It is a rope. It is a knot. It is so much more.\n\n\"As the White Man Comes in . . . \"\n\nThe desire for revenge against the Dakota people was not sated by the deaths of thirty-eight Dakota men or by their removal to Crow Creek. In April 1863 a federal law called the Dakota Expulsion Act terminated all treaties with the Dakota people, thereby releasing annuity money and banning the Dakota from the state. (The law is still on the books.) The Ho-Chunk, or Winnebago, were also removed. For good measure, Governor Ramsey ordered punitive expeditions into Dakota Territory, where many involved in the war had escaped, and announced bounties of between $25 and $200 for Dakota scalps. In July a farmer and his son shot and killed Taoyateduta (Little Crow) on his farm near Hutchinson and received $500 from the state of Minnesota. Taoyateduta was scalped and his body brought into town on a cart, where some kids tried to put fire crackers in his ears and nose.\n\nBut most Dakota people stayed far away from the state, seeking refuge with Dakota communities in Canada. Among them were Dakota Chiefs Sakpe (Little Six) and Wakanozhanzhan (Medicine Bottle). They had been hiding out in Canada for several years when, in 1864, they were lured out of their hiding by two Canadians (eager to collect a reward), drugged with laudanum-spiked wine, chloroformed, tied to sleds, and then brought back over the border. It was, in a sense, a kind of extraordinary rendition. The Canadians handed over Sakpe and Wakanozhanzhan to Major Edwin Hatch at Pembina, Dakota Territory, and they were taken back to Fort Snelling. Like the other Dakota men before them, they had cursory trials, were found guilty based on hearsay testimony, and sentenced to hang. Almost a year later President Andrew Johnson signed the death warrant.\n\nThe two chiefs were executed at Fort Snelling, a stone's throw from Bdote, where the Dakota originated, on November 11, 1865, in front of soldiers and citizens eager to view the execution of two more Dakota men. A newspaper report claimed that \"they struggled but little and seemed to die easily. Medicine Bottle apparently retained vitality the longest, but both had their necks instantaneously broken by the fall, and could have felt no pain.\" Apparently there was a relic frenzy: \"The ropes with which they were hung were seized by the bystanders and cut in little pieces as relics. Those who could not secure one of these, cut chips off the gallows. Two fortunate individuals got the hats of the defunct chieftains, and their shoes, even, would have been taken, had a chance been allowed, so great was the demand for relics.\" Two area doctors came and got the bodies.\n\nThere's an apocryphal story that on the way to the scaffold the two chiefs heard a train whistle blow and Sakpe was overheard saying to Wakanozhanzhan, \"As the white man comes in, we go out.\" I asked Sheldon Wolfchild, a descendant of Wakanozhanzhan, about the meaning of that story. He answered me in one breath.\n\n\"Well, what they're saying is, 'We have been honest in our dealings from the beginning with the United States government. We kept our end of the bargain, our truth as a recognized government of the Dakota people. We have the integrity and understanding and the dignity and the respect to live up to agreements we sign. Now we're going to die after we hear the train coming, and all these people coming to where we originally started from. And we're going to die today because they, and their representatives, lied, cheated, and distorted the truth because they wanted the land. Now here we are, and we're going to be hung very shortly now. And so we'll go to the spirit world with our head held high, with respect because we kept our bargain, our truth in the eyes of the creator, the great spirit. We lived to the truth of what we said in that treaty. And the way we live and respect this earth is our truth. Now these people and the next generations coming on these trains have to live their lives with the knowledge that what they did was wrong. So I can go to the spirit world with respect because I lived up to my bargain, and they are going to have to live, generations to come and their offspring, with what their government did to the indigenous people of this country.' That's what they were thinking.\"\n\nThe lines on Wolfchild's wide, weathered face creased. This is something close to him, close to the surface, a part of his life. As he talked, he slipped from third person to first person. His great-great-great-grandfather became his grandfather, his father, his self.\n\nThe events of 1862 have a fostered a grave sense of loss, a perpetual trauma among many Dakota people, especially those living outside Minnesota. They are the exiles, the children of the diaspora. It became clear to me what this really meant as I drove through the Minnesota River Valley and on west into South Dakota\u2014there are palpable, visible, obvious reasons. An insightful scholar I met in Mankato named Rick Lybeck told me again and again that \"the material legacy\" of that war reverberates still. And I could see what he meant as I drove across a landscape that stretches and flattens, an occasional hill, but mostly farm as far as the eye can see. Enormous, otherworldly grain elevators that cough up their goods into waiting graffitied train cars, a seemingly limitless line of them, trundling forward and onward, awaiting the grain that will feed a nation, a world. These farms of America's Heartland, where buffalo once roamed, are sustaining the centers of capital.\n\nOne area historian named Ben Leonard gave me some stark numbers. \"From 1850 to 1880 the population of the Minnesota Territory went from 6,000 to 776,000 white people,\" he told me. \"In 1850 in the Minnesota Territory there were 150 farms, which means 150 barns with wheat fields, etcetera, but of course the Dakota were farming too. In 1880 there were 92,886 farms in Minnesota.\" This was a sea change not only in terms of the movements of human beings but also for the environment\u2014acres of prairie and woods transformed into wheat fields. For the environment, for Dakota people, it was, Leonard said, \"apocalyptic.\"\n\nThe scene of this apocalypse played out on my family's television as I grew up in South Carolina. Reruns of Little House on the Prairie played on a constant loop in my house, and as the baby boy with two older sisters, I was forced to watch it. As I drove across Western Minnesota I passed through Sleepy Eye and texted my sister Ellen, \"I'm in Sleepy Eye.\" She replied, \"Pa, will you take me on the run to Sleepy Eye.\" I texted back, \"No Half-Pint, the run's too dangerous.\" Later, as I drove through Walnut Grove, pausing to take a photo of a huge mural depicting the pioneer days, Charles Ingalls seemed less innocuous, less quaint. For their efforts, the Charles Ingallses of the Great Plains gained, in many cases, land purchased for a song and, ultimately, an unparalleled generational wealth. In a Minnesota River Valley tourism brochure I picked up in the vestibule of my hotel, one page depicts carrots and tomatoes, peppers and potatoes, migrant workers tossing bowling ball\u2013size heads of lettuce onto a truck. I turn the page and learn in a brief history of the conflict that if not for the \"actions of a few,\" all of this would not have been lost to the Dakota.\n\nThe Dakota lost their buffalo, their seasonal migrations for rice and maple sugaring. The white settlers and their descendants gained a vast gastronomical conduit for a monoculture. The Dakota lost the place they call home, their spiritual center. The white settlers and their descendants gained a food culture centered on the worship of corn. The Dakota lost Mni Sota Makoce. The Dakota lost their ties. The Dakota lost much.\n\nToday there are Dakota communities in Minnesota, South and North Dakota, Nebraska, and Canada. And people like J. B. Weston are trying to hold them together and hold on to what they can. Weston is a tribal historic preservation officer for the Flandreau Santee Sioux Tribe. He addresses tribal protocols and government regulations and works to address misrepresentations.\n\n\"When you drove in today before you came to the casino,\" he asks me, \"did you see that wind farm?\"\n\nI did, in fact: enormous wind turbines along the South Dakota-Minnesota border. When the windmills were built, he says, workers uncovered many Dakota artifacts, artifacts that are culturally significant but that are now housed in museums elsewhere. Weston works to get artifacts like those back to the community, filing Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA, passed in 1990 to help restore some of the lost cultures of Native Americans) claims and educating the public. He is working to bring the community, the culture back together. This is serious work\u2014life and death work. As we're talking he keeps looking over at two young women and one young man sitting in a booth near us. They look like they're up to something they're not supposed to be. Weston seems distracted by them or by something else. We move out of the bar and over to a little grill restaurant about ten yards away.\n\nWeston is wearing a green hat, navy blue shirt, Lee jeans, and sneakers. He smokes a lot. Smoke. Pause. Smoke.\n\n\"You know, suicide rates are very high among the Dakota.\" And then it's quiet between us. This happens a lot. The conversation moves in fits and starts\u2014well, not a conversation really. I'm quiet, listening. He speaks in dribs and drabs, saying either what comes to him or maybe what he thinks I need to hear next. In the moment it seems alarmingly random, but when I look at my notes afterward, when I look for patterns, it makes sense.\n\n\"So you know,\" he interrupts the silence, \"for you this is a story. For me this is every day. If you write this, I hope that it has a truth for my granddaughter.\" He gets up and goes to the grill and comes back with some scrap paper and a pen, starts drawing a picture illustrating all the reservation lands in the United States and then a sketch of North and South America. Pointing to the tiny swatch of land on those two continents, he says, \"This is all we have left.\" He draws another picture illustrating how many Dakota people actually follow the ways of their culture, saying it is about 10 percent, that it wasn't until 1978 that Dakota people could legally practice their religion. Things are changing, but theirs is a long road. It's that disconnect\u2014the people and their culture, the land and their culture.\n\n\"Do you know your tribe?\" he asks.\n\nI think about how to answer this and tell him that my family, the Shulers, came from a little speck on the map called Bibern in what's now called Switzerland. The family, led by a man named Hans Joerg Schuler, immigrated to South Carolina in 1735 with a group of Lutherans.\n\n\"I'm surprised you know that much. But do you know your tribe? Do you know your people before Christianity? Do you know them? Who they were? They had sacred spaces. Mountains. Rivers.\"\n\nTribe is original community. Foundation and bedrock. Something elemental and fundamental that I know nothing about. Tollund Man had a tribe. I glance around the casino, with its mesmerizing clich\u00e9d native-patterned carpet and that note played by the slots, somewhere in the key of C, sustained and ringing. A melodic anticipation of an imminent possibility. A buildup to nowhere and no place. In some ways this is a no place, a nowhere. There's a smattering of Native artwork in the hallways, a painting of a powwow on the wall in a hallway. A display case with images of various chiefs and pieces of arrowheads and pottery. There are more cowboy hats here than I've ever seen back East, but still there's nothing special about this building. Nothing real or sacred. I think about my tribe, whatever it was, whoever they were, resting on snowcapped mountains, summer-green meadows with lakes below. They are hunting the land, working through the landscape, in and of it. Silence. Kyle Rudolph has a fourth-quarter highlight reel\u2013worthy catch and trots into the end zone. Viktor the Viking, the blonde-haired conqueror, parades around the field to the adulation of cheering fans. The Vikings win.\n\nWeston has a warranted suspicion of people like me who come looking for a story. In one moment he is a schoolteacher critiquing my ignorance of Dakota culture, chastising me and telling me that this is more about me than it is about the Dakota. And then the next he's a motivational speaker or writing coach, coercing me to remember Caske's family, to remember the victims but also to write something that matters. \"You have to put it in the context of putting it on yourself,\" he reiterates. \"Have an impact. What you write should come from your gut.\"\n\nAnd then, finally, he talks about the noose. It became a NAGPRA item, a burial item, when the knot was tightened, digging into Caske's flesh. Weston thinks the family should be able to make a claim for it. But how absurd, he says, that they have to use laws to get it back. Why was it there in the first place? Why did Arnold cut it and keep it? Who does that? The noose is another theft of land and lifeways. In this light and in this place I'm thinking about Tollund Man, displaying his body. It's not the same thing and it is.\n\nWeston's telling me to get closer to the story I'm writing and to be honest with myself about what I'm doing. But he's also saying that this particular noose represents Dakota history and getting rid of it goes a long way to helping the Dakota move forward. That noose holds onto something that must be released.\n\n\"Where are those men?\" he asks me. \"You talk about that one noose, but it's much bigger than that. Thirty-eight nooses, but that was a man. That was a man. That was a man.\"\n\nHe says this pointing into the air with his cigarette at imaginary figures, at ghosts.\n\nRelic Hunting\n\nI wake up early the next morning. Columbus Day. A frost covers my rental car, and looking east, a red-ribbed sky nudges the day along. Oglala Lakota medicine man Black Elk spoke of \"a good red day\" and the \"the red road . . . the road of good.\" Today the red road is a pan-Indian concept meaning to be on the right path, to be going in the right direction.\n\nI drive from Royal River Casino through downtown Flandreau and up Highway 13, crossing the ample bends of the Big Sioux River, beginning a four-hour dash back to Minneapolis-St. Paul Airport. I pass the cemetery where Weston told me Little Crow is buried. Dry corn in the fields, prairie grass hugging ditches. Ahead of me is a flatbed with an enormous white blade, looking like some NASA project in rural South Dakota. I'm thinking about something Weston said: \"What's the point of all of this? What are you doing? You'll finish this book and then write another.\" What's the endgame? What's the motivation? Political? Personal? Can I trace every strand of the knot from beginning to end? Is this about the knot or is this about me? I am becoming, I suppose, a relic hunter. A relic: a sacred object, human remains, a souvenir, the ghostly outlines of a practice, custom, idea. The word has Latin roots, meaning \"to leave behind.\" It's related to the word \"relinquish,\" which means abandon, surrender: a relic contains a part of a past that has been abandoned. Pilgrims embark on grand journeys to contact that which has been surrendered from that past, left behind.\n\nBut the noose hasn't been left behind at all\u2014it's very much present, especially in South Dakota and at MHS. And yet I can't see the noose at MHS. I'm not supposed to see the noose. The story is my not seeing the noose. It remains offstage and off camera, a spiritual presence manufacturing plotlines and narratives that I can't readily access. There's something in that rope, in that noose, that's hanging on\u2014a spirit, a force, a life. And maybe it's not for me to come close to, what's inside the rope, like the part of the rope covered by wrapping turns, the inner workings of the hangman's knot, what makes it function, what pulls it taut around the human neck. What's inside the rope makes it work. What's inside that rope holds on. What's inside the rope that is life and human wants freedom and air and light. In some ways for the Dakota that noose is not just a symbol of those who died\u2014it is those people who died. Maybe I'm after what's inside the hands that hold the rope, that manufactures the noose, that makes the knot, that makes the death. Those two things\u2014the noose and the noose maker.\n\nA giant John Deere tractor barrels down the hill in front of me. After it passes I make a U-turn and gun it, passing the tractor on another decline. I want to go back to Little Crow's resting place to pay my respects. I turn off the highway and into a weed-choked field next to a dignified little white clapboard Presbyterian Church perched on a rise, cornfield beyond and the calm shine of the rising sun. I pull up the driveway leading to the church and get out. Surveying the small cemetery, I have no idea which one is Taoyateduta's. I don't have time for this. If I miss my flight, my wife will kill me.\n\nThe wind blows the lonely churchyard trees, and the dried corn stalks rattle gently. That's when I notice I'm not alone. An old yellow Bonneville with four passengers maneuvers the grassy road between the helter-skelter headstones and then quickly parks, engine idling while the driver, a squat Dakota woman, gets out and leaves a bouquet at one site, returns to the car, and drives away. The Bonneville barrels back down the road, turning left and looping out of the cemetery. Good idea. I hop back in my car and start driving around the cemetery, searching for the path that the Bonneville was on. Somehow this feels sacrilegious, like if my grandmother saw me doing this, she'd proclaim in her low-country drawl, \"How tacky!\" And I think of my wife at home with our two kids and keep circling.\n\nAnd then I see a tall prayer flag fluttering in the breeze. Of course. I drive over, park, and walk up to the gravesite. It's reserved, reticent, reluctant. Like Taoyateduta, I suppose. The headstone underscores this. \"Therefore I'll die with you.\" He knew what would happen. The war would be violent and it would only lead to more whites moving into Minnesota. Taoyateduta never really had a proper burial place until 1971, when the Minnesota Historical Society returned some of his bones (which they had among their artifacts) to his family. They buried his remains, over a hundred years after his death, in this innocuous cemetery outside Flandreau.\n\nI get back in the car, turn around, and head back onto Highway 13. On the radio two commentators are talking about the markets\u2014not Wall Street, of course, but soybean and corn markets. And then there's a recap of the news. Again the story of the Somali man, sending young Minnesota-born Somalis to Mogadishu to fight for al-Shabaab and twenty-one-year-old Bangladeshi Quazi Nafis trying to blow up the Federal Reserve in lower Manhattan, a violent echo chamber, questions open for answer and discussion. The day is becoming gray and windy. I can feel it in my gut.\nlynching\n\nChapter 8\n\nAlone from a Tree:   \nLynching in the   \nPost-Reconstruction South\n\nSheriff Waldrop unlocked Dick Wofford's cell in the middle of the night. Outside the jailhouse, enveloped by the roar of cicadas, he and Wofford mounted horses to flee Columbus, North Carolina. Columbus is in Polk County, just over the state line from South Carolina. To the north and west of Columbus the Blue Ridge Mountains, covered in white oak and short-leaf pine, rise serenely from dense thickets of rhododendron and mountain laurel. In the cool of the night Waldrop and Wofford headed toward Asheville, a good forty-five miles away. They followed the Howard's Gap Road, although calling an old rutted wagon trail lined with poison ivy and Queen Anne's Lace a \"road\" is a bit of a stretch. What's more, it had rained a lot over the past few weeks, and in places Howard's Gap looked more like a bog than a road. The over-mountain trek, skirting the Pacolet River, would be arduous, but it was the best option, the only option, if Waldrop wanted to keep Dick Wofford alive until his court date in November.\n\nDick Wofford was in double trouble. It was 1894, and he was a young black man accused of raping a white woman in the South. Sheriff Waldrop had kept lookout for several nights as impatient locals demanded that he relinquish his prisoner to them. Waldrop could sense where this was heading\u2014those men gathering outside the jailhouse every night wanted Wofford something fierce. So they fled to Asheville, where Wofford waited until his day in court came.\n\nHis trial began just as the last leaves were making their way to the earth. On Tuesday, November 20, the charges were read before the court\u2014Dick Wofford was accused of raping Elizabeth Henderson on July 17, 1894. Jurors were selected, and the state brought forward three witnesses, including James Frank Henderson (Elizabeth's father), and the defense had five witnesses, including Wofford. The day after witnesses appeared, the court reconvened, and a jury of white men found him not guilty of all charges. Many in the courtroom could hardly believe their ears.\n\nThe sheriff quickly released Wofford, pointed toward some woods behind the courthouse, and told the likely terrified young man to \"cut dirt.\" If not, he said, \"He would be hanged by the people.\" Based on attempts made on Wofford's life the summer before, Sheriff Waldrop would have known by then that Wofford's best chance of keeping himself alive was to quickly leave Polk County and not come back. For that reason Waldrop might have suggested he run toward Landrum, just over the border in South Carolina. The quickest route south would have begun along what's now called Peniel Road. But at some point Wofford, who was not too proud to heed Sheriff Waldrop's dreadful but necessary advice, cut through the woods and came out at a place locals call the Rock Cut, where the Southern Railroad slices through rock slightly north and west of Landrum and then keeps on chugging.\n\nRailroad tracks looking south   \ntoward Landrum, South Carolina.   \nPhoto by author\n\nThere he made his way onto the train tracks and no longer had to bushwhack. He must have felt some relief then as he walked along the tracks, as they ran straight and flat into the apparent safety of the town of Landrum.\n\nAt around three in the afternoon Wofford spoke to a white man in Landrum named Noah Carpenter and told him he felt safe now. Carpenter told him he best keep moving on or else that girl's friends and family would catch up with him. Wofford then went to a friend's house, a black man named Dan Odem, another mile or so down the railroad from town. About five hours later a posse was spotted passing through Landrum in hot pursuit\u2014eager to get their hands on him. They found Wofford at Odem's house, tied him up, and carried him off into the night.\n\nEarly the next morning a black boy walking into town found Dick Wofford's body hanging from a wild cherry tree about a half-mile from the Landrum train station. Wofford had a noose around his neck, and his hands were tied behind his back. There were knife wounds beneath his left armpit and several slashes on his shoulders, and a pool of blood in the road near the tree suggested a struggle\u2014that he didn't go quietly. But as Dick Wofford hanged from that tree, blood dripping from below his left arm, there was little left to hear but the occasional cricket and the creaking of the taut rope, the gentle movement of Wofford's body turning beneath the dark sky.\n\nLynching After Reconstruction\n\nAs we saw in Chapter 6, before John Brown was sent to the gallows he warned the people of the South and of the nation that the \"negro question\" had yet to be settled but that it would be in due time. And yet even the Civil War did not answer that question. Slaves were freed, but the ideology that had fostered their bondage did not end after Gettysburg or Appomattox. It mouldered, like the bodies of Union and Confederate soldiers left in battlefields or like John Brown's own body, as the song goes.\n\nDuring the Reconstruction period, generally considered to run from 1865 to 1877, the federal government sought to reform the southern states, even deploying the military when deemed necessary. During this period violence against black people in the former Confederacy increased dramatically. Freed slaves no longer fell under the protection, such as it had been, of their masters, and many white people believed federal law illegitimate because \"outsiders\" were imposing it on them. What's more, many white southerners saw nearly four million black people suddenly transformed from personal property into potential economic and social competitors. Institutions like the Freedman's Bureau, set up to provide services for and negotiate work contracts for former slaves, often proved incapable of standing in the gap between white and black southerners in any effective way when southern whites took the law into their own hands. So from roughly late 1865 to the early 1870s various groups like the Ku Klux Klan meted out summary justice across the South. This insurgency, this Invisible Empire, as Albion Tourg\u00e9e called them, intimidated, whipped, and murdered northerners, Republicans, and black people\u2014indeed, anyone who might support or benefit from federal Reconstruction policies\u2014into submission. The Klan and their supporters laid the foundation for Democratic control of the South and the eventual imposition of a white supremacist agenda popularly known as Jim Crow.\n\nAlthough the Klan exhibited how vigilante thugs could terrorize those they wished to expel from \"their\" South, the Klan's actions and agenda don't completely explain the massive wave of violence that swept across the southern United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the first extensive period of lynching. There really is no good way to describe all the extrajudicial murder\u2014to describe all the men, women, and children killed and those who permitted the killing. Many writers who tackle the subject admit the problem. Philip Dray writes that when he was working his way through the Tuskegee Institute's clippings file, an unbelievable and terrifying collection of newspaper clippings about lynchings, he was so overwhelmed and that he muttered the words \"a holocaust\" aloud. Vann R. Newkirk ponders the lives cut short by mob violence, noting that these victims \"were real people and that the incidents in which they lost their lives actually happened. Most had families, and since most were young one can only wonder what impact they or their offspring might have made on society.\"\n\nSome writers rely on the starkness of numbers to give the reader pause. Through their extensive and universally respected research, in 1995 sociologists Stewart E. Tolnay and E. M. Beck confirmed 2,805 lynching victims between 1882 and 1930 in the South, roughly 2,500 of whom were African American. For greater perspective they note that \"on the average, a black man, woman, or child was murdered nearly once a week, every week, between 1882 and 1930 by a hate-driven white mob.\" Researchers at the Tuskegee Institute claimed in 1968 that there were 4,743 lynchings in the United States (3,446 blacks and 1,297 whites) between 1882 and 1968. And in 1919 the NAACP, in their report Thirty Years of Lynching in the United States, cite a total of 3,224 lynchings in the United States (702 \"White\" and 2,522 \"Colored\") from 1889 to 1918. Although the majority, about 75 percent, of those lynched from about the 1880s to the beginning of World War II were African American, other ethnic, racial, and religious minorities fell victim to Judge Lynch's court\u2014Mexicans, Native Americans, Asians, Italians, and Jews. Women and men, children and adults, white and black were lynched throughout the United States\u2014in Alabama and Arkansas, Minnesota and Mississippi, Wisconsin and Wyoming. And there's no good way, no one way to describe a massacre such as this.\n\nWhat we do know is that beginning in the 1880s many Americans lynched with impunity. This lynching epidemic peaked sometime in the 1890s and slowed down by the time of World War I. Mob violence came back in earnest in the 1920s and eventually declined in the 1930s. Some might argue that lynching never really went away\u2014that it's a deep-rooted cultural technology and will always return occasionally. Like when members of the Ku Klux Klan murdered James Cheney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner outside Philadelphia, Mississippi, in 1960. Or when, in 1998, James Byrd Jr., was dragged to death behind a pickup truck in Jasper, Texas. Or when, that very same year, Matthew Shepard was tortured and left to die on a fence outside of Laramie, Wyoming. But what lynching is depends on who you ask and when you ask them.\n\nThe term \"to lynch\" likely developed during the American Revolution. The word has been connected to stories about either Charles Lynch or William Lynch, Virginians accused of using extralegal means to suppress British sympathizers. At first \"to lynch\" did not connote \"to hang\"\u2014that would come later. For these men the whip, not the noose, was the preferred method of discipline, though one story of William Lynch's \"lynch men\" explains that they would often set a victim on a horse, bind his hands, tighten a noose around his neck, and attach the rope to a tree. The horse might wander off and would, in a sense, become the executioner. But its earliest usages simply imply whipping or roughing someone up, perhaps with tar and feathers, and then sending her out of town.\"\n\nAlmost half a century after the American Revolution \"to lynch\" someone still meant to rough someone up. For example, an 1827 article in the Baltimore Gazette and Daily Advertiser explained that \"Lynch Law\" is upheld when the \"young and respectable members of the community, associate for the purpose of preserving morals\" when \"common law\" does not. The article noted that \"the culprit is dealt with in manner and form as the Lynch law directs; which is to go in disguise, seize and blindfold the culprit, and take him to the neighboring woods, and whip him severely\u2014then dismiss him with a promise to double the dose if he does not clear out.\" Thus, Washington Irving describes the practice as he saw it happen to an Osage man, a suspected horse thief, in his A Tour on the Prairies as \"'Lynch's Law,' as it is technically termed, in which the plaintiff is apt to be witness, jury, judge, and executioner.\" He writes that he suspects such actions to foster resentment and exacerbate tensions between native peoples and European settlers. Here, of course, the implication is that roughing up can lead to death. (It's important to remember here that concurrent with the development of the terminology for these extralegal executions was the movement to make legal executions private.)\n\nLynching, meaning extrajudicial executions, became fairly common in the South in the decades before the Civil War. Historian W. J. Cash believes that the antebellum South was \"the home of lynching\" in the United States. The victims of southern antebellum lynching parties were often white people. Black slaves were considered valuable property and so, therefore, were (mostly) protected.\n\nMost researchers in the twentieth century define a lynching specifically as an extrajudicial killing by three or more persons who kill someone illegally and claim to do so in service of justice or tradition. Whatever lynching was (or is), lynchings were supported and endorsed by the communities in which they took place either through hands-on participation, public viewing, or the soft complicity of inaction. On many occasions the murderers were well known\u2014they were not the hooded night riders of the Reconstruction era. Lynchers were anything but secretive about their work; many of them looked directly into the camera lens with the earnest belief that their actions were justified. Despite the common report by officers of the law that a lynched person died at the hands of \"persons unknown,\" they were known; they were the butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker. Some have blamed lower-class dirt farmers for lynchings, but the evidence doesn't support that accusation\u2014lynchers were from all walks of life.\n\nThough most often associated with the noose, lynching also involved victims being tortured to death (including genital mutilation), burned alive, or riddled with bullet holes. Those who were only hanged and not burned alive still suffered immensely. An account of the Memphis lynching of Lee Walker, who was hanged from a telegraph pole, asserts that \"the Negro died hard. . . . The neck was not broken . . . and death came by strangulation. For fully ten minutes after he was strung up the chest heaved occasionally and there were convulsive movements of the limbs.\"\n\nLynching victims were generally young, often the sons or daughters of the last enslaved Americans. Sometimes they were well known to the folks who killed them, but more often than not they were outsiders. Lynchings happened throughout the United States but were most likely to occur in the South. The Gulf Plain (from Florida to Texas) and cotton uplands (Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas, and Texas) had the highest lynching rates. But the Appalachian Mountain region was a close third due in part to the rural nature of the area, with its poor communication networks and weak law enforcement. In these places lynching was viewed as a method of enforcing law in order to protect whites. But even in places where the law was strong and resources plenty, a lynching was still rarely investigated, and when one was, the accused were rarely convicted. After the trial of thirty-one men in Greenville, South Carolina, accused of the brutal lynching of Willie Earle in 1947, an all-white jury came back to the courtroom with a verdict of not guilty. Judge J. Robert Martin then unceremoniously dismissed them without the customary \"thank you\" for their service to the state and to the justice system. Such a protest was both brave and rare.\n\nIf one were looking to sketch a generic lynching story\u2014though no such thing exists\u2014the story of Dick Wofford might be a good model. It is a \"generic lynching story\" because Wofford was accused of the \"usual crime,\" which in lynching parlance meant assault or rape of a white woman. It is also a \"generic lynching story\" because there is little known and recorded about the victim or the crime for which he had been accused. And in the written record of the history of lynching Dick Wofford's has received little attention. When it was first documented recorders often got the date, cause of death, and, sometimes, his name wrong. The details of Dick Wofford's death, like those of many \"Unknown Negroes\" murdered at the \"hands of persons unknown,\" remain, for the most part, a mystery. Some of this mystery is due to a lack of primary sources and to the poor quality of those that do exist. Court records of Dick Wofford's trial reveal very little, and newspaper accounts of the lynching reveal biases. However, with close reading it is possible to uncover enough details to begin to construct what Dick Wofford's life must have been like in Polk County, North Carolina, in 1894 and the reasons for his murder.\n\nAccuser and Accused\n\nMuch of what is now called Polk County was originally Cherokee hunting territory. The first white settlers were traders, swapping gun powder and alcohol for pelts with the Cherokee. Next came Scots-Irish immigrants, with a few English and Welsh for good measure. Many colonists came to the area via Pennsylvania and Virginia, settling in the valleys (or coves, in local-speak) far from main roads and living isolated lives as yeoman farmers. Polk County was formalized as such in 1855, and the county seat was geographically central, a place to be named Columbus after Dr. Columbus Mills, the man who pushed for the county's formation. At the time of its formation there were only about six thousand people countywide. The eastern and southern parts of the county were better suited to agriculture, but even those farms were on the smaller side; the area was never home to enormous plantations like you might see in the eastern part of the state or in the South Carolina Low Country. In Polk County there were just too many mountains and too few stretches of flat land. When the Civil War came, some of Polk's yeoman farmers signed up to fight for the Confederacy out of a sense of loyalty but later deserted when they decided it wasn't their fight.\n\nThat doesn't mean that slavery wasn't a part of life in Polk County. As early as 1782 tax records reveal at least 36 slaves in the area that eventually became Polk County. By 1790 there were about 119 slaves with a total of nineteen owners. From 1790 to 1850, because of changing boundary lines, it's difficult to pinpoint individual slave owners within what are now the county's borders, but by the 1850 Federal Census 572 slaves were living within the county. The numbers indicate that most slave owners owned only a few people; \"203 were owned by 49 different owners\"\u2014an average of about 4 each. Some farms had far more. The largest were home to 53 and 42 slaves, respectively. By 1860 the number of enslaved people in the county had increased, though not by much. In the year before Ruffin and the Cadets fired shots at Fort Sumter, there were 615 enslaved people, with 87 different owners; 399 of them were owned by 19 people.\n\nLife was hard in Polk County after the Civil War. The county was a crossroads of sorts between mountains and the Piedmont, but there was little economic growth. Most people managed to live off of subsistence farms, with a little bit of cotton and corn raised as cash crops. Then there was talk of the railroad, of laying track from Spartanburg to Asheville, opening up the mountains, bringing economic progress. Initially the train was slated to run through Columbus, but that never happened. The train ended up running five miles southwest of Columbus through Tryon and up into the mountains on the Saluda Grade, the steepest railroad grade east of the Rockies. Much of this work was done by hand by convict workers, many of them African Americans. By 1877 the railroad linked South Carolina's ports to the mountains of North Carolina, Tennessee, and beyond.\n\nThe railroad offered new opportunities for employment\u2014on the trains themselves and in the hotels and inns that started to spring up around Tryon. Those opportunities attracted many African Americans from the dead-end sharecropping of South Carolina. Some of those workers may have made their way to Columbus, but in 1894 the African American population there was relatively small, and thus, Dick Wofford's presence in the community is somewhat surprising. My initial thought was that he must have been the descendant of slaves from the county, and yet there are few African American \"Woffords\" in the county in postslavery census records. In 1880 there was only one African American Wofford family in Polk County, a Peter Wofford married to a Mary Wofford. They had two children, neither of whom is named either Richard or Dick. (A fire destroyed much of the 1890 Federal Census, and there are no extant records for Polk County.) Perhaps, then, Dick Wofford was not originally from Polk County. Most likely his story begins in Spartanburg County, South Carolina. The report of his lynching from the Spartanburg Herald indicates that he had been working \"a number of years over the line in Polk County at Tom Davis' saw mill,\" meaning on the other side of the border between North and South Carolina. Factories, railroads, and sawmills offered better pay and steady employment for a young black man like Dick Wofford. Thus, he may have gotten wind of a job in Columbus and made his way north from his home.\n\nThe location of that home or of his birthplace is hard to authenticate. The 1880 Federal Census records offer two possibilities\u2014two Richard Woffords in Spartanburg County. The first is a Richard Wofford, a black male about eight years old from Glenn Springs. His father was a thirty-six-year-old farmer named either Milton or Mills; his mother was deceased, and he had four siblings. But then a Richard Wofford shows up again in 1900 near Pacolet, not far from Glenn Springs, in Spartanburg County. This could be the same Richard Wofford from the 1880 Census. If so, it's not the Dick Wofford who was lynched in 1894. The second possibility\u2014and perhaps more likely\u2014is a Richard Wofford living in the city of Spartanburg in 1880. This Dick Wofford was a five-year-old black male, the adopted son of Andy and Betsy Wofford, an older couple. And at some point in either his late teens or early twenties Dick Wofford hit the road and traveled to Columbus, looking for work.\n\nWofford had been there for at least two years before the 1894 trial. The spring 1892, fall 1892, fall 1893, and spring 1894 Polk County court records reveal he was brought before the court on a warrant. Wofford could have been a career criminal, though there is no record of conviction to support this assertion. Or maybe Wofford was in debt or had been considered a vagrant, but there's no record to support this assertion either. It seems more likely that he was brought into court because the sheriff was rounding up suspects, and in 1894 any African American male would likely have been considered suspicious in Columbus.\n\nFor Dick Wofford life would have been complicated, dangerous even. He would have been cautious about his interactions with whites\u2014careful about what he said, the tone of his voice, the direction of his glance. The social customs of Jim Crow existed in this border region of North and South Carolina in 1894, even if the legal frameworks did not. But those laws did come. In 1899 the state adopted voter restrictions\u2014a literacy test, poll tax, and grandfather clause. By the turn of the century the Democratic Party dominated and foisted a white supremacist agenda onto the state that disenfranchised African Americans for decades. But even before they lost the right vote, African Americans in Columbus, North Carolina, would likely have had very little power or influence.\n\nIn this climate Dick Wofford was accused of rape by a white woman. The Spartanburg Herald writes that his accuser was \"an innocent and virtuous girl about eighteen years old named Lizzie Boad.\" That singular clause brought forth a host of images to the white southern reader's mind. Indeed, it would have led many to instantly assume Wofford's guilt. That's not too surprising. Like the gallows literature of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, stories about lynchings were popular with readers\u2014apparent revenge narratives, salacious details, and blood-stained bodies hanging from the limbs of oak trees added to the popularity of these accounts. Newspapers like the Spartanburg Herald were giving their readers what they wanted and, in doing so, were perpetuating the idea that the primary cause for lynching in the South was that black men were raping virtuous white women. This \"folk pornography\"\u2014to borrow Jaqueline Dowd Hall's term\u2014measured the \"ideal\" white woman against the \"villainous\" black man and played on popular notions about black sexuality. This was part of a marked shift in racial stereotypes after the Civil War. Before the war the standard literary and theatrical stereotype of the southern black male was of the contented slave, the \"happy darky\" or Sambo. After the war and Reconstruction black men were more often than not portrayed as subliterate savages on the prowl for white women. The message was clear\u2014enslaved black men were pliant; free black men are dangerous sexual predators.\n\nThese stereotypes held sway in the North as much as they did in the South and were popularized by writers like Thomas Nelson Page and Thomas Dixon as well as by filmmaker D. W. Griffith of The Birth of a Nation fame. And they didn't go unchallenged. The pioneer critic of the widely held belief that black men were brutal rapists was Ida B. Wells-Barnett. Her muckraking exposed the horror of lynching as well as the fallacies of the standard arguments for why it was happening. Wells-Barnett mined newspaper reports and pointed to many cases in which white women were in consensual relationships with black men. In Elyria, Ohio, in 1892 a white woman accused a black man of entering her home, drugging her, and then raping her. Later the man was put on trial, found guilty, and sent to jail for fifteen years. The woman later confessed she was lying\u2014her neighbors had seen her invite the man into her home. In other cases the conclusions were more violent. In Tuscumbia, Alabama, before an African American man was lynched \"for assaulting a white girl he told his accusers that he had met her there in the woods often before.\" And in Larned, Kansas, a white woman \"held at bay until daylight, without alarming anyone in the house, 'a burly Negro' who entered her room and bed. The 'burly Negro' was promptly lynched without investigation or examination of inconsistent stories.\" Wells-Barnett also furnished evidence that rape wasn't the primary allegation against black men who were lynched. In her Red Record she lists a number of other reasons for lynchings in 1894, including suspected arson, stealing, murder and attempted murder, rape and attempted rape, train wrecking, enticing a servant away, barn burning, writing letters to a white woman, conspiracy, horse stealing, giving information, and conjuring. In that year, she points out, more black men were accused of murder than of rape.\n\nBut the real reasons didn't seem to matter. People believed what they did for entrenched historical, social, and psychological reasons, and the white press aided and abetted such rationalizations. In Shelby, North Carolina\u2014just forty miles from Columbus\u2014a newspaper called the Shelby Aurora was quite clear on the issue: black people must be controlled, and lynching is one way to do it. In an issue from September 20, 1894, a few months before Wofford's lynching, the newspaper published an article on its front page that gives one a glimpse into the popular sentiments of the day. The article, a reprint of an article from the Richmond Dispatch, chastises the English, who introduced slavery to the colonies (\"while Virginians 'kicked' against it\") and now criticize those who lynch in the United States. The article reads, \"Perhaps with their aid and advice a compromise may be effected on the following basis\u2014to wit: That if they will persuade the freedman to give up his besetting sin, the whites will pledge themselves to see that lynch law is abandoned at once and forever.\"\n\nEdward Ayers writes that \"the fear of black rape obviously triggered something deep within the psyche of the white South. Whites had long associated blacks with sexuality, however: why did that association suddenly erupt in a wave of lynchings in the late 1880s and early 1890s? In part, that crisis developed because a new generation of blacks and whites faced each across an ever-widening chasm.\" There was an intense distrust and ignorance of each other, and thus, fear emerged. In this fashion white women were taught to fear black men and black men taught not to put themselves in a situation that could lead to such an accusation. This fear of black men, fostered by an eager press, could have led a young white woman to accuse Dick Wofford of raping her, even if it never happened.\n\nThe Spartanburg Herald calls Wofford's accuser Lizzie Boad. But there are no Boads in the 1870, 1880, or 1900 Federal Census of Polk County. We can assume, then, that the name in the newspaper was made up\u2014either to protect her or the newspaper or both\u2014and that the name in the court minutes, \"Elizabeth Henderson,\" is the correct one. There are several Elizabeth Hendersons in census records to choose from, but the most obvious choice is the daughter of James Frank Henderson, who also happened to be a witness for the state during the trial. Henderson was a farmer, miller, and once served as justice of the peace. During the Civil War he joined the Confederate army as a private and served under Stonewall Jackson; he was apparently with the soldiers who mistakenly shot Jackson at Chancelorsville leading to the subsequent loss of his arm. When the war ended he came back to Polk County, married Cynthia Mariah Hannon, and they had eight children\u2014one of whom was named Nora (Bettie) Elizabeth Henderson.\n\nElizabeth Henderson was born on November 10, 1877, on a farm about four miles south of Columbus proper. Interestingly, Henderson was married to a man named Taylor Alfred Sims on September 1, 1894, just weeks after Wofford was accused of assaulting her. There's no record of witness testimony, so we can only imagine why jurors came to the decision they did. One hypothesis is that he was innocent and the jurors believed him. Dick Wofford and Elizabeth Henderson could have been in a consensual relationship and maybe things ended badly. Maybe she cried wolf out of anger or to protect herself, given that she was about to be married. That the two were in a relationship isn't a stretch\u2014nor was it uncommon, as Wells-Barnett pointed out. But it was supremely problematic for white women to be discovered in such a relationship: it was okay for white men to sleep with black women, but for white women to do the same was unimaginable. For a white woman caught in the act, crying rape was one way out.\n\nAfter ten years of marriage and five children, Elizabeth and Taylor separated. She lived with her children outside of Columbus for a short while and then worked in mills throughout upstate South Carolina. She moved back home eventually and married again, this time to Frank Giles. When her mother died from cancer in 1913, she assumed responsibility for her father, whose health was beginning to fail. On March 16, 1921, she wrote to the National Soldiers Home in Hampton, Virginia, that her father \"has lost his mind and is almost deaf and has no one to attend to him.\" A letter was sent to her on March 18 that he should come as soon as possible, to bring his army discharge and pension certificate. He died on April 25 and never made it to the home. Elizabeth died on March 25, 1922, of cancer, almost a year after her father. She's buried in a beautiful cemetery next to Green Creek First Baptist Church, about ten miles east of Columbus, with a view of the grassy foothills and a hint of the mountains beyond.\n\nProbable Cause\n\nLike many lynchings, there's no evidence that Dick Wofford's was ever investigated. Authorities from Spartanburg County likely didn't see it as their problem, and because it happened over the line, it was out of Polk's jurisdiction. The vivid description of Dick Wofford's body, written by the Spartanburg Herald writer, is all we have to work with. One of that writer's assertions is that the lynchers wanted to bring him back to Polk County. But why? Did they wish to torture him? Did they wish to take care of him in their own neck of the woods in order to avoid being charged in South Carolina? And who were the lynchers? Elizabeth Henderson's family? Her new husband's family? Without a doubt those who killed Wofford were angry about some perceived injustice. But according to court records, Wofford was cleared of charges for the supposed rape. Could he have been lynched for another reason?\n\nEconomic stress might also lead to resentment among poor whites of a black man in their midst willing to work for low wages. Polk County was likely affected tangentially by the downturn in cotton prices that was hurting parts of North and South Carolina in the 1890s, and economic downturns often led to crime waves, including lynchings. Perhaps local whites resented Dick Wofford's employment at Tom Davis's sawmill, coupled with his outsider status. Or perhaps Wofford was discontented with his pay and demanded more from his boss. Especially in the cotton belt, violent suppression was a useful tool for coercing disgruntled African American workers\u2014and lynching was the extreme use of violence.\n\nBut there's no evidence that Dick Wofford was an angry employee. Somehow, some way, Dick Wofford crossed a line that white folks in Columbus didn't want black men to cross. Like white people across much of the South, they desired at any cost\u2014even human life\u2014a social if not legal framework that replicated the racial control inherent in a slave regime. Just because Polk County was never the center of slavery that Charleston County, South Carolina, was doesn't mean that people in that community didn't share a similar ideology. Eric Foner notes that \"slavery affected society everywhere in the South and even mountaineers shared many attitudes with planters, beginning with a commitment to white supremacy.\" This commitment was underscored when the Ku Klux Klan emerged in North Carolina around 1867 and was especially popular in mountainous counties like Yancey and Rutherford (Polk's neighbor to the east). Membership reached about 40,000 in the state during Reconstruction and included all classes and regions. And North Carolina was never immune to lynching; in fact, between 1865 and 1941 168 North Carolinians were lynched. In 1893 the state made lynching a felony, demanded sheriffs secure their jails, and made counties liable. But those laws didn't change things a whole lot; indeed, many sheriffs loathed the prospect of shooting at friends and neighbors.\n\nAnd yet Dick Wofford was lynched on the southern side of the North and South Carolina border and, thus, was also bound up in the contentious politics and race relations of that state. The fact that his death was, at best, underinvestigated points to the legal system's tacit acceptance of vigilante justice. Things weren't any better for black people in South Carolina in 1894. In fact, they may have been worse. The upstate of South Carolina, the foothills of Appalachia, had a long history of Klan activity, especially in Spartanburg County where Wofford had been lynched. Spartanburg was one of nine counties in South Carolina that President Grant had placed under martial law in October 1871. Though its power had waned greatly, the Klan's model of freelance justice lingered in the upstate; there were twenty-four lynchings in the state of South Carolina from 1890 to 1894, and a third of those took place in the northern corner of the state.\n\nReenactment of Ku Klux Klan in North Carolina. Engraving made from 1870 photograph by US Marshal J. G. Hester\n\nAcross upstate South Carolina there was a spike in violence in the 1890s, a problem exacerbated by a culture of feuding in the foothills. An especially hostile and law-breaking area was nicknamed the \"Dark Corner\" and sat just over the line from Polk County, North Carolina, and Spartanburg County, South Carolina, in Northeast Greenville County.\n\nAt the time, \"Pitchfork\" Ben Tillman was governor of South Carolina. A populist and \"friend of the working man,\" Tillman also had a complicated relationship with lynching and violence in general, walking the line between a business elite who wished to bring business to South Carolina and the poor working classes. In 1892 Tillman famously declared, \"Governor as I am, I would lead a mob to lynch the negro who ravishes a white woman.\" Though, earlier, in his inaugural address, he claimed he wouldn't tolerate lynching and would forever uphold \"the majesty of the law.\" This is the message moneyed classes wished to hear, many of whom feared that the spectacle of lynching would scare away northern investors and black workers. Stephen A. West points out that for many in the large towns and cities in South Carolina, lynching was an affront to their sensibilities, a violation of law, and definitely something with roots in the lower classes. For these reasons it should be controlled. They were \"anti-lynching but hardly anti-racist.\" With equal parts New South and white supremacist, it's uncertain which message his audiences digested.\n\nBut Dick Wofford was lynched by a party from North Carolina, and in the year he was killed there were three other lynchings in the Tarheel State. Lynching had become the ultimate cultural technology whites had at their disposal for controlling black people. Before the war slave codes governed black people's movements, access to information, and, in general, the ways in which black people could act in the public sphere. After the war a new world emerged, and whites felt the need to assert their authority anew. By 1896 the US Supreme Court made \"separate but equal\" common parlance and the law of the land. But it is important to note how closely blacks and whites were connected in the South before and after that decision. The lives of white and black people in the South were connected and disconnected in complicated ways. In rural areas there tended to be closer contacts\u2014\"Rural roads, country stores, and cotton gins were not segregated; hunters and fishermen respected rules of fair play, regardless of race.\" Black people and white people came together at corn shuckings, to help each other when sick, when babies were born, and, sometimes, as Wells-Barnett points out, in the bedroom. Despite all of this seeming goodwill, the reality on the ground for African Americans in the South was more complicated, that in an instant they could become the victims of unspeakable violence and that in big and small ways they were second-class citizens. The terror of the noose and the daily indignities African Americans suffered in the South imposed a quiet and horrible discipline.\n\nThe fact that we know exactly where Elizabeth Henderson was buried says a lot about history, about what and who gets remembered. There's no headstone with Dick Wofford's name on it that I could find, but scattered about the Columbus, Landrum, Tryon, area are places\u2014or hints of places\u2014that would have been around in Wofford's day. When he was last seen in Landrum, Wofford spoke to a white man and told him he'd just come across the woods from Columbus, that he'd walked along the train tracks into town beginning at the Rock Cut\u2014that place still exists. About a mile south of Landrum, where Greenwood Road connects with Highway 176, is a new bridge, built in 2001, that crosses what locals call the Rock Cut. If you walk out on the bridge in the winter, you can see clearly the work that must have gone into building this place. But on the summer afternoon I visited, trees draped in kudzu covered much of my view of the tracks below. A storm was rolling over the mountains to the west of me, the Blue Ridge amplifying the thunder in the distance. I walked about twenty feet into the woods, closer to the rock's edge. I stopped and listened and looked. Around me it was quiet except for the occasional whoosh of a car back on the highway. It was cooler in the woods, and soon the rain would come.\n\nFinding the Story\n\nToday Columbus is the first stop in North Carolina for drivers heading northeast on I-26 from South Carolina. From the interstate Columbus doesn't seem like much\u2014the usual conglomeration of chain stores and eateries that typically greet drivers as they enter and exit most American interstate highways. A Waffle House, a menagerie of gas stations, a couple of grocery stores, a McDonalds, and a former Hardees repurposed as a Mexican restaurant. A half-mile from the interstate exit is \"downtown\" Columbus, a short strip of stores, many of which have seen better days. A pizza joint, a bar, a hardware store, and\u2014one sign of the changing demographics of North Carolina and the southeastern United States\u2014a Mexican tienda. Columbus is like a lot of little towns in the mountains of North Carolina\u2014for many years relatively poor and lily white. That's changing as more and more migrant workers stay put. Slowly but surely they are transforming the demographics and culture of these communities. The tension between these immigrants and whites who've long resided here isn't obvious, but a crude poster I saw in the yard of one house spoke the possibilities. \"Wake up America! Impeach Obama,\" the poster read, with the word \"Osama\" scratched in above the surname. Despite the tepid welcome, Columbus's newest citizens are very visible\u2014working in stores, walking down streets, or smoking cigarettes in front of the Polk County courthouse. The courthouse itself rests amidst a green square peppered by an assortment of memorials to Columbus's soldiers who died in various wars. The building itself is a modest but stately Greek Revival building topped by a white cupola, its bricks baked by slaves as it was being built in 1857.\n\nI went to Columbus because I was looking for the story, looking to see whether someone had ever heard of Dick Wofford. I talked with a secretary in the Clerk of Court's office who let me comb through some old records. She had never heard of Dick Wofford or the lynching and said there were no records of trials from that long ago in the building. She asked around the office, and someone suggested I try the county museum a block away.\n\nWhen I walked into the Polk County Historical Society's museum, it was empty save for me and a helpful docent named Anna Conner. I explained my research and what I'd discovered thus far. She seemed a little surprised at first, but curious. Conner told me she didn't think too much about race when she was growing up. \"There were black communities, but they were totally isolated. Even when I was growing up in the forties and fifties, I never really had a conversation with a black person until I went to college in Greensboro.\" She grew up in Columbus, and her family, on her father's side, has been here since the 1760s. She remembers an isolated, insular community when she was growing up. She laughs, \"My family called anybody who wasn't from Polk County a Yankee!\"\n\nAbout fifteen years ago Anna Conner started writing a book on the history of the nearby town of Tryon, and during that process she began to understand her community. Now she's obsessed with its history. Her research has taught her a lot. For one, she says, \"You can't trust most sources. You have to find as many as you can and go with your best guess. People always see events differently.\" I showed her my sources\u2014the newspaper articles, court records, and a list of Woffords I'd found who lived in Columbus at that time. Looking at the list, she quickly told me all of these Woffords were white because they were buried in white cemeteries. Her best guess is that Dick Wofford wasn't from Polk County, that he was here for work.\n\n\"Now, who was the accuser?\" she asks.\n\nI told her that according to newspaper accounts she was an eighteen-year-old woman and the Spartanburg Herald calls her Lizzie Boad but the court transcript refers to her as Elizabeth Henderson. Based on records and local names, we both agree that \"Lizzie Boad\" was likely made up. \"But Henderson, I'm related to some Hendersons.\" I mention that her father was James Frank Henderson. \"Well, then,\" she says, \"we're related.\"\n\nElizabeth Henderson and her ancestors, Anna Conner told me, were well connected to one of Polk County's seminal events, the Battle of Round Mountain. When Europeans began settling in the area, they slowly but surely encroached upon Cherokee territory. In 1767 Sir William Tryon met with Cherokee leaders and brokered a treaty. But for the most part settlers either ignored such treaties or didn't know about them in the first place. When the war with Great Britain began, things got complicated, especially for colonists siding with the Revolutionaries. They were stuck between the English in occupied South Carolina and the Cherokee in the mountains to the west.\n\nAs war broke out in 1776, the Cherokee attacked a number of families in western North Carolina. One of those families, that of William Hannon, lived near the Pacolet River, just down the road from what became Columbus. Family members were working in the fields when the Cherokee attacked, and all were killed except for young Edwin Hannon (five generations back for Conner), baby William Jr., and Winnie Hannon. They raced into the woods and followed the river to the safety of another settler's home. After the Hannon Massacre, as it is often referred to, the local militia went after the Cherokee. They were led by a young man named Thomas Howard and a Cherokee guide named Skyuka, who led the militia straight to where the Cherokee were camping on nearby Round Mountain. Under the cover of darkness they slaughtered most if not all of the Cherokee. Because it links Polk County to the American Revolution, it is the source of much consternation and hearsay and many, many local legends. One such legend is that Skyuka was later found hanging from a sycamore tree at the base of Tryon Peak, killed by either British Loyalists or the Cherokee.\n\nIn her autobiography, Polk County native and jazz legend Nina Simone tells a different, if not totally historically accurate, version of the Battle of Round Mountain. Nina Simone's version takes place in 1855 when, she writes, \"some white settlers and the last band of hostile Indians left hiding out in the mountains. The settlers won, captured the Indian chief and hung him from the nearest tree.\" The hanged \"Indian chief\" was called Skyuka. Later, when the railroad was built and a town for workers sprang up just north of Landrum, South Carolina, people debated what to call the new settlement. \"Someone suggested that they call it Skyuka after the lynched Indian chief, but the older folks didn't take to the idea of naming the town after a man they had once set swinging from a tree.\" Even if the dates and details of her story are off, there's a lot of truth in it. Most people don't want to address their own violent past, try to understand it, or make amends for it. What's more, Nina Simone seems to side with Skyuka, and thus, she captures the way many African Americans in the Jim Crow South (like the boy who first discovered Dick Wofford's hanging body) understood their own precarious place in the world and the haunting presence of the noose in their lives.\n\nThe DescendAnt\n\nBefore I left the museum Anna Conner suggested one more possible lead. Elizabeth Henderson's granddaughter, Bernice (Bee) Tompkins, lives just down the road in Tryon, she told me. After a few e-mails and phone calls I was at the doorstep of her brick condo, with an \"Obama for President\" sign displayed in front. With a smile and a handshake she welcomed me inside her home. At the time I interviewed her she was ninety-three years old and suffering from glandular cancer, but you wouldn't know it because she's so vivacious, so smart and incisive. Bee grew up in Polk County but moved away as a child. Later she married her teenage sweetheart, and the couple ended up in New York City, where she taught in the public schools and sang in the Riverside Church choir for thirty-one years.\n\nI asked Bee about the story of Dick Wofford, and she soon spread out photos and family history books on a coffee table for me to look through. She picked up one photo of a woman surrounded by five children. \"Now this is the woman we're talking about\u2014Betty. And this is my mother,\" she said pointing. \"Now Betty had twins, Heddie and Haddie\u2014my aunts\u2014and they were born July 3, 1901. And Heddie died on January 11, 1902, of shaken baby syndrome. I didn't learn this until about six months ago. I'm a genealogist, and you take the bad with the good, but I think this Taylor Sims, he's my grandfather, he might have been involved with this lynching, and he might have been involved with this baby's death.\"\n\nBee said that stories about Taylor Sims and his nasty reputation and likely alcoholism were passed down in her family. She assumed that this is what contributed to Betty divorcing him in 1903. \"I still hold her in high regard,\" she said emphatically, \"because she had the guts to divorce this man.\" Not only that but she struck out on her own, working in the appalling conditions of South Carolina mills and then, later, selling moonshine on the sly in order to keep her family afloat.\n\nBee was only three years old when Elizabeth Henderson died, but she still has some memories of her. \"Betty gave me a necklace with a locket on it that she wanted me to have. And when I started the first grade down here in the Green Creek Elementary School I wanted to wear it. And my mom said, 'No, you'll lose it!' Well, I insisted and insisted and wore it to school. And sure enough, I lost it, and lost one of my connections with my grandmother.\"\n\nWe chatted some more. I learned a lot about Bee and her family, her passion for genealogy, for knowing where she comes from. I also got the sense that she's an infinitely humane and kind person. And she is the offspring of someone wrapped up in such violence.\n\n\"I think the fact this black man was found not guilty inflamed relatives, and that's how he ended up dead,\" she speculated. \"I regret the death of anybody, and I regret very much the death of black people at the hands of very biased white people.\" The story, she said, makes her very sad but also curious and desirous of some sort of reconciliation with it: Why did it happen? Why did it happen the way that it did? \"I'm just glad,\" she lamented, \"that Dick Wofford had time, if even a little, to live with that 'not guilty' verdict. At least he had that.\"\n\nBefore I left, Bee told me she'd show my research to the one person from the Sims side who might know something about what happened. I was eager to hear the results. But, then, months later Bee told me that the woman had died before she could talk with her about it. So, perhaps, the truth has been buried too. I think about that photo Bee showed me. Despite its poor quality, it's quite telling. Elizabeth Henderson and her children all dressed in their Sunday best. Three children in the front row look directly into the camera. And the children on the second row, two girls, don't look into the camera at all; they stare off to the right. Elizabeth is also on the second row. Maybe it's the poor quality of the image, but it's hard to tell where she's looking. She could be looking to the right like her daughters or directly at the camera. Or maybe she's looking upward, above the camera, into the heavens or beyond.\nChapter 9\n\nA Story of Hands:   \nAn Early Twentieth-Century   \nLynching in the American Midwest\n\nIn the first few decades of the twentieth century more Americans were visibly fighting for an end to the lynching epidemic: activists like Mary McLeod Bethune and Walter White continued the work that Ida B. Wells-Barnett had begun, actively pursuing national legislation to protect Americans from vigilante justice. They were armed with a growing body of scholarship aimed at trying to understand and offer solutions for this horrific phenomenon. One of their greatest weapons was to record and tell lynching stories. In 1937 one such story was read into the record of the US House of Representatives amidst a floor debate about an antilynching bill. The story was horrific: two African American men who had pleaded not guilty to a murder were taken from local law enforcement by a mob of some two hundred people, tied to a tree, tortured with a blow torch, and then shot in Duck Hill, Mississippi. And yet that bill did not pass.\n\nBy the beginning of World War II, though, there were fewer and fewer lynchings. Some have suggested lynching died out because of a combination of opposition in the press, the rise of advocacy organizations (like the white-led Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching), the New Deal, radio-dispatched law enforcement, African American resistance, and migration. But by no means did the practice disappear completely. And curiously, lynching in the first half of the twentieth century was in some ways more visible, as technologies developed that shaped how and where people were killed. Railroad tracks were used to batter down jail doors. People were dragged behind automobiles. People were hanged from telephone and telegraph poles.\n\nMost importantly, though, technology made it easier to document a lynching. This was the heyday of the lynching photograph and the lynching postcard. Indeed, the brazenness of the lynchers and their supporters, who often look directly into the camera lens, is captured for posterity in photo after photo from this era, some of which became postcards and were mailed around the United States.\n\nThe knots, the nooses, tied by the hands of murderers stand out in these images in a telling variety of forms. In some cases it seems like the victim was killed and then hanged; lynch victims were often shot, burned, or beaten before being strung up for public display. In those cases, it seems, the knots are quick, haphazard, inelegant, and utilitarian. But this is the first time I begin to see an abundance of hangman's knots, though not always. For example, in the ninety-eight lynching images in Without Sanctuary, a book based on the lynching photograph collection of James Allen and John Littlefield, I count about thirty hangman's knots (Knot #1119) or attempts at forming them. I'm reminded of Don Burrhus's assertion that the knot is a tuxedo, an elegant knot to tie for killing someone. It's clear in many of these lynching photographs that the kind of noose used doesn't really matter.\n\nOne of the hangman's knots is in an image of Leo Frank, a Jewish man lynched by a Georgia mob in 1915. Frank had been convicted of murdering a thirteen-year-old factory worker named Mary Phagan in a trial that was considered a miscarriage of justice. When Georgia Governor John Slaton commuted Frank's sentence, a mob kidnapped him from prison and hanged him. The photo reveals a noose formed from a sturdy piece of manila rope, laced through the fork of a tree. Before he was hanged he was made defenseless: his legs were bound by a square knot and his hands cuffed. Then a noose was placed around his neck. The knot only has five wrapping turns, which could explain why his head arches back rather than being forced to the side. Among the men who lynched him there must have been someone with at least rudimentary knowledge of rope work, someone who knew how to form a knot akin to the hangman's noose. Close examination also reveals that the rope was a bit frayed and that someone had tied a crown knot to stop the fraying.\n\nThe lynching of Leo Frank.\n\nThe knot and rope say something about the lynching itself, a combination of slap-dash and professional, of planned and spur of the moment, of emotion and intellect. But in the moment of the photograph the quality of the knot and rope don't seem to matter anymore. The mob has done its work. Leo Frank hangs in suspended animation, and the lynchers stand near the tree. The hands of the men on the far left and far right of the frame are hidden behind their backs. Most of them wear white shirts and hats (newsboys and boaters), but one man on the right side of the photo stands out. In overalls and rumpled hat, his arms are crossed. His face is stiff and stolid. All of my prejudices boil up\u2014\"redneck,\" \"ignorant hillbilly,\" \"cracker.\" But others in the photo wear ties and fine hats\u2014the classes, the \"good\" people of the community of Marietta, Georgia, united by race and religion.\n\nA Lynching in the Heart of It All\n\nIt's important to remember, though, that not all lynching victims were black and not all lynchings took place in the American South. There were willing hands elsewhere. Sherwood Anderson's classic short-story cycle Winesburg, Ohio begins with a story called \"Hands.\" The story recounts a visit between Anderson's protagonist, an earnest young journalist named George Willard, and one of George's acquaintances, a man named Wing Biddlebaum. \"The story of Wing Biddlebaum,\" Anderson writes, \"is a story of hands. Their restless activity, like unto the beating of the wings of an imprisoned bird, had given him his name.\" Wing is obsessed with his hands. As he chats with George he alternates between exposing them and hiding them\u2014they are a source of both pride and shame. Although his hands have made him the most prodigious strawberry picker in town and this is how he earns his keep, his hands also caused his fall from grace. Wing was once a beloved schoolteacher in a rural Pennsylvania town, defamed when he is wrongfully accused of sexually abusing a young boy. When the boy's father heard his son's charges he raced over to the school and pulled the teacher outside and assaulted him. As the students watched, the father yelled, \"I'll teach you to put your hands on my boy, you beast.\" That night the schoolteacher heard a knock at his door. He opened it, and standing there was a posse of men. One of them carried a rope. \"They had intended to hang the schoolmaster,\" Anderson writes, \"but something in his figure, so small, white, and pitiful, touched their hearts and they let him escape.\" The schoolteacher ran away, changed his name from Adolph Meyers to Wing Biddlebaum, and moved to Winesburg, Ohio, to live with an aunt. Wing was, from thence forward, fearful of human touch and connection; he lived a mostly solitary existence. Wing also developed the unusual tic of constantly revealing and then hiding his hands.\n\nHands come up a lot when people talk about lynching, that crime that most often resulted in the death of someone \"at the hands of persons unknown.\" Hands grab. Hands push and pull. They turn and tussle. They whip and maim and cut and bruise. Hands light fires and fire guns. Hands tie knots. Like knots, though, hands also have life-affirming qualities. Handshakes or pats on the back reinforce human bonds. Hands come together, work together, build together. Wing's own escape from the hands of his accusers and tormentors took him into the safe hands of his kin, an escape, a movement west that was repeated again and again in the nineteenth and early twentieth century by people wishing to start life anew. Like Wing, they flew to new and apparently idyllic Midwestern cities and towns like Anderson's imaginary Winesburg.\n\nThere are many such towns. Today they are spread around the Midwest like forgotten children. People are moving away from these towns. The most recent Federal Census indicates that growth rates in Midwestern states like Ohio, Michigan, Iowa, and, to a lesser degree, Indiana have dropped compared to states in the southeastern United States. And yet the names of these towns still resonate with hope\u2014Utopia, Felicity, Liberty Center, Goodland, Loveland, Arcadia, Rising Sun, Mount Zion. This is a geography of hope. The names mark places where people went with ideas and dreams, with hatchets and saws. People from the coasts, from Europe, from the South traveled to the great Middle West of the United States and were called \"pioneers,\" \"settlers,\" \"homesteaders,\" \"immigrants\"\u2014idealistic men and women imbued with a sense of purpose to make the world anew or, more simply, to make a dollar.\n\nBut at times it seems these impossible towns lost their bearings. Lynching was, of course, not only a southern disease; it was a national one, and the Midwest was not immune. In 1919 when the NAACP reported that of 3,224 known lynchings that took place from 1889 to1919, approximately 373 occurred in non-southern states. There were at least 12 in Ohio, 19 in Indiana, and 24 in Illinois. Public spectacle lynchings took place in Cairo, Illinois; Duluth, Minnesota; and Springfield, Ohio\u2014events that brought thousands to the street to watch and witness. Even in this geography of hope, people did such things.\n\nThey did them in places like Newark, Ohio, just a ten-minute drive from where I teach. Newark is the seat of Licking County, about forty miles from Columbus and just east of the center of the state. In 1910 the central conflict between the city and the county was alcohol. Two years prior the Ohio General Assembly passed the Rose County Local Option Law that allowed each county to choose to go dry or not. (This legislation was pushed by the Westerville, Ohio\u2013based Anti-Saloon League and the Woman's Christian Temperance Union, also based in Ohio.) But Newark's economy was closely linked to alcohol. At one time Newark was supposedly the largest producer of beer bottles in the world. One glass bottle factory in Newark alone, the American Bottle Company, employed about twenty-five hundred workers. And many of Newark's immigrants came from countries with drinking cultures, where going to a saloon after work was routine. In the end Licking County voted dry while Newark voted to stay wet. But the sentiments of the city dwellers didn't matter; the county-wide law went into effect, and shortly thereafter the booze trade shifted gears and unlicensed speakeasies popped up where the saloons had been. There were about eighty saloons in Newark, most of them in the downtown area. Everyone in Licking County knew what was going on; even the chief of police and the mayor were in on it. Indeed, as Sloane Gordon writes, \"Vice and crime became arrogant.\"\n\nProhibitionists formed a \"Law and Order League\" to crack down on the saloons, and according to local appearance dockets, people were brought up on charges of violating the law. But saloon keepers and their lackeys harassed those who went after them, and some judges feared for their lives. The Law and Order League contacted the Anti-Saloon League, and lawyer Wayne B. Wheeler got involved. He hired some detectives from Cleveland who mingled with the saloon crowd and collected evidence of corruption and law breaking. On July 3, 1910, a brief story showed up on the front page of the Newark Advocate: \"Affidavits May Be Filed in Granville.\" The story claimed that plans were being made to issue warrants and that raids on saloons would likely happen the coming Saturday. And yet life chugged along. As Ray Stannard Baker put it in the American Magazine, \"Nothing extraordinary had ever happened to disturb the even life of Newark; it was an ordinary, typical, prosperous, American town, like yours or mine. . . . And yet in this very town, on the afternoon of the eighth of July, through the smooth crust of civilization, burst quite suddenly a sort of molten savagery.\"\n\nThere are many versions of what happened the morning of July 8, but all of them begin with a group of detectives filtering into downtown Newark. One of these detectives was a young white man from Willisburg, Kentucky, named Carl Etherington. Some said he was a former Marine, that he had once worked as a strikebreaker, and that he was twenty-two years old. Etherington was actually only seventeen years old and had been discharged from the Marines with \"good character\" but poor physical condition about a year earlier, and he was quite new to the detective business. Etherington and the other detectives gathered on the steps of the Licking County Courthouse, where Mayor E. J. Barnes of nearby Granville deputized the men and handed out warrants and instructions to raid a number of saloons. Barnes's Granville was a prohibitionist stronghold, and around 1910 Granville was only about fourteen minutes away on the Interurban railroad. Before getting involved in the prohibitionist struggle, Granville played a significant role in the fight to end slavery. Fiery abolitionist Theodore Weld lectured there more than once, and a branch of the Underground Railroad passed through the village. One ardent abolitionist was Ashley Bancroft, whose son, Hubert Howe Bancroft, became one of the most important nineteenth-century American historians and authored many books, including the 1887 Popular Tribunals, a two-volume defense of the lynch-law justice of the San Francisco Vigilance Committees of the 1850s. Bancroft wrote, \"The vigilance committee is not a mob; it is to a mob as revolution is to rebellion, the name being somewhat according to its strength.\" In other words, when there's a critical mass, a rebellion becomes a revolution; a mob, a committee; and lynch law, justifiable.\n\nThe detectives split up into three groups with about eight men each and moved on three different saloons\u2014Henry's Bar, the Bismark Cafe, and the Old Stock Exchange\u2014none of which was too far from the courthouse steps. But when the detectives began arresting owners and barkeeps and taking them to jail, the police released them immediately, claiming these out-of-town detectives lacked jurisdiction. By the time detectives entered Henry's Saloon word had spread about what was going on. An angry crowd gathered outside, so Carl Etherington and the detectives he was with ran out the back. Etherington hopped on a passing trolley that ran to the train station on the outskirts of Newark. But the mob followed the trolley, running just behind it. Etherington thought he was in the clear when the trolley pulled up to the station and he raced to get on the train, but the mob caught up to him and began to pummel him. The proprietor of another saloon, a former police captain named William Howard, was among the mob. In the scuffle that ensued, Howard nailed Etherington with a blackjack. Etherington pulled out a revolver and shot him. Some say that at this point Etherington's back was up against a tree and that Howard was holding him down when he managed to pull out his gun and shoot. Whatever happened, Howard was mortally wounded.\n\nShortly thereafter the police grabbed Etherington, threw him in a horse-drawn paddy-wagon, and took him to jail; along the way Howard was dropped off at the local hospital. Maybe the police assumed that Etherington would be safer in the jail\u2014some claimed it was the strongest jail in Ohio and had been built to withstand mobs. But just outside that mob-resistant bastion a crowd began to grow and kept growing throughout the afternoon. The evening edition of the Newark Advocate reported what had happened\u2014that Howard had been shot and Etherington beaten\u2014and this brought more folks to the streets. The sheriff let a news reporter inside the jailhouse to interview Etherington. The reporter claimed he \"presented a pitiful appearance. His face was mashed to a jelly and was clotted with blood while his clothes were soaked in gore.\" Another writer reported hearing shouts of \"Hang him!\" and \"Get him!\" just outside the newspaper's downtown office. At about 8:00 p.m. Howard died from his gunshot wound\u2014a .44 caliber bullet through his abdomen, exiting below the left shoulder. Upon hearing this, the crowd inched its way toward mobdom. They cut the telephone lines to the jail and then looked for a way in. The crowd grew by the thousands. Newark Mayor Herbert Atherton addressed them, but he was ignored or booed. People threw rocks at the jailhouse and broke out most of the building's windows. All the while neither Newark city police nor sheriff's deputies made any attempts to stop the mob from rushing forward and pounding the front door of the jailhouse, first with a telegraph pole and then with a large piece of train rail. Swaying the rail back and forth, they battered the door like a medieval siege.\n\nAt about 10:00 p.m. the door was down, and members of the mob rushed in and up the stairs to the second floor and Etherington's cell. Outside the jailhouse and to the delight of the gathered multitude a man named Robert Cleveland climbed a ladder to the second floor and began a running play-by-play of the action. Down below, the crowd listened attentively. \"Okay,\" he shouted, \"now they're outside his cell.\" Cheers. \"They're trying to break in.\" Shouts of encouragement. Meanwhile Etherington was trying to commit suicide before the mob could enter his cell. He beat his head against the brick wall and then wrapped his head in a blanket and tried to light it. \"They got in,\" Robert shouted. Cheers from the crowd. And then it was nothing but hands: hands pushing, punching, shoving, and carrying him out of his cell. Someone tried to put a noose over his head. He cried out for a moment to speak but was denied. One report claims he was overheard repeating again and again, \"What will mother say when she hears of this?\" The mob forced him out of the jail and out onto the streets with the noose around his neck. As he was carried through the streets he was beaten with hammers and cut with knives. Robert climbed down the ladder to follow the mob. From that day forward some folks in Newark called him \"Bloody Murder\" or, simply, \"Bloody.\"\n\nOld city of Newark Jail. Photo by Ron Liniger\n\nWhen Etherington reached the courthouse square, a place with abundant arboreal options, none of the trees satisfied the mob\u2014most of the limbs were deemed too high. They decided on a telegraph pole at the corner of Second Street and South Park\u2014a symbol of the modern age, of communication, of human connection across the western wilderness. That night, though, it served as an ancient technology. The pole had steps running up it for workmen, and so a few men or boys climbed the pole and attached the rope to a peg, \"while those below held the victim clear of the ground. When all was ready Etherington was dropped, and he hung just above the heads of his executioners.\" There's a bit of confusion\u2014or perhaps imagination\u2014in the written record regarding his final words. In one story, just before he was hanged, Etherington addressed the crowd saying, \"Tell my mother that I died trying to do my duty.\" Another version of this story that ran in an Oregan newspaper has Etherington channeling the gallows literature of an earlier century. The writer claims that \"as [he] mounted the block ready to swing, he was asked to make a speech.\" To an attentive audience he said, \"I want to warn all young fellows not to try to make a living the way I have done\u2014by strike-breaking and taking jobs like this. . . . I had better not have worked or I would not be here now.\" Anti-Saloon League lawyer Wayne B. Wheeler claimed there was no way Etherington could have spoken before he was hanged, that he had been beaten senseless.\n\nAt 10:35 p.m. Carl Etherington was hanging from the telephone pole, most likely struggling to breathe, lost in the long fade of strangulation while thousands watched. After the fact some speculated that, due to the beatings he endured in the street on the way to the pole, Etherington was likely unconscious when he was hanged. But the coroner reported that his death was the result of strangulation. If that was the case, then those looking on would have witnessed the pain on young Etherington's face\u2014there's no indication a hood had been placed over his head. They would have noticed his body's struggle to survive, twitching and turning and then, perhaps, the gentle sway. And they may have heard the stretching rope in the hot July air or smelled the excrement from his evacuated bowels. The Newark Advocate reported that some men in the crowd would not allow \"their ladies\" to gaze upon Etherington's swaying corpse. \"Those who did look upon it turned with horror from the scene.\" Others tried to get their hands on relics of the night's work\u2014pieces of the rope, wood from the telegraph pole. After an hour or so the overstretched rope broke, and Etherington's body crumpled in a heap on the ground. The mob slowly dispersed, and as it did some overheard Mayor Atherton invite a few friends to have a drink with him. An ambulance arrived and took Etherington's body to McGonagle's Funeral Home and Mortuary. The streets grew quiet, and from the west the good citizens of Newark who were still awake could just hear the first rumbles of a thunderstorm headed their way.\n\nThe next morning tourists and relic hunters gathered in downtown Newark. Some visited the jail to see the broken windows and discarded battering rams just outside the front door. But train rails were not easily transportable, so the prized possession was wood from the pole on which Etherington was hanged. One relic hunter said he was going to frame his piece of wood from the pole \"as a memento of the occasion.\" Police were brought to the corner of South Park and Second to guard the pole from further destruction, and then city officials had the bottom half of the pole encased in sheet-iron to prevent further relic-hunting expeditions. The pole stayed there, with its sheet-iron skirt, well into the 1950s, when it was finally taken down.\n\nA few days later, after having a moment to breathe and reflect, the Newark Advocate published a scathing editorial claiming that \"Newark did not only lynch a man, but Newark lynched the law last Friday night.\" To repair the damages wrought by the fury of its citizens, the newspaper's editors demanded that Newark arrest those responsible and try to figure out why this had happened.\n\nPole used to hang Carl Etherington.  Used with permission of Licking County Historical Society\n\nBut who was responsible? The Wets (as the pro-alcohol crowd was called) blamed the Drys for meddling in Newark affairs by bringing in outside law enforcement and sending the Granville mayor to deputize them. The Drys blamed the Wets for fostering a culture of lawlessness in Newark and painted the town as some latter-day Sodom and Gomorrah. For years a central tenet of temperance discourse had been that alcohol fueled violence\u2014this lynching was perhaps proof of that assertion. Furthermore, many Drys thought that Newark's government officials had turned a blind eye to law breaking in general. A lot of attention was focused on Mayor Atherton, and Ohio Governor Judson Harmon exercised executive authority to suspend him; Atherton resigned shortly thereafter. Sloane Gordon offered a more measured approach, pointing out that the struggle over alcohol was beneficial to both Wets and Drys. Both sides blamed each other, he wrote, and both made a living doing so.\n\nBut other issues are underdiscussed in the newspapers and magazines of the day: How could a community of people all of a sudden rise up en masse and decide that a man should be put to death by their own hands? Why did people, who would normally shy away from such brutality, commit it with such ease and precision? Who in the crowd knew how to hang a man? And why was Etherington not protected? In fact, Newark is very close to Columbus and, therefore, to more law enforcement officers, and yet no one, most notably the sheriff, had called in the National Guard. Ultimately, twenty-one people were charged with first-degree murder, and a handful received sentences of up to twenty years. Through parole and reduced sentences, though, no one served more than four years of actual jail time for Etherington's murder. Some of the people convicted may have been guilty of taking part in what happened that night, but all were working class, one was from the West Indies, at least two were of German descent, one was described as a deaf mute, and some had priors. These were the scapegoats of a sort. The people in seats of power didn't go to jail. Etherington's father allegedly vowed revenge and wanted to lead a \"band of mountaineers from Kentucky\" to the streets of Newark. But he would never get his revenge\u2014two years after his son's murder he committed suicide.\n\nCultural Knowledge\n\nToday the Licking County courthouse sits regally amidst a lawn of green grass and shady hardwoods. Its limestone edifice with statues of Lady Justice perched over each building entrance was completed in 1878. Park benches and memorials populate the square, as they do in every small town in America. Here we're told to abide by the Ten Commandments, to remember the victims of the September 11, 2001, attacks, and to pay homage to Newark native Johnny Clem, the little drummer boy of the Union Army. These are all somber reminders of the past and present. The 1910 lynching of Carl Etherington, though, isn't mentioned anywhere next to that hall of justice. For years the pole from which he was hanged, across the street from the courthouse, was the only reminder of what happened, but even that's gone. The spot on the sidewalk where that pole once stood is distinguished from the rest of the sidewalk because the concrete covering the hole that remained is newer than that around it. From the cracks of that newer patch of sidewalk green weeds push toward the sunlight. And from this spot you have a good view of a statue of Lady Justice on the courthouse roof.\n\nIf you walk along the streets that encircle Newark's courthouse square, there's a patina of sadness, a longing for the grand days of yore. Yes, some of the old buildings are beautiful, but the decay is just below the surface. There's nothing particularly unusual about Newark; it's like a lot of small cities in the Midwest that have been hit hard by the loss of manufacturing jobs. The core hangs on by its teeth, while the strip malls, chain stores, and used car lots stretch on\u2014an ugly appendage of a once-graceful body. Towns like Newark have struggled hard to hold on to hope, to find a renewed sense of purpose. A few years ago a song mocking Newark briefly made an appearance on a Columbus radio station. And in the summer of 2010 an article marking the hundredth anniversary of the Etherington lynching appeared in the Newark Advocate. Readers responded with shock\u2014that such a thing had happened here. One reader left a rather pithy response: \"And thus began the decline of Newark, Ohio . . .\"\n\nLocal historian Chris Evans doesn't believe that's true. \"It's not based in fact. I'd venture to say that one month later everything was going on as before. It didn't change Newark at all. It didn't change the people of Newark at all. There were some that were sorry it happened, but the vast majority probably didn't care one way or the other.\" That's the kind of comment, he tells me, \"that will catch a writer's eye and get printed. No reflection on present company.\" I laugh.\n\nEvans is a descendant of some of those hopeful immigrants, though his ancestors were Macedonian, not German. It's easy to tell that his roots are in Newark, Ohio, because when he says it, it comes out like \"N'erk, Ah-high-ah,\" in keeping with the local pronunciation. He remembers a time when the downtown was hopping, when all the action was there, but that changed, he says, as it did in many places, with the birth of the suburban strip mall. The lynching didn't kill this downtown\u2014the fifties did.\n\n\"Over the years people stopped talking about it,\" he says. \"I don't know why, probably shame. It isn't one of those things you brag about. When somebody would mention that there'd been a lynching in Newark you'd get all kinds of stories. 'Yeah, I think some black guy raped a white girl' and so on.\" The memory of the event has manifested in some unusual ways. In 1972 some community members proposed a reenactment of the lynching to take place during a local festival, and a great hue and cry ensued. Ultimately organizers decided against it. One organizer noted, though, \"The lynching is definitely a part of history no matter how hard it is to accept that.\" For his part, Evans doesn't think the event should be memorialized at all. When a local businessman approached him about putting up a state historical marker after the hundredth-anniversary article in the newspaper, Evans wasn't interested in helping. \"He said it was important that the story be told, but not in my mind. You don't glorify it by putting up a monument.\" His ambivalence is due to the circumstances of the lynching itself. Both sides, he believes, were in the wrong. It happened because Etherington shot Howard. \"With self-defense you're not supposed to use any greater force than is being imposed on you.\"\n\n\"I'm not sure I agree,\" I protest. \"From the accounts I've read, biased and otherwise, Etherington had reason to believe his life was in danger. He'd just been hit on the head by a blackjack. A few more blows and he'd be dead.\"\n\nEvans says that the mob was a threat, not an act. \"You're not supposed to use more force than is facing you. He was under their control. You're not legally justified in taking the law in your hands.\"\n\n\"Maybe,\" I say, \"but isn't that the irony?\"\n\nLocals like Evans will tell you this is a story of prohibition, of Wets versus Drys. And it is, but like all stories of the noose, it's also a story about the things\u2014the awful things\u2014that human beings will do to each other. In the aftermath Ray Stannard Baker opined that \"towns are much like individual men; some you will find struggling, resolving, organizing, training themselves for better things. These towns, you say, have a civic spirit. Other towns you will find drifting carelessly, leading a free, selfish, easy-going life, each man absorbed in making money for himself\u2014no cooperation, no town consciousness, no civic spirit.\" He believed that Newark typified the so-called decline of Western civilization. Newark was founded by the best and the brightest. It had many churches. It had rich natural resources. But somehow, he said, it lost its way. Sloane Gordon was less sympathetic and wrote, \"The people in Newark went crazy. That's the only charitable way to describe it. An entire municipality lost sense and reason and human attributes and ran amuck. It lusted for blood, and the blood-lust was sated. It babbled and prayed and shouted and pleaded; it cursed and raged; it dug with claw and fang into quivering flesh . . . Newark, Ohio, 'saw red.'\"\n\nIs it that simple? Did the people of Newark just go crazy or lose their way? A man was pulled out of a jail cell, a noose thrown around his neck. He was paraded through the streets, abused along the way, and then strung up from a makeshift gallows for all the townsfolk to see. What happened to Carl Etherington was different from what happened to Dick Wofford. Because there were so many participants in his death\u2014as engineers, spectators, and documentarians\u2014his lynching had more in common with the ritual of the public executions from centuries before. Indeed, it's decidedly part of that tradition.\n\nBut does tradition explain how the noose ended up in the hands of Newark's citizens? Does it explain how this Midwestern community permitted such violence to occur, even though the lynching took place in the North and wasn't motivated by racial strife? How does a community come together and get to work tearing down a jailhouse door, stoking a fire, running a rope over a tree limb? How do they know how to do such things, and how do they come to be involved? These were not mere spectators, quietly watching events unfold; those attending a lynching were often very much involved. Certainly some in Newark may have felt a desire for retribution\u2014and it's important to remember that some lynching victims were likely guilty of the crime for which they were accused. And yet that doesn't excuse the lynchers.\n\nIn the preface to a guide to an antilynching art exhibit, Sherwood Anderson once wrote that lynching is \"an assertion, ugly and perverted, of man's hunger for self-respect.\" He says it's a very elemental, fundamental action, that lynching is a process for individuals and communities to reassert some sort of dominance\u2014be it social, economic, or political\u2014over others. The noose becomes part of this lynching ritual meant to protect community values or reinforce community control over a situation or over a group of \"others.\" Bertram Wyatt-Brown writes that lynching was a kind of \"offering to the primal, sacred values of the folk.\" But this offering, this ritual, did not always follow a particular pattern\u2014every lynching was different, and spectator-participants seemed to choose their killing methods based on their material circumstances. But where did these choices come from, and where did they get the idea to do this or that? Why did so many lynchers revert to the noose? And\u2014this is a question that haunts this book\u2014how did they learn to tie the knot?\nChapter 10\n\nStrange Fruit:   \nThe Legacy of Marion\n\nOn the night of August 7, 1930, in Marion, Indiana, a photo was taken of the hanged bodies of Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith. The photo is iconic because it contains all the elements that one's mind conjures when considering the history of lynching\u2014the tree, the rope, and the noose. Of the two, the noose around Thomas Shipp's neck is a more precise hangman's knot, which makes sense, given that Shipp was the first man killed\u2014perhaps indicative of premeditation and planning. The knots around Abe Smith, the second man killed, are hasty; as we learned in Chapter 1, when people are stressed they tend to use more half-hitches or granny knots because those knots are easier to make. The photo gathers meaning too from the crowd of spectators in the bottom half who look as if they're attending a county fair: the woman who, oddly, wears her fur-trimmed coat as if headed to the opera despite the fact that it was August. The smiling pregnant woman and jovial rube behind her. And the focal point of the bottom half of the photo, the man who looks an awful lot like Adolf Hitler pointing at the community's work. It's not just the noose that makes this image stand out; it's the people who may have tied it or who may have known who tied it\u2014we can't assume the lynchers are in the photo\u2014going through the effort of forming this particular knot with its wrapping turns and taut loop at the end.\n\nThis photo didn't appear in the local daily newspapers\u2014the Marion Chronicle or the Marion Leader-Tribune\u2014the next day or in the Indianapolis papers, for that matter. But somehow the image was disseminated quickly around the nation, in part because a copy showed up at the Acme News Service in New York City a few days after the lynching. It was logged as image number 132856, \"Lynching of Two Negroes in Marion, Indiana.\" The image appeared in many news\u00adpapers, including significant African American periodicals like the Crisis and the Chicago Defender, the latter of which printed it on August 16 along with the caption \"American Christianity.\" Six years after the photo was taken, a New York City high school teacher named Abel Meeropol ran across the image and was so affected that he wrote one of the twentieth century's most important protest songs, \"Strange Fruit.\" Historian James H. Madison writes that \"years later Magnum Photo Agency also secured a print. From these two major agencies and the Library of Congress, editors, authors, museum exhibit planners, and others readily obtained copies. By the late twentieth century it had become one of America's most well-known lynching photographs.\" The image of Shipp and Smith continues to be reproduced. Life magazine included it in a 1988 issue devoted to race in America. Rap group Public Enemy included it on the cover of a 1992 release titled \"Hazy Shade of Criminal.\" Newsweek ran it twice in 1994. In 2011 Life magazine published the photo again in a collection titled \"100 Photographs That Changed the World,\" with the comment that such an image \"reminds us that we have not come as far from barbarity as we'd like to think.\" The photo appeared in Alistair Cooke's America (1973) along with the statement, \"No one now knows who took this picture, or exactly when. But lynch law ruled the South in the years after World War I. In 1919 alone, 70 Negroes were lynched.\" But, of course, many people in Marion, Indiana, did know who took the photo, when he took it, and where he took it. But no one really knows why he took it.\n\nThe photographer was a man named Lawrence Beitler, and he usually took photos of wedding couples and babies, of school and church groups, of parades and public events. His daughter Betty would later claim he didn't want to take the photo in the first place. But he did, and he sold it for 50 cents a pop. Beitler apparently stayed up for ten days and nights making copies of the photo to meet his customers' demands. Everybody wanted a copy, a modern relic from the event. James H. Madison wonders whether people saw the photo \"as a reassurance of white supremacy and of race solidarity in the face of any perceived black threat, a talisman against murder or rape or inappropriate crossing of the color line.\"\n\nLynching of Abraham Smith and Thomas Shipp,   \nby Lawrence Beitler. Corbis Images\n\nBeitler's photo isn't unusual as lynching photos go. There are many photos of lynched men and women, black and white, and there are many lynching photos with crowds. Yet this particular lynching photo\u00adgraph is memorable. Maybe it's because of its relationship to Meeropol's song or because it came into the possession of a major photo distributor or because of the clear and visible faces of the spectators and victims. Or maybe it's because the photo reproduces, at the tail end of the lynching era, one of the most salient symbols of that era\u2014the noose. It's the noose that we see in this photo and others like it, and perhaps this helps the noose become not just a method for execution but also a symbol of white supremacy. The age of mechanical reproduction (to borrow from Walter Benjamin) marks a significant shift because now one no longer needs to get his or her hands dirty to assert racial authority or to provoke fear\u2014the image of the lynching and the image of the noose can do that work.\n\nA former reporter from the Marion Chronicle told me he'd heard many stories about the picture still existing \"in many Marion households, white and black . . . buried deep in people's drawers.\" Nobody, he said, wants to talk about it, but the event is not dead. It may be hidden, literally and figuratively, but it's not dead. Those who still have this photographic talisman or relic hidden in their dresser drawers know the power and horror it represents.\n\nRoots and Crop\n\nIndiana is one of the first \"square states.\" Its counties are squares, and its local roads run straight on maps. Marion, Indiana, sits amidst a square called Grant County, about seventy miles northeast of Indianapolis. This is corn country. A friend who grew up nearby told me once that the thing she remembers most about her Indiana childhood is that you could plant anything in the ground and it would grow. And that's the case in Marion\u2014it's all corn and soybeans as far as you can see. Impossible towns rest like islands amidst this green sea. Towns like Fairmount, Gas City, Swayzee, Sweetser, and Upland. Grant County was originally home to the Miami, who were slowly and sometimes violently pushed out of the area. By the 1820s a government land sale opened the area for settlement, and in 1831 Grant County was born. Shortly thereafter Marion was named the county seat. The town developed on the left bank of the Mississinewa River. But there were remnants of previous occupants besides the names they left behind. In Grant and surrounding counties Native American earthworks punctuated the flat landscape. One earthwork was discovered on a spot that later became the courthouse square. It was about ten feet high and sixty feet in diameter, and during one construction project on the courthouse grounds human remains were uncovered.\n\nBefore the Civil War over half of the people in Grant County were Quakers from North Carolina. Many of them left North Carolina because they wished to free their slaves but found it virtually impossible to do so in North Carolina. In Grant County many of these freed slaves as well as some who had been freed in the eighteenth century began to settle in an area called Weaver that today is on the outskirts of Marion. Weaver was a haven and a refuge, a place that in many and important ways expressed the hope of the Midwest.\n\nMarion grew considerably in the late nineteenth century, in part due to natural gas reserves and its convenient spot along the railroads that crisscrossed the Midwest. It was a center of manufacturing in glass and iron works, two industries that particularly relied on natural gas to power furnaces. Immigrants flooded the town\u2014Irish, Germans, Belgians, and Czechs, though there were also many from Kentucky and Tennessee. They came to Marion, much like the Quakers and freed slaves did, for safety, security, and a better economic situation. And when immigrants didn't find that security at their places of work, they organized unions and elected Socialist candidates for city council.\n\nIn the 1920s, though, Indiana was no longer a place of refuge. Longtime white residents embraced a reactionary politics that sought to blame contemporary social ills and developing economic ones on African Americans and immigrants. This reaction came in part because many whites believed they were losing their nation to a wave of southern and eastern European immigrants. In Marion alcohol sales and union organizing were particular sources of contention in the community. In this social and cultural milieu the Ku Klux Klan came roaring back. This second iteration of the Klan was the brainchild of a defrocked Methodist minister and salesman named William Joseph Simmons. While apparently drunk one night he found himself gazing up at the moon and had a vision of ghosts on horseback. Simmons thought it was a sign directing him to start a new Klan like the one he'd just seen in D. W. Griffith's 1915 film The Birth of a Nation, a tale of white vigilantes saving the Reconstruction-era South from the dangers of savage \"Negros\"\u2014and even lynching some of them. On the day before Thanksgiving of 1915 Simmons and fifteen other men went to the top of Stone Mountain in Georgia and set a cross on fire\u2014and the Klan was reborn.\n\nKu Klux Klan parade in Washington, DC,   \nSeptember 13, 1926. Library of Congress\n\nSimmons's Klan was akin to a fraternal organization except that this one wished to protect a deeply Anglo-Saxon Protestant vision of the United States\u2014they were no fans of Catholics, Jews, African Americans, unions, or immigrants. By the early 1920s their numbers had grown, especially in the Midwest, and some in the Klan began taking their rhetoric seriously\u2014a spate of whippings, brandings, and tar-and-featherings led to congressional hearings\u2014and an increase in the Klan's popularity. Though decidedly violent on occasion, the second Klan was more prone to theatrics. This was the Klan of the burning cross and parades down Main Streets, USA. Perhaps its most infamous parade happened in 1925 when some forty thousand Klansmen, in all their white-robed glory, marched down Pennsylvania Avenue to the Washington Monument. The march was significant for many reasons: it underscored not only how deeply racist and xenophobic the nation was in that moment but also this particular Klan's close ties to government. This Klan, unlike its predecessor described in the last chapter, was powerful not because of the violence it produced but because of its lobbying efforts.\n\nNowhere was this truer than in Indiana, where, because of its size and popularity in both city and country, the Klan's tentacles reached deep into both state and local governments. At one point in the 1920s every one of the ninety-two counties in Indiana had a Klavern, and in 1925 there were about 165,000 Klan members in the Hoosier state\u2014more than any other. They rallied or marched in towns large and small, from Indianapolis to Hobart. The Indiana Klan was spearheaded by a former coal salesman named D. C. Stephenson who now sold the Klan to Hoosiers as a bastion of nationalism in a country whose Protestantness and whiteness were being diluted by the immigrant masses. This rang true to a people obsessed with their pioneer heritage, like those in Grant County who had seen an influx of immigrants in recent years. Many longtime residents felt these new residents didn't share their \"traditional\" white Protestant values. Moreover, these long-timers claimed the immigrants were causing a spike in union rabble-rousing. In fact, union membership was high and Mother Jones and Eugene Debs had each spoken to large crowds in Marion.\n\nBut for others alcohol was the catalyst for joining the Klan. The town had gone dry in 1915, a move that essentially deregulated alcohol and opened the door for speakeasies, unlicensed taverns, and, not surprisingly, a crime wave. The Klan blamed these cultural and economic shifts on immigration and responded by staging rallies and parades throughout the county. By 1925 there were 2,329 Klansmen in Grant, or \"just over 15 percent of native-born white men in the county.\" In Marion the Klan led their moral crusade right to the front door, paying visits to Wednesday night church services at congregations with pastors who had yet to join. Dressed in their costumes and carrying an American flag, they'd walk down the aisle, toss some money on the pulpit, and hand a membership form to the pastor. If he didn't sign, he'd be out the door by the end of the week. The Klan was strong in Grant County; a Fairmount woman, Daisy Douglass Barr, was president of the US Women of the Klan. She's buried in a cemetery in Fairmount, just a few rows away from her great-nephew, Grant County native son James Dean. But the Indiana Klan disintegrated rapidly in 1925 when D. C. Stephenson was convicted for kidnapping and raping a woman named Madge Oberholtzer, who died a month after the incident. After Stephenson's conviction, Indiana Governor Ed Jackson wouldn't pardon Stephenson, so Stephenson provided evidence that led to the governor being tried for bribery. The trial was dismissed on a technicality, but the reputations of both the governor and the Indiana Klan were forever tarnished.\n\nBy 1930, well after the D. C. Stephenson debacle, the Klan held little power in the state and in Marion. But as one local told me, at the time you couldn't throw a rock without hitting someone who'd once belonged to the Klan. Racist and xenophobic ideologies were not the only things at work on the social dynamics of Marion, Indiana, in 1930. Marion was also on edge because in the past year or so a wave of bombings in the town, most likely connected to labor struggles, had killed five men. The murders remain unsolved. On top of this, the community was also beginning to feel the effects of the Depression: people were being laid off, wages were dropping, and some factories were shortening the work week. Just a year later the American Red Cross distributed three hundred thousand pounds of bread in the county.\n\nOn August 7, 1930, these unemployed and possibly hungry people gathered outside the jailhouse in Marion in the midst of a heat wave. Inside, three young black men, Tom Shipp, age nineteen, Abe Smith, eighteen, and James Cameron, sixteen, were behind bars. They had been accused of robbing a young couple, Claude Deeter, twenty-four, and Mary Ball, eighteen, the night before at a place called the Dark Secret, a spot along the Mississinewa River outside of town where folks went to make out. Apparently it was a robbery gone bad: Deeter had been shot and was dying of his wounds in the local hospital. Ball was supposedly recovering from the attack, during which time, newspapers claimed, she had been raped. The young men confessed to the shooting, though who was responsible for what has never really been determined. And some speculate that the young men were coerced into confessing.\n\nWhen Deeter died in the early afternoon on August 7, who did what didn't seem to matter to the people in Marion and the surrounding communities, especially in Deeter's hometown of Fairmount. Nor did it seem to matter that Deeter, who grew up in a deeply religious family, forgave his assailants shortly before dying. What mattered was that three black men had killed a white man and\u2014\"so they said\"\u2014raped a white woman. Rumors circulated around town that something was going to happen that night. When a police officer hanged Claude Deeter's blood-soaked shirt from a City Hall window, in clear sight of passersby, the pot began to boil.\n\nAt about 8:30 p.m. a mob arrived at the jailhouse. Many people had warned Sheriff Jake Campbell that something was going to happen. The head of the local NAACP chapter, a dynamic woman named Flossie Bailey, had even alerted him. Campbell was either unprepared or didn't much care\u2014he didn't transfer the prisoners to another location, claiming that the air had been let out of his squad car tires and the gas tanks drained. At about 9 p.m. Mary Ball's father entered the jailhouse and demanded the keys but was turned away. The mob then decided that if the keys weren't forthcoming, they'd enter by force. It didn't take them long to figure out how to do the work\u2014they got sledgehammers from a local foundry and beat the doors down. The sheriff and his deputies put up some resistance, tossing canisters of tear gas to a crowd that included former World War I vets who just tossed the canisters back into the jailhouse.\n\nThe first man they pulled out of the jailhouse was Thomas Shipp. They took him outside and assaulted him with their hands and feet and weapons. At 10:30 p.m. a rope\u2014three-eighths inch thick, bought from a local hardware store\u2014went around his neck, and he was hanged from the bars of a jail window. Next they went for Abram Smith. Members of the crowd also beat him, but this time they carried him across the street to the northeast corner of the courthouse square and hanged him from a sturdy maple; perhaps they felt the bodies would be more visible from this location. A few went back to Shipp's body, still hanging from the jailhouse window, and put him next to Smith on the tree. Finally they went for James Cameron, who was also beaten and around whose neck they threw a rope. But something happened\u2014a swing in the emotions of the crowd? A twist of fate? A miracle? No one knows for sure. Bystanders claim that a voice was heard above the din saying that Cameron was innocent, that he wasn't involved. As quickly as he was pulled from the jailhouse, the mob mellowed, the rope was lifted, and Cameron was allowed to walk back to the relative safety of the jailhouse.\n\nCameron claims he was saved by an angel. His story of that night is fascinating, and it focuses, in part, on his personal relationships with the folks doing the lynching. Cameron talks a lot about the hands of these persons unknown, the hands that pulled him from his cell, beat him, and placed a noose around his neck\u2014the hands of a fanatical mob but also the \"hands of people I had grown to love and respect as friends and neighbors.\" When those good neighbors \"got their hands\" on him they beat him, pushed him, pulled him out of the jail: \"Their grips were like bands of steel.\" As he made his way to the street, \"so many clubs and hands were aimed and swung at me that they got in each other's way.\" And then \"rough hands grabbed my head and stuffed it into a noose. . . . I stopped thinking then. In my mind I was already dead. I was glad to be leaving a world filled with so many deceitful people.\" Cameron, a well-known downtown Marion shoe shiner, says he remembered those hands, recognized those faces, and even knew those shoes because he had shined many of them. The tightening noose began to burn his neck and then, Cameron says, he heard a voice, \"Take this boy back. He had nothing to do with any raping or killing!\" This angelic voice, it \"was sharp and crisp, like bells ringing out on a clear, cold, winter day.\"\n\nBy about 11:00 p.m. law enforcement from surrounding communities showed up to assist. The mob settled down and like vultures gliding the currents, relic hunters began their scavenging, taking pieces of clothing, tree, and rope. They gathered around the courthouse square, swapping stories and offering details to late arrivals. It was a community gathering of women and men, young and old. Someone went to fetch Lawrence Beitler, who set up his camera and snapped the now-famous photo that later inspired Abel Meeropol's words:\n\nSouthern trees bear a strange fruit,\n\nBlood on the leaves and blood at the root,\n\nBlack body swinging in the Southern breeze,\n\nStrange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.\n\n. . .\n\nHere is a fruit for the crows to pluck,\n\nFor the rain to gather, for the wind to suck,\n\nFor the sun to rot, for a tree to drop,\n\nHere is a strange and bitter crop.\n\nOf course, the image that inspired Meeropol was not of a Southern lynching but a midwestern one. Its imagery is arresting and conjures the singular and iconic image of tree and hanging body, of tree and victim, of burning or rotting corpse. It is an ugly scene: depositing the stunningly brutal into the bucolic pastoral.\n\n\"Strange fruit\" is a powerful, iconic phrase, evocative of the wrongness of the crimes it describes. And yet in a sad way that fruit, the hanged man, was not strange at all: it was cultivated and harvested in communities across the United States\u2014it came from within. There was \"blood at the root\" of lynching, of hanging. The fruit is strange, but the people surrounding the tree are not strangers; they are the good people of Marion, Indiana, and they were in good company. Their behaviors were unusual but not unique\u2014those \"bod[ies] swinging\" were visual reminders of the outcomes of an age-old practice of hanging someone by the neck until dead.\n\nIt wasn't until 5:45 a.m. on August 8 that the \"strange fruit\" was cut down from that maple tree in Marion. At that point most of the previous night's spectators had gone home to rest, easily or not. Some cut pieces of the rope on their way homeward. Things quieted down in Marion, but as a precaution two companies of the Indiana National Guard were sent in to patrol the streets. Meanwhile Flossie Bailey was contacting NAACP headquarters in New York, who were in turn contacting the governor. They demanded swift justice and immediate protection for the black community in Marion. A few weeks later the NAACP sent acting Secretary Walter White to Marion to begin its own investigation. Newspapers across the state and nation followed the story. The Marion Chronicle ran an editorial entitled \"Mob Psychology.\" Echoing the sentiments of those commenting on the Newark lynching, it claims that \"Marion is about the last place on earth where we should have expected to witness a lynching. Yet, this very thing happened here.\" It was committed by men \"stung to the quick by an atrocious crime and spurred on to their violent act by a want of confidence in the processes of the courts.\" Ultimately the editorial concludes that \"it is sad to reflect that, human nature being what it is, and social conditions being what they are, what has taken place here in Marion is not unlikely to befall any community. Mob psychology may break out anywhere.\"\n\nNot everyone in the state of Indiana\u2014or in the United States, for that matter\u2014was willing to write this off as an aberration, a momentary outbreak of \"mob psychology.\" Individual human beings were involved\u2014they tied the noose and bruised the bodies. A Court of Inquiry began a week after the lynching, and the depositions of the thirty people interviewed in that court are telling. In one exchange between Prosecutor Harley Hardin and Assistant Chief of Police Roy Collins, Hardin asks Collins whether he could identify anyone in the crowd. He says he could not, that \"it looked like a whirling mass of humanity.\" This is repeated again and again in the pages of these depositions\u2014those two men died at the hands of persons unknown. The depositions also reveal that law enforcement in Marion was not investigating the lynching. When Deputy Attorney General Earl Stroup asked a sheriff's deputy named Orville Wells whether he had been trying to gather information about what happened, he treated the interview with disdain:\n\nStroup: Have you talked to anybody about this lynching?\n\nWells: Just casually; not from the standpoint of getting information, anything like that.\n\nStroup: I suppose you regard it your duty to learn, if you could?\n\nWells: Yes, yes, sir. I haven't secured anything.\n\nNot surprisingly, the trials that followed in late 1930 and early 1931 were a sham from the start. In the first place, they took place in Marion. Two men from the mob, Robert Beshire and Charles Lennon, were put on trial; both were acquitted, and then the attorney general essentially gave up. One outcome of the trials, though, was that the black community in Marion, despite the lynchings, showed a united and fearless front; this was in large part due to the leadership of Flossie Bailey. And yet that united front didn't matter. Justice was never served. No one was ever convicted. Another gaping wound in Lady Justice's side festered.\n\nSmall Midwestern Cities\n\nThe similarities between Newark and Marion are uncanny. Both were small industrial Midwestern cities\u2014towns really\u2014built on a landscape dotted with Native American earthworks. Both were towns where glass manufacturing and iron works fueled economies and significant population growth. And both were experiencing growing pains when their respective lynchings occurred, though the issues that prompted each lynching were quite different. Newark was still booming, while Marion was in the midst of hard times. But something prompted hysteria and violence. And in both cases law enforcement turned its gaze or barely offered protection to the prisoners as citizen mobs broke into jails, got their hands on the accused, and slipped nooses around their necks. The victims were hanged and their bodies displayed on or near the county courthouse. In both towns the wounds perhaps never really healed. The two events and cities had a lot in common, but in some ways the only \"real\" thing that connects them is the noose and the human hands that made it.\n\nThere's a story that some locals tell in Marion, that the tree from which Smith and Shipp were hanged died shortly after the lynching. In this story the tree's death is symbolic of the community's decline\u2014that after the lynching nothing was the same in Marion. In Paul Laurence Dunbar's poem, \"The Haunted Oak,\" a personified oak tree speaks to a passerby who wonders aloud why the tree is so bare and haunted looking. The tree explains that it bore witness to a lynching and the experience has forever transformed it:\n\nI feel the rope against my bark,\n\nAnd the weight of him in my grain,\n\nI feel in the throe of his final woe\n\nThe touch of my own last pain.\n\nAnd never more shall leaves come forth\n\nOn the bough that bears the ban;\n\nI am burned with dread, I am dried and dead,\n\nFrom the curse of a guiltless man.\n\nThe tree could no longer produce life and light in a world of such cruelty. The Marion tree story is reminiscent of the reader's comment about Newark, Ohio, declining in the wake of the Carl Etherington lynching. But as in Newark, history doesn't support that story either. Something may have died in that community that night, but the community itself did not die\u2014economically or socially.\n\n\"It wasn't the lynching that killed this town\u2014it was factories closing,\" a retired Marion high school teacher named Bill Munn told me. But, he says, the lynching is a part of community memory\u2014perhaps locked away, but it's there. Because he was a well-liked history teacher and has close ties to the county museum, folks will often call him when they want to get rid of stuff they think might hold some historical value\u2014for example, copies of Beitler's photo of Thomas Shipp and Abe Smith.\n\n\"It's always the same picture, an 8 x 10,\" he says. \"It was their grandmother's or some family member, and they want to get it out of their house. Almost like they want to exorcise this demon from their house.\" One time a woman called him and said she found a Klan robe and hood in a deceased relative's home and asked whether he could come get it. The local museum had all the robes and hoods they needed, thank you. But the caller was insistent. When he finally went to the house to get the hood, the woman walked him down a hall and opened a door to a room.\n\n\"She told me it was in the closet but that she didn't want to go in the room. She was literally scared to be in the same room as that Klan robe.\"\n\nMore than artifacts, though, Bill Munn is a collector of stories about Marion and Grant County. And he has collected a lot of stories about the lynching.\n\nThere are countless stories from countless perspectives, Munn says, and he's given up trying to reconcile them all. For example, he asks aloud, Who was Mary Ball really? Some say she was in a relationship with Abe Smith, others that she was friends with all of the men involved, that they were a criminal gang and had often used Mary to lure men to the Dark Secret, where they would then rob them. Others believe the original story, that she was raped. Munn isn't sure what to believe. Her family has been quiet through the years, and Mary Ball left Marion shortly after the lynching. Munn heard a rumor in the 1970s that Mary Ball was living in San Bernadino. He was out there on vacation and looked her up. He called her, but no one answered.\n\nI ask him about the tree story. He chuckles.\n\n\"It didn't die. They were always cutting them down. Maybe they get too big, and so they cut them back or down. They've done it at least twice since I've been here. Now, I can see why they'd want it out of there.\" The lynching had a long-term effect on the community, but he thinks the stuff about the tree is just \"too karmic.\"\n\n\"But was there a long-lasting impact? Yes.\" Munn says the lynching represented a breakdown in law enforcement and that ultimately justice was never pursued. \"You had murderers loose on the street who were never punished and people knew who they were. And of course, if you were a black person, and maybe the guy working next to you was one of the people who put the noose around one of the guys. And so what are you to think? Look, white people will kill and get away with it.\" But there have been some public admissions of past wrongdoing. In 2003 the Grant County government apologized for the lynching; the city of Marion never has.\n\nBill Munn came to Marion by way of Ball State in Muncie. When he finished grad school he got a job in Marion, married a local girl, and settled down. \"When I started out it was not to be talked about. In the seventies there were still people around who had had their hands on the noose. When I was doing some research I found the name of a guy who was accused of being an instigator, and I knew him. He had since died, but I did not know that while he was living. Now, I'm not a cynic, but I'm enough of a student of human nature to know that people can do just about anything.\" Even in places like Marion, he says, \"somebody had to know how to tie that knot. That wouldn't have been easy.\"\n\nI talked to Bill on August 6, the day before the anniversary. I assumed there would be some recognition of that day. Bill told me not to hold my breath. \"There won't be anything. There won't be a peep.\"\n\nAnd there wasn't a peep. It was just another quiet Sunday morning. High humidity, a patch of fog here and there. Some people slept in. Others went to church. I drove down to the banks of the Mississenawa, to the place once called the \"Dark Secret,\" and I could just hear a trickle of water from the river. I drove over to the courthouse, passing the former (seemingly bombed-out) RCA factory along the way. The courthouse square was quiet too. I kept driving and left Marion on State Highway 9. Following Bill Munn's directions to the Weaver community, I turned right down a narrow, barely two-lane road deep into fields of summer corn, higher than my head. I passed a small cemetery, close to the road, where Bill Munn told me Abe Smith and Thomas Shipp are buried. He said that for years he'd heard rumors that this was where they'd been buried, on the edge of Weaver's African American cemetery. And then he spoke to a ninety-year-old man who grew up in Weaver. The man said he knew they were buried there, that a few days after the lynching he watched from his bedroom window as several men dug their graves by car light.\n\nIt's a desolate stretch of Midwestern corn-lined road. Nothing but field and sky, and I imagine the place is windswept and frigid come winter. This was the Midwest where former slaves fled and first felt something akin to freedom. I get out of my car to listen to the wind roll in and out. Above me a red-tailed hawk is at work, floating and then diving into the corn. It's a quiet, beautiful place. I'd like to believe that this is, in fact, where Thomas Shipp and Abe Smith are buried, peaceful in the warm morning sun.\na good death\n\nChapter 11\n\nWhen the Gallows Come Down\n\nThirty-three-year-old Richard Hickock and thirty-six-year-old Perry Smith were hanged after midnight on April 14, 1965, at the Kansas State Penitentiary. Hickock and Smith had been convicted on March 29, 1960, for the murders of Holcomb, Kansas, farmer Herb Clutter, his wife, and their two children. Hickock had heard from a former Clutter employee that this farmer and former member of the Federal Farm Credit Board kept a safe in his house with $10,000 in it. No such safe existed. For their efforts, a nighttime robbery and multiple homicides, the pair earned $43, a radio, and a pair of binoculars. After an extensive manhunt authorities apprehended Hickock and Smith in Las Vegas. And after almost five years on death row and four appeals, their time had run out.\n\nIn the final twenty-four hours of their lives Kansas Governor William H. Avery denied clemency, \"a federal judge denied a writ of habeas corpus, and a US Supreme Court justice denied their final petition for a stay of execution.\"  That was it. Smith and Hickock ate their final meal of jumbo spiced shrimp, French fries, soft drinks, garlic bread and hot rolls, and vanilla ice cream and strawberries with whipped cream in separate interrogation rooms, and they waited there until their executions. Because of all the press the murders garnered, it was no routine execution for the witnesses present. Indeed, for one of them, Truman Capote, it was more than just an execution: it was the obvious conclusion to a book he was writing called In Cold Blood: A True Account of a Multiple Murder and Its Consequences, a book that would examine violence in America through the lens of this case.\n\nCapote begins his narrative of the Hickock and Smith executions with a \"breakfasting\" Alvin Dewey, the hard-nosed Kansas Bureau of Investigations (KBI) detective who had doggedly pursued Hickock and Smith and had just watched them die. Capote explains that Dewey \"had never attended an execution, and when on the midnight past he entered the cold warehouse, the scenery had surprised him: he had anticipated a setting of suitable dignity, not this bleakly lighted cavern cluttered with lumber and other debris.\" It was a dumpy warehouse with stone walls and a large gallows on which hung two nooses in a corner. The nooses were crafted by an executioner brought in from Missouri, \"attired in an aged double-breasted pin striped suit overly commodious for the narrow figure inside it\" and a cowboy hat. With a driving rain falling hard on the warehouse roof, the witnesses waited for Hickock and Smith to arrive. They talked among themselves, making \"self-consciously casual conversation.\"\n\nThey were killed in alphabetical order. Hickock entered first, at 12:14 a.m., accompanied by six guards and a chaplain. He wore \"an ugly harness of leather straps that bound his arms to his torso.\" Hickock looked around and asked a guard whether any Clutters were present. \"When he was told no, the prisoner seemed disappointed, as though he thought the protocol surrounding this ritual of vengeance was not being properly observed.\"\n\nAfter the death warrant was read Hickock gave his final words: \"'I just want to say I hold no hard feelings. You people are sending me to a better world than this ever was'; then, as if to emphasize the point, he shook hands with the four men mainly responsible for his capture and conviction, all of whom had requested permission to attend the executions: KBI Agents Roy Church, Clarence Duntz, Harold Nye, and Dewey himself.\" He walked up the steps, and the chaplain spoke as the hood and noose were put in place. The trap opened at 12:19. Seven minutes later a doctor checked\u2014Hickock's heart was still beating. Rain fell harder on the warehouse roof. At 12:41 he was dead.\n\nKansas state gallows. Used with permission of the Kansas State Historical Society\n\nCapote records a conversation between two reporters as the witnesses waited for Smith. For one it was his first hanging: \"Nobody in our office wanted the assignment. Me either. But it wasn't as bad as I thought it would be. Just like jumping off a diving board. Only with a rope around your neck,\" he says. The other replies, \"They don't feel nothing. Drop, snap, and that's it. They don't feel nothing.\" The first, again, \"Are you sure? I was standing right close. I could hear him gasping for breath.\" The second: \"Uh-huh, but he don't feel nothing. Wouldn't be humane if he did.\" And then Smith walked in, chewing gum, and, writes Capote, appearing \"jaunty and mischievous.\" He made his way to the gallows and gave his final speech. \"I think it's a helluva thing to take a life in this manner. I don't believe in capital punishment, morally or legally. Maybe I had something to contribute, something. . . . It would be meaningless to apologize for what I did. Even inappropriate. But I do. I apologize.\" Smith dropped at 1:02 a.m. and was pronounced dead at 1:19 a.m.\n\nThere is a kinship between In Cold Blood and the gallows literature of centuries before\u2014both illustrate that hanging is a dramatic ritual deeply connected to our culture, where we work out social tensions and alleviate our deepest fears. It's a planned and calculated process that we are all, as citizens of this land, deeply connected to. These are our laws protected and enforced by our legal system. But it's also a process from which we seem to wish desperately to distance ourselves. The hanging happened late at night in a dank warehouse with a handful of witnesses, and the hangman was an out-of-state consultant and not a state employee. The hanging execution has become a necessary but shameful bureaucratic process\u2014but it is still violent, it is still about killing a human being. Indeed, the hanging execution is, as Capote's subtitle explains, often the culmination of a process that begins in violence and ends in violence.\n\nCapote's book begins with the randomness of the Clutter murder and concludes with the planned nature of a state-sanctioned execution. This is an important juxtaposition worth parsing. The Clutters lived in farm country and had achieved the American dream; they were killed by two men who certainly had not. Such violence was not supposed to happen in the Sunflower State, the breadbasket of the world. And such violence is not supposed to happen in Newtown or Aurora or Blacksburg or Littleton. It's not supposed to happen in Holcolmb, Kansas, not in Newark, Ohio, not in Marion, Indiana. But it does. And when it does it disturbs a certain privileged sense of separation from the grosser nature of humankind or from certain shameful technologies of death.\n\nThus, the action in In Cold Blood leads to this double hanging. Capote writes his way to this execution regardless of whether he meant to when he began. With any judicial execution comes a desperate desire for catharsis, and this is painfully evident with the Clutter murders. Bill Brown, editor of the Garden City Telegram, witnessed both the crime scene and the execution. He said that after Smith made his comment about the death penalty he thought of the day of the murder and the scene he encountered at the Clutter house: \"I thought of the shotgunned and mutilated bodies of the Clutter family . . . they were shown no mercy whatsoever. I think the feeling of the people of Garden City is one of relief. They have been waiting, some impatiently waiting. Some doubted they would ever go to the gallows.\"\n\nThe irony was that there would be no relief. Capote's book was soon released and then the film, and to this day the community continues to relive the Clutter murders again and again\u2014most recently in 2012 when the bodies of Smith and Hickock were exhumed in order to help solve a Florida murder mystery. Capital punishment doesn't always bring catharsis. The execution simply becomes one more through-line in a complex narrative about the horrible things that humans are capable of doing to one another\u2014sometimes planned and calculated, sometimes not.\n\nThe 1967 film adaptation of Capote's novel, starring Robert Blake as Perry Smith and Scott Wilson as Dick Hickock, makes editorial choices similar to those in the book. The noose is inevitable. We know it is coming from the beginning of the film. We watch Perry Smith tying knots with ease when, in a hardware store, the two prepare for their crime. When investigators puzzle over the scene, Dewey comments on the knots used to tie up members of the Clutter family. \"All tied with the same square knot,\" he declares. \"Used by anybody who works with livestock.\" And later, still trying to figure out who would be motivated to kill the Clutters, he notes, \"Unless we can place the killers in this spot. Unless we can tie the killers to that piece of rope, they'll never hang.\" There is rope in the beginning, middle, and end, when the movie concludes with the hanging: Perry Smith looking scared as the pastor reads Psalm 23 and we hear the heartbeat. Perry asks, \"Is God in this place too?\" The trap door releases. We hear his heartbeat slow down as his body sways and the rope groans.\n\nHollywood may well have played a significant role in shaping our contemporary understanding of the hangman's knot. One victim of a noose incident I spoke with told me that when he saw a noose left on a timeclock at his workplace, he immediately pictured himself hanging from a tree like in a movie. In western films, especially, well-wrought hangman's knots and gallows are often employed as plot devices or villainous omens, in a sense romanticizing frontier justice. A great example\u2014and there are plenty\u2014is Nathan Juran's Good Day for a Hanging (1959), which centers on a marshal, played by Fred MacMurray, struggling with the duty his position entails versus the reasonable doubt he and the community have about a man condemned to die for murder. In the end the condemned man breaks out of jail and dies on the gallows in a shoot-out with the sheriff\u2014not the ignoble death of the hanged man but the haphazard one of the outlaw. The film's closing shot is of the noose rocking back and forth with the outlaw, shot dead, resting on the gallows.\n\nIt is curious how this conquest of the West is wrapped up in the American imagination with popular myths and popular culture, most notably the western film. It's even more curious how this film genre has forever linked the West with the noose. Do-gooder sheriffs and their manly posses ride on horseback to avenge some wrong done to the community, be it by outlaws or Indians. Hollywood has profoundly affected our thinking about the conquering of the West. A recent advertisement promoting rereleases of Columbia\/Tri-Star westerns, after listing all the films, ends with the tagline, \"It's how the West was won.\" Hickock and Smith, for their part, disrupted the life of a western farmer and his family and were chased down by a posse and brought to justice at the end of a rope. And their story was refashioned into gallows literature and film\u2014the genre keeps on.\n\nThe Last Hanging Executions\n\nIn the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the transforming nature of corrections, spurred on by an apparent humanitarian bent, led many to view hanging as an archaic punishment out of step with modern sensibilities. To many, hanging brought to mind barbaric public spectacles and even lynching. Furthermore, it was increasingly viewed as both unnecessary and barbaric. And yet for years some hangmen had tried to make executions more humane. Their efforts centered on perfecting the drop from the gallows, believing that with a longer drop a person would die more quickly, in most cases from a severed spinal cord.\n\nFrom the perspective of these innovators, the hangings in the early chapters of this book were crude affairs with little attention paid to engineering a swift death. The positioning of the knot of the noose had been studied closely for some time. Originally the noose was placed behind the head, but eventually both hangman and hanged preferred to place the knot behind the ear and pulled tight. There's evidence that the hangman's knot (Knot #1119) was used in nineteenth-century American executions; in Great Britain, however, a rope with a metal eyelet was more common. There were other differences in execution style across the Atlantic.\n\nBy the middle of the nineteenth century hangmen in Ireland and England began to pay attention to the distance of the drop as a way to hasten death and avoid prolonged strangulation. Irish doctor Samuel Haughton proposed that a longer and more exact drop would dislocate the neck and produce a quicker death. His formula for determining such a drop was to \"divide the weight of the patient in pounds into 2240, and the quotient will give the length of the long drop.\"\n\nPerhaps prompted by Haughton's essay, English hangman William Marwood, working from 1872 to 1883, devised a table of drops that took into account the height and weight of the condemned person when determining the length the execution rope. British hangmen adjusted these measurements from time to time, but the general science remained the same. In the United States a \"standard drop\" (between four and six feet), a drop longer than the old-fashioned short drop but not measured based on a prisoners height and weight, was often used. But this drop didn't always break the neck, though the condemned were often made unconscious by it, and if it were too long, the head could decapitate. (The use of a measured drop officially made its way into American executions when the US Military included a table in its 1947 execution field manual.)\n\nAnd yet no matter how precise the drop, no matter how much the process was perfected, hanging still made people squeamish. It was a simple but old method of killing often administered by sheriffs with little experience. It could never be precise: there's no way to anticipate how an individual human body may react to traumatic violence. All manner of dreadful outcomes ensued: necks exotically bent, heads pulled off, and, worst of all, victims who suffered but didn't die. Hanging put the body on display and maybe was shunned, in part, because of a kind of Victorian fear of the body and impropriety. Or perhaps it was shunned because of an earnest belief in the progressive nature of humankind. In 1885 New York Governor David B. Hill noted in his annual address that \"the present mode of executing criminals by hanging has come down to us from the dark ages, and it may well be questioned whether the science of the present day cannot provide a means for taking the life of such as are condemned to die in a less barbarous manner.\"\n\nThe new technologies, most notably the electric chair and the gas chamber, supplanted the noose in the United States. In 1889, in Auburn, New York, William Kemmler was the first to be electrocuted. By 1923 even Texas had abandoned hanging, citing \"the 'fact' that hanging 'is antiquated and has been supplanted in many states by the modern and humane system of electrocution.'\" A year later, in Carson City, Nevada, Gee Jon became the first American to be executed by lethal gas. These new technologies were widely believed to kill more humanely. If we look at the long history of executions in what is now the United States, it's clear that the turn from the noose was quick. From 1608 to 2002 61.3 percent of all executions were hangings (9,324 people), but 29 percent were electrocuted (4,425 people). And then, from 1900 to 1999, 4,361 were electrocuted, 2,722 hanged, 593 gassed, 432 injected, and 33 shot. But hanging was not completely abandoned. Though private affairs in twentieth-century America, hanging executions still excited and disturbed the popular imagination as they had before. Perhaps this was due to the simplicity of the act of hanging compared to the complicated engineering of the electric chair or gas chamber.\n\nThe last public hanging execution was of Rainey Bethea on August 14, 1936, in Owensboro, Kentucky. Bethea, an African American farmhand, had been convicted of raping and murdering seventy-year-old Eliza Edwards. Bethea was never tried for the murder; instead, he was convicted of the rape by a jury that deliberated for about five minutes. At the time Kentucky law stipulated that someone convicted of rape would be executed in the county where the crime had occurred. Bethea's execution was witnessed by a crowd of about twenty thousand. Kentucky prohibited public executions in 1938.\n\nFrom that day forward hangings, like all executions, were exclusively behind closed doors. Hickock and Smith were hanged on April 14, 1965, and on June of the same year George York and James Latham were also hanged. Those four Kansas hangings were the last hanging executions in the country until the early 1990s. The 1972 Supreme Court decision Furman vs. Georgia invalidated existing death penalty laws, prompting a hiatus until the Supreme Court declared the death penalty constitutional in 1976. In 1977 Utah's Gary Gilmore was the first to be executed after that hiatus\u2014by firing squad. Sixteen years later, in 1993, the first of three hanging sentences was carried out. The first, Westley Dodd, murdered three boys, hanging one of them, postmortem, in a closet. The second, Charles Campbell, slashed and killed two women and an eight-year-old girl. And the third, Billy Bailey, shot and killed an elderly couple in their rural farmhouse. Apart from the heinous nature of their crimes, these three men had a lot in common. They were all white, had problematic childhoods, and were sentenced to death by hanging.\n\nIf there were a scale for determining the relative heinousness of crimes, of the trio, Dodd might be at the top. He was a serial pedophile who kept a diary of his crimes and his plans for others. After the three murders\u2014stabbing ten- and eleven-year-old brothers to death and later brutally raping and then killing a four-year-old\u2014he was caught in November 1989 trying to kidnap a six-year-old boy from a movie theater. Shortly thereafter he readily confessed to his crimes. Dodd waived all appeals, and his execution date was set for January 5, 1993, in Walla Walla, Washington. Dodd chose hanging over lethal injection because he had hanged one of the kids he tortured and murdered. In his final statement Dodd claimed there was no way to stop a sex offender but through execution and that he had made peace with that through his new faith in Jesus Christ. The noose was placed around his neck, and he dropped about seven feet through the trap door as witnesses watched through glass windows in the state's two-story execution room. When he dropped there was little struggle. One of the witnesses, Dodd's lawyer, Darrell Lee, claimed he was surprised by how smoothly the execution went. \"I came away with the view that, 'Hey, if you are going to be executed, hanging is the way to go.'\" A coroner's report revealed that he died two to three minutes after he was dropped. The examiner claimed that he hadn't died of a broken neck or hangman's fracture but instead of a \"combination of neck damage and strangulation . . . ligaments in [his] neck were damaged enough for neck bones to separate.\" The coroner had told the state beforehand that Dodd would likely die of a \"hangman's fracture,\" but that isn't what happened. Anti-death-penalty advocates pointed to this as proof of the unpredictable nature of hanging.\n\nCharles Campbell was another story. He worked every angle he could to not be executed. His lawyers appealed to the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in part on the premise that hanging was a cruel and unusual punishment. Ultimately his sentence was upheld, but the dissenting opinion, penned by Judge Stephen Reinhardt, argued that hanging is a \"medieval\" form of execution that isn't \"compatible with society's evolving standards of decency.\" Reinhardt claimed that hanging \"inflicts unnecessary pain, both physical and emotional, on those condemned to die.\" Washington state protocol relied on a 1959 military execution manual that, Reinhardt pointed out, \"had never been used in an actual hanging, even though the Washington state officials had no idea how the procedure set forth in the manual had been developed.\" He argued that the Constitution allows for people to be executed \"with as much dignity as possible.\" The Army's manual is \"hardly some set of scientific equations which magically eliminates all possibility of decapitation or strangulation . . . [it] contains no scientific references.\" To this degree he was right: as we have seen, hanging is violent and always has been, and there's no way around that.\n\nReinhardt noted that most states and even the US Army have rejected hanging. But it's not just objectively wrong: it's contrary to \"human dignity\" and \"savage and barbaric.\" He continued, \"We are convinced that judicial hanging is an ugly vestige of earlier, less civilized times when science had not yet developed medically-appropriate methods of bringing a life to an end. Hanging is a crude, rough and wanton procedure, the purpose of which is to tear apart the spine. It is needlessly violent and intrusive, deliberately degrading and dehumanizing. It causes grievous fear beyond that of death itself and the attendant consequences are often humiliating and disgusting.\" But Reinhardt's most salient argument was that in the United States \"hanging is associated with lynching, with frontier justice, and with our ugly, nasty, and best-forgotten history of bodies swinging from the trees or exhibited in public places.\" To emphasize his point he footnoted the words to \"Strange Fruit.\"\n\nOn the night of his execution, Charles Campbell refused his last meal and had to be subdued and pepper sprayed because he wouldn't be handcuffed in order to be moved to a holding cell. He had to be strapped to a board because he was too weak to stand up straight for the execution. Witnesses described prison employees fumbling about, trying to fix the hood over his head despite all the straps on the restraining board. Campbell made no final statement, and so witnesses never saw his face; a curtain separating witnesses and Campbell stayed in place so all they could see was shadows moving the machinery of death into place. The noose was cinched up, and at 12:08 a.m. the lever was pulled and the trap opened. After twelve years and about $2 million, thirty-nine-year-old Charles Campbell plunged to his death on the same gallows that had been used for Dodd.\n\nLike Dodd, Billy Bailey, the last man to be hanged in the United States, didn't fight the sentence. When he was asked to choose the needle or the noose he claimed, \"Asking a man to choose how to die is more barbaric than hanging. . . . The law sentenced me to hang and I should hang.\" Bailey grew up poor and abused in South Carolina, the nineteenth of twenty-three children. In 1980 he robbed a liquor store and went to the rural farm of Gilbert and Clara Lambertson in rural Kent County, Delaware, intending to steal a truck. Drunk and high on valium, he shot Gilbert in the face and Clara in the back.\n\nBailey said later that he wasn't really sure why he did it: \"It hurts sometimes when I think about it. When I say hurt, I think about the Lambertsons and how much they hate me and I start to cry and sometimes I cry myself to sleep at night.\" After being sentenced to death he became a model prisoner, fixing furniture, mending clothes, and earning a good reputation among prison guards who spoke up for him at his last clemency hearing. But Bailey wasn't granted clemency, and his hanging sentence was set in motion. The night before his execution reporter Bob Faw from NBC, noting his size, quipped that \"once 220-pound Bailey wondered out loud if prison officials would be able to find a rope strong enough to hold him. Early tomorrow morning, he'll find out.\"\n\nIn the hours before his execution on January 25, 1996, Bailey was moved to a location closer to the gallows. He met with his lawyer and a chaplain, and he visited with his sister for the last time. He also ate his final meal: steak, a baked potato, rolls, peas, and vanilla ice cream. Before midnight Bailey was escorted to the large gallows set up in an outdoor area at the Delaware Correctional Center in Smyrna. He climbed the steps to the top and stood in the freezing night, waiting for witnesses to arrive. When they did they immediately saw Bailey on the gallows above them, with a bald head, white sneakers, and a light denim jacket. Flanked on both sides by guards wearing black hoods topped with black baseball caps, a clench-fisted Bailey gazed down upon the witnesses, including the victim's son, and they looked up at him. The noose swayed in the wind and the yard was quiet, with no one talking or whispering\u2014they had been told if they did, they'd be kicked out. And then, at 12:01 a.m., the warden asked whether Bailey had any final words, and he said no. They put a black hood over his head and moved him closer to the noose, put it over his head, and adjusted it.\n\nThe lever was pulled at 12:04 a.m. Bailey fell through and stopped suddenly, \"spun around six times in one direction and then twice in the other.\" Silence. A curtain was closed over his hanging body, and eleven minutes later he was pronounced dead. Gary Tuchman, one of the witnesses for the media, says, \"It doesn't matter how you feel about the death penalty, when you see something in this fashion it's quite shocking to the system . . . for many days afterward I had a tough time sleeping. It stays in your mind a long time when you witness something so unusual as death by hanging.\" Bailey's lawyer, echoing Reinhardt, called the hanging \"mediaeval and barbaric.\" Witnesses from the victim's families told the media that justice had been served.\n\nGallows in a Warehouse\n\nToday hanging is permissible in New Hampshire, if lethal injection isn't possible, and Washington, where there is a choice between hanging and injection. Despite the technological advances of execution engineers, the hanged human body will expire how it sees fit. A snap of the neck. A tear of muscles. A slow suffocation. The gallows is still made of wood, and the noose is still a knot in a rope.\n\nKansas hasn't executed anyone since 1965. For years the state gallows, built in 1944, collected dust in that warehouse, still intact but taking up space. In 1986 officials from the State Penitentiary in Lansing contacted the state museum to see whether they wanted it. John Zwierzyna, a former curator at the Kansas Museum of History, went to check it out with some other colleagues and assess whether they could find a place to store it. As Zwierzyna tells it, they were taken to the warehouse where it was still set up, a cavernous but nondescript building on the prison grounds. It was a strange thing, he says: \"from the outside you wouldn't expect it to be the place where that gallows was.\" When they got closer the gallows looked like it was thrown together in the prison carpentry shop\u2014crude, makeshift, ugly. Someone had carved little crosses on one of the support beams. Graffiti, markers of the dead. But the innocuousness of it all, he recalls, made it seem like it had just been used. They took it apart, transported it back to the state museum in Topeka, and put it in storage, where it's been ever since. With the gallows came a few other items: a harness used to restrain the condemned, a hood, a roll of adhesive tape and a tongue depressor (the tape held the depressor in place to prevent the condemned from biting his tongue during execution), and a pair of shoelaces used to tie the condemned prisoner's feet together.\n\nThe governor at the time opposed capital punishment and so opposed exhibiting it, and, besides, there was no room for it in the museum. It has never been displayed, in part, Zwierzyna says, because anything associated with the death penalty is complicated to display. \"They're an important part of the state's history, but it's hard to display them. How it's displayed, the lighting or whatever, can make an object appear sinister.\" The curator doesn't want it to appear macabre because that might come off as an attempt to exploit people's emotions. Zwierzyna wonders whether there's any possible way to display the gallows objectively. About a decade ago, while working for Pennsylvania's state history museum, they held a single-day symposium to discuss the feasibility of exhibiting the electric chair. They didn't come up with an answer for that one. In Delaware state officials held a press conference, where they ran a chain from the gallows to a backhoe and yanked the gallows down.\n\nMy amiable tour guide at the Kansas State Museum is curator Blair Tarr, who ushers me down a hall and swipes a key card that opens enormous steel doors, and all of a sudden we're in a huge warehouse chock-full of Kansas history\u2014cars, tractors, signs, windmills, an old soda bottle dispenser, and boxes upon boxes upon boxes. It's all neatly organized on three floors of metal storage racks, with a staircase in the middle to allow easy access. Tarr says part of the reason they haven't exhibited it is because of lack of space. They've talked about setting it up in the lobby of the museum, but the museum is often rented out for parties and the like. \"It might put a damper on festivities,\" he chuckles.\n\nBut really, Tarr says, it's the Clutter murders. That's what prevents them from displaying the gallows. \"Even after\u2014what is it now, fifty-four years? It's still extremely sensitive, particularly out around Holcomb and Garden City. Members of the Clutter family are still around. And a lot of it has to do with Truman Capote. Many feel he glorified Hickock and Smith too much.\"\n\n\"It's interesting,\" I point out, \"that of all the people hanged on this gallows, two people after them . . .\"\n\n\"There were nineteen altogether\u2014fifteen by the state and four by the military. But it's those two who stand out, and it's mostly because of the book In Cold Blood. Otherwise they'd be forgotten for better or worse. It's a problem that doesn't go away because as long as people are using Capote in high school or college classes or writing about it . . .\" There is an awkward pause, then, \"It's not gonna go away. Someday we may be able to put it up.\" They have displayed a beam from the gallows used to execute the Lincoln conspirators\u2014there was no controversy about that.\n\nWe walk through the warehouse and up to the third floor, our feet clanging across the metal floor. He points to objects along the way\u2014a pinball machine here, some bullets there, a Carrie Nation poster here, the original Hickock and Smith's gravestones there (they were stolen and ended up on a farm in southeastern Kansas). We move on down the narrow aisles between shelves on the third floor and over to a corner.\n\n\"There it is,\" he points.\n\nSeveral piles of wood. Some stairs. Boxes with screws and nuts and bolts. (I'm tempted to take a relic, but I don't.) There are little notes attached to various pieces explaining what the pieces are and where they should go, but Tarr says that if it ever gets put back together, there's going to be a whole lot of trial and error in the process. I tell him what John Zwierzyna said about there being crosses on some of the wood, and so we poke around a bit but realize that it would be quite a project to locate anything in that mess. Tarr says a few others have come to see the gallows before me but not many\u2014mostly television stations wanting a shot of the trapdoor and stairs whenever they're doing a story about capital punishment. There are some folks in Lansing who'd like to put it in a museum there. But people from the Holcomb area say it sounds like they want to use the gallows for tourism. \"That doesn't sit right with them, of course.\"\n\nWe walk back down the stairs to look at the platform, which rests on its side in a rack full of other items. As I walk around to the other side to get a better look at it Tarr says, \"And you're about to pass by the trap door.\"\n\nI pivot and see it, a long, black metal lever attached to the metal trapdoor. It's stunning, in a way. The handle is gray, seemingly worn away from use or just a bad paint job. It's up on a platform to protect it from flooding.\n\n\"Wow,\" I say, surveying the scene around me. \"What a strange collection of objects!\"\n\n\"Yes, it is,\" he agrees.\n\n\"Here's a tractor, here's a trap door, here's an old vending machine . . .\"\n\n\"And here's a jail,\" he points to a box-like structure in the corner made of wooden bars. \"Well, more like a drunk tank.\"\n\nIt's all disorienting, but I turn back to the worn handle of the trapdoor. I'm mesmerized. I look at it closely and get the courage to touch it. I think of the people who have touched this thing. It's a strange sensation, at once sinister and sad.\n\n\"Through that,\" Tarr says without prompting, \"nineteen people met their end.\"\n\nEven though it's a pile of wood, it still carries meaning. Deconstructed, disassembled, scattered in parts about the warehouse, to reconstruct this machine would require much effort. To build it in the first place certainly did. I think of Sandee Geshick's remark that the rope didn't want to be a noose. The wood didn't want to be a gallows. People made it into a gallows.\n\nLater that day, reading through the files of James Latham and George York, the last two executed on the gallows, I came across a slip of paper with these notes scribbled across:\n\nLatham 11:59 PM W\n\n12:04 AM Sprung\n\n12:20 AM Deceased\n\nYork 12:30 W\n\n12:34 Sprung\n\n12:53 Deceased\n\nCalled Townsend 1:03 AM\n\nThere's nothing more. After that the page ends.\nChapter 12\n\nThe New Burning Cross\n\nA stun grenade contains only a few grams of magnesium, aluminum, and ammonium perchlorate, but it's enough to cause intense disorientation of sight and sound. The blast and flash last about five seconds, they say\u2014brief and effective. So when a Lima Ohio Police Department SWAT team kicked in the front door of Tarika Wilson's modest home and one team member tossed in a stun grenade, this is what Wilson's six children experienced, disrupting their play and the drone of a television. It was an otherworldly juxtaposition of sharp light and dull sound\u2014the black-armored SWAT team and multicolored children's toys\u2014at about 8 p.m. on January 4, 2008, a Friday night. The dozen heavily armed men had entered the home because a petty drug dealer named Anthony Terry was supposedly living there. They used the stun grenade to create a distraction in hopes of catching Terry and finding a stash of cash and drugs. But the SWAT team didn't find Terry; they found his girlfriend, twenty-six-year-old Tarika Wilson, cowering in an upstairs bedroom with her six children, the oldest of whom was eight. One officer, Sergeant Joseph Chavalia, fired his automatic rifle at Wilson, shooting through the left shoulder of her fourteen-month-old boy, Sincere. When the firing stopped, Wilson was dead.\n\nThe response from Wilson's neighbors was almost immediate. They gathered outside the house, demanding to know what was going on inside and what was happening with the children. Over the following days, as they learned what happened, they continued to demand justice and the truth. The day after the raid they marched to City Hall and kept up pressure on the police. Throughout the cold Ohio winter Tarika Wilson's community kept the pressure up. Most said the police raid and the killing of Tarika Wilson were a tragedy but not surprising. For years, many said, the police had singled out African Americans for stop-and-frisks, for abusive treatment.\n\nAt the time, one of the most vocal critics of the Lima Police Department was Jason Upthegrove, an area businessman and president of the local chapter of the NAACP. Upthegrove's ties to Lima run deep: he was born and raised in Lima, and his family on his mother's side has been here for over a hundred years. He's seen the changes too\u2014the enormous loss of jobs that accompanied the closure of a steel foundry, the loss of jobs in the area. When I meet him in Lima it was the fall of 2011, in the midst of the Great Recession. Upthegrove notes that Lima today looks like a lot of communities across the Midwest, across the United States. \"Unless you knew the people in the community,\" he says, \"you wouldn't know what community you're in. The faces are different but the situations are very similar.\"\n\nBut what separates Lima from some of these places is a sizeable African American community, many of whom are descendants of folks who moved north looking for jobs, escaping the Jim Crow South. Upthegrove's grandfather was such a person, moving from Rome, Georgia, in search of work and security. And this, Upthegrove notes, is why tension over crime and policing in these communities is rarely about an actual spike in crime. The real issue is race. \"Traditionally law enforcement in this country has felt that the way you deal with black people is by force; that you can't communicate with them in a civil manner.\" This is what led to Tarika Wilson's death, he says. It was a battle between two law enforcement agencies, the county sheriff's department and the city police, to see who could get the most drug dealers off the street, and that's why they went after Anthony Terry, a petty drug dealer, with a SWAT team and semi-automatic weapons. If it wasn't a SWAT team kicking a door in, it was racial profiling or \"pin-point policing,\" the current euphemism. Because of his position of leadership in the NAACP, Upthegrove was pushed into the spotlight by Wilson's death, and he has had to try to make sense of what happened for the African American community. What he saw was another example of the reckless behavior of policemen when encountering poor black people. \"You know, how can you go past Big Wheels and Barbie dolls on the porch at eight o'clock on a Friday night, knowing that there were children in there, and then do what they did?\"\n\nAt rallies and press conferences Upthegrove pointed to a pattern of racial profiling. He was not off the mark. In 2007 61 percent of the 323 drug arrests made in Lima were black people, whereas 39 percent were white. And in 2008 a reporter from the Toledo Blade found that more than half of the 5,000 arrested each year in Lima were black. That same year just 2 of 77 police officers were black. None of these numbers are proportionate to the actual demographics of the community: in 2005 73 percent of Lima residents were white and 26 percent were black. According to the 2010 Census, Lima's population was 38,771, with a 3.3 percent decline between 2000 and 2010. In the same year 67.1 percent of the population was white and 26.4 percent black. In this predominantly German-Catholic city African Americans arrived in the 1940s and 1950s to work in the oil refinery; they stayed, and resentment simmers just below the surface. Lima's inequities and tensions are perhaps connected to a poor economy. Unemployment is staggeringly high, and Lima has lost about eight thousand jobs over the past fifteen years. Per capita income for Lima hovers around $16,000, versus about $25,000 for the state as a whole.\n\nFor some time, African Americans had complained of harassment and poor police work in general. When the police finally explained the raid, the complaints of the African American community seemed, if not vindicated, underscored. According to Lima Chief of Police Greg Garlock, the \"flash-bang\" grenade was for Terry, whom they assumed would be armed and dangerous. But Terry wasn't in the home, and the police never located a gun. They did find about eight grams of marijuana and less than a gram of crack cocaine. This came after several weeks of investigation and obtaining a \"no-knock\" search warrant. The police claimed they raided the house because they had tracked Terry leaving it to make a drug sale and then returning to it later. They said they didn't know Wilson and her children were there, even though they claim to have surveilled the house for some time. These admissions of sloppy police work came well after the raid\u2014in the weeks immediately afterward they weren't as forthcoming, and Jason Upthegrove, among others, applied pressure whenever and however possible, marching in the frigid winter to City Hall and speaking to the media at every opportunity.\n\nThe media, both local and national, picked up the story. That's when the pushback started. First it was phone calls. Then racist flyers on cars and lampposts. Not just targeting Upthegrove but also other leaders in the community\u2014basically any black person they could find in Lima, including Tarika Wilson's mother. The flyers mocked Wilson's death and told African Americans to keep quiet. And then on Valentine's Day, about a month after the killing of Tarika Wilson, Jason Upthegrove's wife handed him the mail as he was sitting in his car in the driveway. He noticed a large envelope. \"I opened it,\" he remembers, \"and it had some racist literature with Tarika Wilson's face on it and the word 'nigger' and some other stuff written on it. And then I opened up a package, and inside the envelope was a little nylon rope tied into a noose.\" It was a small hangman's knot, complete with wrapping turns. He went straight to the Sheriff's Department, and they passed it on to the FBI. The case got traction because the noose came via the US Postal Service. Upthegrove was not the only African American resident in Lima to receive the literature, but he was the only one to receive the noose.\n\nUpthegrove felt like his life might be in danger. He changed his patterns and habits: drove down different streets, went to work at different times, became hypersensitive to what was going on around him. One day he noticed a Dodge Ram pickup truck parked near his house, and then he saw it later in the day heading down the street toward him. He slowed down. As the cars passed each other, he stared at the man in the truck\u2014then the truck raced off. After that, Upthegrove was worried about the safety of his family. He wouldn't let his children leave the house\u2014no parties, no basketball games, no nothing. He slept when he could during the day and sat on the floor with a gun in his lap at night. That this was standard procedure for many African American civil rights activists in the fifties and sixties wasn't lost on him at the time; he says he was accustomed to people being angry with him for some reason or other, but these people had \"invaded\" his home and, in doing that, threatened his family.\n\nBut the machinations of justice were working all the while. The FBI jumped on the case and traced the noose to an Oregon man named Daniel Lee Jones, apparently a member of a white supremacist group called the National Socialist Workers Party. He wasn't hard to find\u2014Jones had left his fingerprints all over the literature and skin cells from his hands all over the noose. On May 17, 2010, Jones entered a guilty plea and, on November 8, 2010, for using the US Postal Service to mail threatening communications, he was sentenced to eighteen months in a federal prison and three years of supervised release. At the sentencing Jason Upthegrove tried to explain the significance of what happened, to put words to feelings complicated by history and emotions. He claimed, \"Sending a noose isn't just like saying, 'I don't like you.' It is not like saying, 'I disagree with you.' It's not just an objection to my position. Sending a noose is tantamount to sending a picture of a gas chamber to a Holocaust victim, tantamount of sending a bullet to a shotgun victim, tantamount of sending a knife to a stabbing victim, or a stocking cap to a victim of rape. . . . The noose is the most egregious thing that can be threatened against an African American because of its long history. We've come a long way since the Jim Crow South, but this is a constant reminder in the African American community that there are people out there that feel as though the African American has not evolved, that we are not deserving of citizenship.\" Upthegrove explained that the noose disrupted his family and work life. He was scared, he said, anytime somebody walked through his business door. He wondered, \"Is that the guy, is that someone who wants to harm me?\"\n\nNothing violent ever ended up happening to him, and that, Upthegrove seemed to say, gave the court a unique opportunity to rehabilitate and perhaps educate the perpetrator of this crime; it was an opportunity because the intent of the hate behind the literature and the noose he was sent was clear\u2014\"clear indicators of his intent, clear indicators of how he feels, what the essence of this man are.\" He made a choice, Upthegrove said, and now he has to pay the consequences, but perhaps he would learn something. He concluded, \"His hands were on the rope. He's the one that sent it to my house where my wife, where my children stay. He could have called me like any other coward . . . but he chose to [send a noose].\"\n\nJones's defense attorney, Andy P. Hart, noted that the FBI's investigation revealed that most of Jones's friends and associates were surprised he would do such a thing, and those not affiliated with the hate group were surprised he held such beliefs: \"They found him affable, and just an average everyday person.\" Jones, he said, had no history of violence; he seemed only to wish to create attention. But that's the problem, Judge David A. Katz said. This was not a community that needed any more attention in this moment. The real danger in this case was \"its impact on an already-supercharged community,\" that this could have opened the door for more people with Mr. Jones's leanings to act, and it could have led to violence. It's not just about whether Jones would have done anything; it's that it could have encouraged others to act. Shortly after the sentencing the Department of Justice issued a press release in which Civil Rights Division Assistant Attorney General Thomas E. Perez noted that \"a noose, an unmistakable symbol of hatred in this nation, was used by this defendant as a threat of violence aimed at silencing a civil rights advocate. . . . The Department of Justice will vigorously prosecute those who use threats of violence to silence proponents of racial equality.\"\n\nUpthegrove came face to face with Jones at the trial\u2014the man who had threatened his life. \"I found myself getting really angry the first time I saw him.\" But Upthegrove says his anger wasn't just about what Jones had done to him and his family; rather, it was that he seemed like such a normal, simple man. There was nothing that screamed Aryan Brotherhood! about him. \"He just looked like a normal guy you'd see working anywhere, in a factory or as a mechanic. Always talking to the judge, 'Yes sir, your honor. No sir, your honor. Yes sir, I understand.' Just on his best behavior, and that was just sad because it showed and demonstrated that he had the capacity to be respectful. He wasn't one of them minutemen types who were just like, 'F the justice system.' He certainly wasn't that guy. And when we went to the first hearing I remember coming out of the courtroom, he had to walk past me to leave, and he nodded at me. In that moment I just felt like busting him in his face.\"\n\nThat look, he said\u2014how could Jones even look at him after what he'd done? It wasn't a game for him, for his family. Upthegrove hasn't encountered or heard from Jones since that sentencing hearing. \"I wouldn't be opposed to sitting down with him and talking to him,\" he says. \"I'm not harboring any ill feelings toward him. I think what he did was foolish; I think he's probably a product of his environment like I'm a product of my environment. It would be injurious to me to walk around with a spirit of unforgiveness. He paid a penalty, what I consider a heavy penalty\u2014a year and half in a federal penitentiary is a heavy penalty. He paid a heavy price, and it's not for me to judge him.\"\n\nAt the time Jones did it Upthegrove thinks Jones didn't take what he was doing very seriously. As he tied that knot, as he made those wrapping turns, he didn't care about the repercussions for the recipient and what it would mean to him. That noose, Upthegrove says, felt very real. \"Black men were hanged in front of their wives and children for doing nothing more than speaking to a white woman or not kowtowing to white supremacists or preaching the gospel of Jesus Christ or refusing to sell their land. Not for murder or rape, but just trying to be a typical citizen. The remedy for scaring those men and women, to prevent them from being citizens, was to have these public hangings. Daniel Jones kept that cycle flowing. There cannot be a new paradigm when you're re-creating old wounds like that.\"\n\nFrom Tool to Symbol\n\nFrom 1952 to 1954 researchers at the Tuskegee Institute who had been tracking American lynching since the late nineteenth century did not record a single incident. The era of the large-scale public lynching was over. There were no Newarks or Marions after that year. There were, however, Emmitt Tills, Cheneys, Schwerners, and Goodmans. There were Medgar Everses and Martin Luther King Jrs. The end of the spectacle of lynching does not mark the end of the history of the noose: tracing the noose from its wide use as a tool of execution and then lynching to its manifestations in the hands of those who wish to threaten violence without actually committing it\u2014in some cases\u2014an interesting thing begins to happen: the noose becomes a synecdoche, a part that stands in for the whole.\n\nAs both lynching and hanging executions became less public, the noose as tool of intimidation began to take on a more public role. Hanging someone in effigy had been practiced for many years, but in the twentieth century a similar message is conveyed by displaying the noose on its own. Mark Potok, a senior researcher for the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), claims that the noose emerged as a symbol of intimidation during the 1950s and 1960s; for example, a noose was mailed to NAACP secretary Roy Wilkins in 1959.\n\nBut there are earlier examples of the use of the noose as symbol. On May 3, 1939, in Florida, a Klansman riding shotgun in a car held a hangman's knot outside a window during a \"parade\" through an African American neighborhood of Miami the night before a municipal election. The motorcade rolled along, stopping at least twenty-five intersections and burning crosses. Along the way they threw out leaflets that read, \"Respectable Negro citizens are not voting tomorrow. Niggers stay away from the polls. KKK.\" But they didn't stay away. In fact, black voters showed up in record numbers; about \"twenty times the number recorded\" in the previous election turned out to vote. There is some evidence that more recent iterations of the Klan and white supremacist groups have used the noose as a ready symbol of hate and intimidation in the latter half of the twentieth century.\n\nRoy Wilkins with noose, 1959. Agefotostock\n\nKlansman with noose, 1939. Corbis Images\n\nDuring the civil rights era the noose migrated from one site of contention to the next, from the offices of the NAACP to the streets of African American communities and even to the schoolhouse. On September 11, 1956, in Texas, the noose appeared again in its role as tool of intimidation, dangling from a tree at Texarkana College amidst a battle over integration. That incident brings to mind the events of Jena High School, of course, and how the public school has been for some time a central site of contention. This is a history that has been suppressed or, at least, underacknowledged\u2014in the United States the noose has a long history of being dangled from sturdy trees in order to keep racial and ethnic minorities \"in their place,\" so to speak.\n\nIn American art the noose has served as a stand-in for this history. Aaron Douglas's 1928 painting \"Charleston\" evokes the jazz clubs of the Harlem Renaissance\u2014the music, dance, the quiet corners where African Americans could feel a modicum of liberation in a country that still provided very little political freedom. Douglas reminds viewers of this via a figure of the noose, centered on the canvas, and eerie hands grasping from the bottom of the painting\u2014perhaps the hands of lynchers who seek to disrupt those who seek freedom. Those hands and the noose are a reminder of the reality for many black Americans who cannot find their way north\u2014those hands reaching up from some dark place, some present, some past.\n\nMost recently Kara Walker examines the link between the past and present in American culture. Her cut-paper silhouettes drip with tar, metamorphose, perform sex acts. Indeed, her work is at once sexually provocative and horrifying. In \"Slavery! Slavery!\" (1997) trees covered with Spanish moss also sport tangled ropes that appear almost alive. Her work, though, is both reminder and caution\u2014that this history, these nooses can perform their own choke-hold on us, entangling both perpetrator and victim, performing the past in the present. John Sims's \"The Proper Way to Hang the Confederate Flag\" uses an actual hangman's knot and Confederate flag and is, in some ways, more explicit than Walker in addressing the history and legacy of the noose, combining as he does two lingering and powerful symbols of America's violent past. The first iteration of the piece was in 2004 at Gettysburg College's Schmucker Gallery. Publicity about the exhibit, which was to include a large gallows outside the gallery, angered local historians and the Sons of Confederate Veterans. Sims even received death threats. Given the controversy, college officials decided to move the exhibit indoors and not construct the gallows. The piece was then simply a Confederate battle flag hanged from a noose of thirteen wrapping turns with a picnic basket on the floor beside it\u2014a symbolic lynching of the Confederate past. In protest of the college's decision, Sims boycotted the exhibit opening. In 2007 Sims installed the work at the Brogan Museum in Tallahassee, this time building a gallows and dangling a Confederate battle flag through a hangman's knot. The first display, perhaps, evoked the extralegal steps to dealing with America's past and, the latter, a more legal, state-sanctioned manner.\n\nIs something lost when the knot is reproduced, as the image of Sims's piece is likely more powerful, more visceral in person? What is lost when a YouTube video or iPhone app can teach anyone how to tie the hangman's knot? There is no Glenn Dickey, no rope or knot expert to admonish and instruct knot tyers about the dangers of the knot, the very real possibility of death that can come quite easily from such a knot. Perhaps in this age of one-click copying we feel so distant from the potential harm that the noose can and has inflicted that we do not take it seriously.\n\nJohn Sims, \"Proper Way to Hang a Confederate Flag,\" 2004.  Used with permission of the artist\n\nBut it is serious, and as Jason Upthegrove sensed, it can produce and reproduce harm simply through its symbolic presence. In the twenty-first century there is something uniquely American about the noose. It is at once an expression of racist hatred but also of the possibilities of extralegal punishment\u2014the kind of extralegal punishment any individual can mete out. It is a particularly American symbol because it is at once an expression of the racial categories that developed with the formation of this nation as well as the tension between the individual and the community. Vigilante justice existed and exists in other countries, of course, but the term and iconography have American roots. (Actually, commentators called the mob killing of a man in Brazil in 1982 a linchamento.) The United States at once values the rule of law while at the same time glorifies the pioneer spirit of the individual who bucks the system, breaks the law, and seeks retribution for some perceived wrong. America is the orderly narrative of the Constitution and its system of checks and balances, but America is also the nation of Ahab's revenge, of the Lone Ranger, of Rambo, of Dirty Harry\u2014and of George Zimmerman.\n\nIndeed, the noose has become a synecdoche for this history in part because, compared to a burning cross, it is simple and quick to manufacture. Hardware stores sell rope, and online videos can instruct any patient person on how to tie the knot. If the rope isn't too large, it's easily concealed and portable. The noose is instant hate. And what happened in Jena, Louisiana, was not an anomaly. It wasn't the first noose incident, and it wasn't the last. The noose has become the new burning cross, the ready symbol for expressing hate and fostering a climate of fear in workplaces, schools, and neighborhoods throughout the United States.\n\nBut should noose incidents really be taken seriously? To address this question we must seek out patterns, causes, and effects. The incidents fall into a number of obvious categories. Quite a few of these incidents, like what happened to Jason Upthegrove, are racially motivated attempts to intimidate African Americans. Such incidents reveal a desire on the part of the perpetrator to control a minority group or individual, to limit their free speech or social mobility\u2014the latter is particularly common. Nooses are often displayed as a way to censor, discipline, or intimidate a perceived outsider or outsider group.\n\n\u2022 In Ruston, Louisiana, a Honduran immigrant found a noose hanging from her garage on June 13, 2008. A neighbor, Robert Jackson, placed the noose there to intimidate African American men who had visited her house. Jackson was prosecuted under the Fair Housing Act and sentenced to twelve months in a federal prison.\n\n\u2022 On August 30, 2010, in Elwood, Indiana, twenty-five miles down the road from Marion, the only African American employee at a small manufacturer found a noose dangling from a time clock a week after he began work there.\n\n\u2022 In October 2010, a few weeks after moving into a predominantly white neighborhood in Noblesville, Indiana, an African American family found a noose in their yard\u2014this in addition to people driving by and shouting racial epithets.\n\n\u2022 Specialist Adam Jarrell was the lone African American in his unit of the New Mexico Army National Guard stationed in Afghanistan. After being called various racial slurs, he found a noose hanging outside his barracks. Jarrell may have been harassed also because he reported the physical abuse of two subordinates by another officer.\n\n\u2022 A series of complaints of racism lodged against US Capitol architect Stephen Ayers's office exposed racial tension among the blue-collar workforce on the Capitol grounds. In one reported incident a noose was discovered hanging in a break room.\n\n\u2022 In May 2012 a noose was found hanging from a tree outside Varina High School in Henrico County, Virginia (where Gabriel Prosser lived). The culprit was a student who claimed that he didn't mean it to be seen as a racist symbol or an attack on any specific person.\n\n\u2022 On June 7, 2012, an interracial couple moving into a new home in Brazoria County, Texas, found \"No Niggers\" spray-painted on their garage and \"KKK\" along with a picture of a noose on a sidewalk that led to their front door. The next day the community came out to support them with welcome cards and gifts.\n\n\u2022 In April 2013, in Meridian, Mississippi, black mayoral candidate Percy Bland found a noose hanging outside his office. Bland ultimately became Meridian's first black mayor on July 1, 2013.\n\nThe noose is also being transmitted via communications technologies. These high-tech lynchings, to borrow Justice Clarence Thomas's now-famous phrase from his Supreme Court nomination hearing, occur via fax machines and cell phones. In March 2010 South Carolina Democrat and then\u2013House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn was faxed a picture of a noose in the wake of the House's vote to approve health care reform. In January 2011 California state Senator Leland Yee also received noose faxes. High-profile politicians are not the only victims of high-tech nooses. In early September 2010 an African American student at a mostly white high school in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, received a text message of an image of a brown beer bottle with a noose and three beer cans dressed as KKK members. His family had recently moved to the community from Philadelphia. Police filed charges against suspects for ethnic intimidation and harassment. Later someone spray-painted \"Go back to Philly or else KKK\" on the Fletchers home while they were on vacation. And in early February 2011 a school bus driver in Fort Mill, South Carolina, sent a text to several friends and coworkers with an image of a noose hanging from what appears to be a swing set. A message attached read, \"I called Fisher Price and asked if they had black swing sets. They sent me this one. Sweet.\" The bus driver said it was just a joke, but she was fired nonetheless.\n\nPerhaps it is the anonymity of some communications technologies that fosters such incidents. Some noose incidents are not anonymous in part because the perpetrator claims other intentions, like the bus driver did. One particular manifestation of the noose happens every year in late October when some homeowners decorate their houses and yards for Halloween and incorporate nooses\u2014either just the noose itself or a mannequin in a noose hanging from a tree. Some Halloween displays are more public than others, though. In October 2011 a highway billboard in Pittsburgh displayed a hanging person to help advertise the Haunted Hayloft and one of its main attractions, a re\u00adenactment of the 1889 hanging of the Nicely Brothers. Other seasonal decorative nooses are both obviously racist and borderline ridiculous. In December 2010 a white separatist in Hayden, Idaho, built a snowman in his yard, complete with Klan hat and noose in hand.\n\nSince Barack Obama became president in 2008, one source reported in October 20, 2010, there have been over 106 noose incident\u2013related lawsuits. And the political rhetoric, directed toward President Obama and his policies, has also brought out the noose. In September 2010, in Miles City, Montana, a Tea Party affiliate displayed a hangman's noose at their booth at the Eastern Montana Fair. The incident created a heated debate in the community\u2014on the streets and in the local media outlet. A member of the group that displayed the noose claimed that \"a lot of ads use symbolism to make something stick in your mind. That's all it was.\" But this noose appeared in a display of a political organization whose rhetoric specifically attacks the policies of the United States' first black president.\n\nIn the weeks prior to the 2012 election there were a number of noose incidents directed toward President Obama. Some involved hanging chairs, a reference to Clint Eastwood's GOP convention speech in which he addressed an empty chair, a stand-in for President Obama. Certainly this isn't the first time a political leader has been depicted wearing a noose\u2014this is a global phenomenon. Around the same moment the Obama nooses were appearing in the United States Greek protestors were depicting German Chancellor Angela Merkel wearing one. A year or so earlier Egyptian protestors did the same with Hosni Mubarak. More recently, when the Italian government's first black minister, C\u00e9cile Kayenge, visited the town of Pescara, an extremist group hung nooses from lampposts. (Two days beforehand a white senator had compared her to an orangutan.) Certainly there is free speech, but perhaps there are limits to what is considered \"free speech.\" The noose is, of course, violent and threatening speech. And there's something all the more problematic and prescient here: the people responsible for the Obama noose incidents were white males targeting the policies of a black male.\n\nMark Potok thinks the return of the noose is part of a reaction from white people who have become more aware of the Census Bureau's prediction that by 2050 they'll lose their numerical majority in the United States. And now there's a black president in the White House. Some people feel threatened, he says, \"and these are just those feelings playing out.\"\n\n\"What does the noose symbolize for you?\" I ask.\n\n\"Well, the noose symbolizes that if you don't act the way I want you to, you will die. That's essentially what the threat is. The threat is rarely followed by murder. I don't know of a single case, but that's the obvious implication of the threat. The noose has no other purpose other than to hang people until they are dead.\"\n\nPotok's job is to expose and, sometimes, humanize these crimes. He's very honest, abrupt, and to the point. When I ask him whether hanging a noose is a hate crime, his answer is straightforward. \"If the intention is to frighten or somehow warn someone about the way they better act\u2014it absolutely is a hate crime,\" he says. Without taking a breath, he claims, \"It's a form of terrorism. It's not blowing up buildings, but it's a form of instilling fear in your enemies or also in someone you see as your enemy and everyone else who looks like that person. And that's what makes it terrorism.\"\n\nAccording to Potok about 56 percent of hate crimes go unreported, so it's hard to tell whether we are witnessing an increase. What he will say with some certainty is that we are witnessing a backlash to inevitable change, something our country has always gone through. \"There was a backlash after slaves were freed, after women got the right to vote, against Catholics at the beginning of the twentieth century, certainly with the civil rights movement and the gay rights movement\u2014each of these things produced a major backlash. It takes a while,\" he says, \"to change a society's reactionary ways.\"\n\n\"Postracial\" Noose\n\nShould noose incidents be considered hate crimes? A hate crime means, essentially, a crime that targets someone because she belongs to a particular group. Laws protecting victims of such crimes are a relatively recent phenomenon, but certainly they are rooted in the violent histories discussed in this book. This is not surprising: hate crimes are about enforcing a social order. They are, as Barbara Perry writes, \"a mechanism of power intended to sustain somewhat precarious hierarchies, through violence and threats of violence.\" In other words, hate crimes act out already-present conditions on a more intense scale.\n\nHate crime laws have their roots in the wake of the American Civil War, specifically in the Fourteenth Amendment's guarantee of equal protection under the law, and they were enhanced, in part, by the passage of the federal Civil Rights Act in 1964. Hate crime began being monitored as such in 1990 when George Bush Sr. signed the federal Hate Crimes Statistics Act into law. It requires the US attorney general to compile information on crimes motivated by religion, race, ethnicity, or sexuality. But reporting is mixed. Every state reports differently, and some states report no crimes for certain categories. (And nongovernmental organizations like the SPLC and the Anti-Defamation League do their own monitoring as well.) Laws about who is protected from hate crime differ across the nation as well. For example, although most states have laws protecting victims of crimes based on hatred of specific races, ethnicities, or religious faiths, fewer protect against crimes motivated by someone's hatred of the victim's sexuality. (Though a 2009 bill in the wake of the high-profile Matthew Shepard case may change this at a federal level.) In March 2013 the Department of Justice released a report estimating that over 250,000 hate crimes (with victims over the age of twelve) occur each year.\n\nIt is in the very nature of hate crimes that they destabilize already fragile community relations. This may have been what Daniel Lee Jones was thinking when he mailed the noose to Jason Upthegrove\u2014an activist, an agitator, in Jones's mind, most likely. A black man who didn't know his place. But it's not just the violent threat implied by the crime itself; it's also the psychological effects of the crime on the community\u2014the fear and intimidation produced\u2014and these effects are largely incalculable. Communities learn of these crimes. They imagine it could happen to them. And then they change their lives and patterns. This fallout is what the judge addressed during Jones's sentencing. Jones, he said, was not just threatening Jason Upthegrove and his family; he was also threatening a community already on the edge and perhaps giving the green light to other racists. For Daniel Lee Jones, this nexus of race and hate did not pan out. The federal government, backed by the Constitution and legal precedent, protected Upthegrove and, in a sense, reinforced his right to free speech in the public sphere.\n\nThinking about First Amendment rights\u2014of the victims and of the perpetrators\u2014is important, but legal scholar Jeannine Bell believes it's more important to consider the impact of the noose on victims. She notes that in popular culture it holds a particularly negative connotation for African Americans, and the media often pick up on this; the media \"almost uniformly describe the noose in a manner consistent with its historical meaning as a racially offensive symbol used to intimidate.\" They will offer the commentary of experts, of numbers of lynchings, or they will bring up analogies to the swastika or burning crosses. This coverage can add to the impact of the incident itself and perhaps exacerbate the effects of the hate crime.\n\nIn the wake of Jena many state legislators rushed to ban the noose, but noose hangings were already illegal according to employment and criminal law as well as civil rights legislation. And yet legislatures in North Carolina, New York, and Louisiana, among others, made noose hanging illegal. In New York, for example, legislation was a response to a spate of noose incidents in Hempstead, Long Island, and in New York City. On October 22, 2007, the New York State Senate passed legislation (S6499) sponsored by Republican Senator Dean Skelos of Rockville Centre. This legislation makes \"it a felony to etch, paint, draw, or otherwise place or display a noose on public or private property with intent to threaten, intimidate, or harass.\" Skelos claimed that \"there is no place for racism and intimidation in America and this rash of incidents clearly demonstrates the need for tough new penalties.\" State Senate Majority Leader Joseph L. Bruno added, \"This legislation recognizes that a noose continues to be a powerful symbol of racism and intimidation towards African Americans.\" He added that noose incidents are \"menacing and disturbing.\"\n\nBell says such bills are a good start but don't address situations in which the noose is hung as a joke or prank\u2014\"those who, like the students at Jena High, do not appreciate the significance of the hangman's noose. Such perpetrators impart fear and intimidation, but cannot be punished under the legislation specially aimed at the harm they cause with nooses.\" For noose hangers to be prosecuted there must be a clear intention to intimidate. This, she says, is problematic because it negates the feelings of the victim. Even if the perpetrator meant it as a joke, a burning cross or a noose could cause a great deal of harm for those who see it. Bell says that whenever hate symbols are displayed, courts need to \"incorporate the victim's perspective.\" She advocates a \"victim-centered\" approach that \"focuses only on punishing the 'wordless speech' in readily identifiable extreme symbols of racial hatred like the hangman's noose.\" When courts reject the victim-centered approach, \"the hangman's noose changes from what victims and the rest of society sees\u2014an unmistakable sign of violence wrought by the Ku Klux Klan\u2014into a harmless prank. Validating the perpetrator's perspective in this way is symbolic of the lynch mob all over again.\"\n\nThe Nooses in Jena\n\nWhen the nooses appeared on that oak tree in Jena, Louisiana, on the morning of September 1, 2006, some of the black students who heard about it didn't understand the significance of them. Or at least that's what former Jena High School student Robert Bailey told Alan Bean, a Baptist minister and activist from Tulia, Texas, and the man who helped publicize the Jena 6 case. But when those students went home that day and told their parents, their parents were livid. They organized a meeting at a local Baptist church and made plans to speak at the next school board meeting. And those black students, perhaps armed with a better understanding of the meaning of the noose, held a sit-in the next day beneath that oak tree. Reactions from white students to the protest were mixed: some agreed, some were indifferent, and others were angered by it. There was some shoving, some pushing, some yelling. Clear divisions were being drawn in the schoolyard.\n\nAs Bean tells it, there had always been some animosity between black and white students, and even between black students and white teachers. After the noose incident and student protest, tension in the school was palpable. The campus was put on lockdown\u2014law enforcement officers swarmed the place, and the school administration called an assembly. At that assembly all of the white kids sat on one side of the auditorium and all of the black kids on the other. At one point during the assembly District Attorney Reed Walters addressed the students, saying he was tired of their behavior. And then he said, \"I just want you all to realize that I can make your lives disappear with a stroke of my pen.\"\n\nThe noose hangings were discussed at the next school board meeting. The high school principal wanted the noose hangers expelled, but he would not get his way. The noose hangers claimed they meant it as a joke aimed at kids on the school's rodeo team. They claimed to have recently seen an episode of the television show Lonesome Dove that inspired them to make the nooses. They said they didn't really understand the history of lynching in America and, according to at least one journalist, \"became visibly remorseful\" when told about it. The students were given nine days suspension in an off-campus alternative school, two weeks in-school suspension, and a number of Saturday suspensions. They were also required to attend a discipline court and undergo psychological evaluations to determine whether they were a threat to themselves or their classmates.\n\nIn an interview with Jena Times reporter Craig Franklin, LaSalle School Superintendent Roy Breithaupt and LaSalle District Attorney Reed Walters said there was a \"full investigation\" in the wake of the noose hangings. The investigation found that the nooses were first seen early in the morning, at about 7:55 a.m. They were made of nylon ski rope and were cut down almost immediately. According to LaSalle School System Child Welfare Supervisor Melinda Edwards, they conducted multiple interviews with the perpetrators and came to the conclusion that the students \"did not have a knowledge of black history in relation to the hanging of black citizens in the south.\" When they learned the history \"they really were very remorseful,\" Edwards said. Besides, she notes, when the student asked the assistant principal whether he could sit under the oak tree in the school yard, \"Everyone laughed including the black student who asked the question. That exchange has been misconstrued by certain persons to formulate a reason for the hanging of the nooses.\"\n\nWhen a group of African American parents was allowed to speak at one of the meetings, they protested what they saw as the board's leniency toward the noose hangers. They wanted the school board to acknowledge it was a hate crime, that it was motivated by race. They were allowed to speak for five minutes. After they spoke the meeting went on as scheduled; the nooses, along with the history they raised from the dead, were apparently ignored. Life carried on in Jena. By the end of September 2006 the Jena Giants football team was having a winning season, and all seemed well\u2014as it does in small southern towns with successful football programs. Two of the team's star players were black students Mychal Bell and Carwin Jones. But victories on the gridiron couldn't erase the history of race relations in Jena, Louisiana, or in the South, for that matter. Tensions mounted on and off campus. On Thursday night, November 30, 2006, someone set fire to a classroom building at Jena High School. The culprits have never been apprehended. The incident made the situation more difficult. For one, the school administration was thrown for a loop\u2014they had to figure out where to have classes. And secondly, many assumed the fire had something to do with the bubbling animosity between black and white students.\n\nThe next evening two black students, Robert Bailey and Theo Shaw, tried to attend a private dance at a local dance hall. A few black students had been invited and were already inside. Bailey had gotten a call from one of these students, telling him to come on in. But when he tried to enter the hall, he was asked to leave. Then Bailey was attacked by a white man named Justin Sloan, who was later charged with simple battery. The next day, at a local convenience store, Bailey and two friends encountered one of the white men who had attacked him the night before. The white man took a shotgun out of his truck, and Bailey and his friends wrestled the gun away.\n\nThe following Monday a white student named Justin Barker was assaulted as he was walking out of the gym. Barker was apparently knocked out with one punch. Some say he was kicked while on the ground. The primary assailant, according to teachers, was Mychal Bell. According to Alan Bean, it's virtually impossible to know for sure what happened\u2014and he even wonders about who was involved. Some have said that Barker had been teasing Bailey for getting beaten up on Saturday; others have said that Barker was friends with the noose hangers. Six students were arrested in connection with the fight or attack at school: Carwin Jones, Robert Bailey, Jesse Ray Beard, Mychal Bell, Bryan Purvis, and Theo Shaw. Eventually they were all charged with attempt to commit second-degree murder and conspiracy to commit second-degree murder, charges that could carry a maximum sentence of life in prison. The six were expelled for the year, but the harsh charges brought the media to the story and about twenty thousand activists to Jena on September 20, 2007\u2014so many people that cell phones wouldn't work and roads were clogged with buses of protestors never making it into town to march.\n\nEventually the charges facing the Jena 6 were reduced. Those young men have moved on, moved away, gone to college. But Alan Bean told me that to focus solely on the fights and the charges against those young men is to miss the point. The point is that there was an underlying issue that wasn't being addressed in the community, and the noose brought it to the surface. And when it got there, it was ignored. On a number of occasions investigators and school officials have said the initial noose incident had no relation whatsoever to the violent confrontations that happened that fall. \"That makes no sense to me,\" Bean said. The noose was what set off the community. The noose is what led to the fights, to the fire, and to the charges of attempted murder filed against six black youths. It was the noose that led to one of the largest civil rights marches in the United States since the 1960s. The noose made it all happen.\n\nAnd it was the noose that led many to quickly paint the community with a broad stroke, to dip into the narrative of the past. An area newsman claimed that the media got it all wrong and that the experience led to a deep distrust among folks in Jena of anyone from the outside. The community of Jena looked inward and, in some cases, upward. One local pastor claimed the \"community saw the church as a rallying point and point of unity and we grew closer than we were before. That's not an admission that there was some problem just that that event brought us closer. Jena is more close-knit than it was.\" In the wake of the incident the community formed a task force of local clergy and leaders to talk about some of the things that happened, but they remain, not surprisingly, hesitant to talk with outsiders.\n\nCommunity-rooted efforts like the Human Relations Committee happened after all the violence and tension, Bean noted. \"It wasn't phony.\" They were trying to address what happened, but there was no real effort to address the heart of the matter, which is an ugly and complicated history. And the heart of the matter, he said, was buried deep in the community, buried deep in the history of the South, an ugly history that almost no one wants to address. \"Everybody wants to feel good about their heritage,\" Bean said, \"but neither black nor white southerners can do that.\" The history of black people in the South is a story of slavery and racist violence. And for white people it's being the perpetrators and being on the losing side of the Civil War. Bean notes that \"white people in the South had cobbled together this myth of the lost cause.\" But then the rest of the world, the rest of the country disrupted that myth in the 1950s and 1960s, and \"it was a tremendous blow to white southerners.\" Addressing the underlying issues in Jena would mean actually confronting that messy past, and that would be overwhelming. That, Bean said, explains why the school board so desired a quick resolution.\n\nIt also might explain why white students at Jena High School claimed they were ignorant of the history of lynching in the United States and in Louisiana. In fact, Louisiana has seen the fourth-most lynchings in the United States\u2014behind Mississippi, Georgia, and Texas\u2014and second-most in lynching per capita. And by 1923 Louisiana had the top three lynching counties in the nation with number of recorded lynchings\u2014Ouachita (19), Caddo (18), and Bossier (15). So what are young people learning about the history of race and violence in the United States and their surrounding communities? Are they learning anything about lynching? There's no way of knowing what takes place in every classroom across the United States, let alone in a small town like Jena. Some Louisiana textbooks do mention lynching. But Louisiana's State Department of Education has curriculum standards, and they do not mention lynching directly. The only mention comes not in the US history classroom but in standards for teaching African American studies, one of nine options that students can take to fulfill a high school social studies elective requirement. Louisiana standards do address Jim Crow, but the vigilante justice that kept those laws and customs in place, the over 391 people lynched in the state, isn't required knowledge. Of course standards do not define everything that happens in a classroom, but they are about accountability and measurement. Standards are also about what state departments of education think well-rounded citizens of the state should know.\n\nThe problem is exacerbated because the offspring of those who lived through 1950s and 1960s don't really know each other. Bean told me that \"a lot of the white kids had gone to white schools in towns around Jena. They were country types, into hunting and fishing, and many of them racist\u2014they were having culture shock. Some of these folks were on the rodeo team, and they cooked up this idea to hang nooses from that tree.\" He thinks of what happened as indicative of a deep resentment. \"The white kids should have been punished in some way as a sign that this will not be tolerated, that it's a breach of the social compact. An expulsion for a month or something. But the real thing is that there was no acknowledgment on the part of the leadership and no desire to educate about the past.\"\n\nJena isn't alone in ignoring this history. \"Look,\" Bean said, \"there are still scars from integration. That's what this is about, fundamentally, whether or not whites and blacks can get along or whether a multi\u00adcultural society can work.\" It disappointed Bean then and disappoints him still that this was never a part of the story. Like many places in the South, in the United States, \"they couldn't handle it, the nooses, a real racist symbol in your face. They couldn't handle it as a community.\" It showed the real differences in perceptions in that community, and the white community experienced a bit of \"cognitive dissonance.\" The tree, he knew, would be central to the story because most people can make that connection. But he was shocked that few people connected the dots between the noose, the tree, and the schoolyard and that adults in the community didn't recognize this moment for what it really was\u2014a litmus test for the future.\n\nFrom the outside looking in, the story seemed clear-cut, at least from the perspective of the national news media. What happened in Jena was evidence, as one BBC News story headline screamed, that \"'Stealth Racism' Stalks Deep South.\" Alan Bean said he was concerned about such stories from the beginning. \"I didn't want it to be about an unreconstructed South. I wanted it to be a story about what happens post-civil rights when schools are integrated and people can't unpack their baggage from the past, the trauma. It was a festering wound.\" So the stories were either \"This is Jim Crow racism!\" or \"This is being blown out of proportion.\" The South today is a different place from the South of the 1960s, he allowed, but there are still things below the surface that mustn't be ignored. There's evidence, though, that some white folks down the road were learning something. On the day of the march in Jena a teenager from nearby Alexandria named Jeremiah Munsen hung nooses from his truck as he drove past demonstrators. Munsen was sentenced to four months in prison for interfering with the marchers' right to travel.\n\nThe noose incident is an easy target. Newscasters with pained faces report on this visible symbol of hatred and note the fear it has provoked in the victim. And yet the noose reveals a more complicated set of truths\u2014the still underdiscussed narrative of violence in American history and the long arc of violence in human history. Interpersonal racism is easier to address than the institutional racism that, perhaps, privately sustains and permits it. In Jena, in an effort to put the past behind them, they cut down the supposed \"white tree,\" but the history was still there, of course.\n\nIt is one thing to point to a symbol and say that symbol is bad; it is another thing entirely to engage with the history that symbol represents. Displaying the noose in the United States carries the resonances of our nation's long lynching history, a history we have yet to reconcile. When we see the noose, whole worlds open up in a terrible and tremendous fashion. To trace the noose's wrapping turns is to trace a violent American history perpetrated against social others, in particular against racial minorities. This includes both a kind of legal \"justice,\" the death penalty, meted out by the state\u2014with all the biases that kind of justice entails\u2014as well as another, extralegal \"justice,\" the democracy of the mob.\n\nThere are also plenty of examples in which the symbol becomes much more. On June 7, 1998, an African American man named James Byrd Jr. was dragged to death behind a truck in Jasper, Texas. During the trial prosecuting his killers, it was revealed that one of them, John William King, was a member of a white supremacist prison gang and had a tattoo of a man hanging from a tree. Wade Michael Page, the neo-Nazi who walked into a Wisconsin Sikh Temple, killing six and wounding four, was a member of a \"white power\" band called 13 Loops. But perhaps the most salient example in the last few decades was when, on March 21, 1981, Michael Donald was found hanging from a tree, a noose around his neck, along a street in Mobile, Alabama. The autopsy revealed that Donald was dead before he was hanged from the tree, and yet that isn't the point: the position of the body and public nature of its display signaled the long history of lynching in America. It wasn't enough to simply kill Donald; his killers, both Klansmen, wanted to display his body in such a manner in order to maximize fear in the black community. One of Donald's killers, James Knowles, described in court the deliberate nature of his own contributions to this lynching. He first went to friend and fellow Klansmen Frank Cox's house to get the rope, used a lighter to seal the ends of the rope, and then tied the hangman's knot. The lawyer questioning him asked him whether he could replicate the knot for the court. Knowles did so, explaining the process and care he took in tying the knot almost as if in passing, like it was second nature. He said, \"There was a strand left over, about like this [indicating], it was cut off and burned, just similar to this right here . . . both ends were cut and burned prior to the time of the noose, so that they wouldn't, neither of them, unravel.\" Then the lawyer asked him why he got the rope from Cox in the first place. Knowles's answer was blunt: \"I intended to use it to hang a black person. . . . Henry [Hays] and me went to East Mobile, and we drove around for a while. Exactly how long, I don't remember. And eventually, we came on Michael Donald, and we kidnapped him and took him to Baldwin County and killed him, and brought him back to Herndon Avenue and hung him up earlier Saturday morning.\"\n\nWhere the nooses used in the Jena incident were a threat, this noose was shaped, turned, and crafted as a tool for killing. In literature a \"turn\" is a major transformation in a poem's narrative, rhetoric, or form. Poet and friend David Baker tells me the turn \"is both a turn in the language, story, argument, and often\u2014like in a sonnet\u2014a turn of the line and visible re-turn of the poem's shape itself.\" It's a dramatic change. \"It's magic,\" he explains. When a noose is formed from rope a kind of sorcery occurs, indeed. The structure is transformed\u2014the meaning of the rope is transformed.\n\nThe noose signifies an international history of execution, legal or otherwise. The knot itself was crafted as a technology of execution; it was the way of death for young and old, men and women, rich and poor\u2014but mostly poor\u2014across centuries. According to one study, 15,800 people have been executed from colonial days into the present in what is now called the United States of America. About half of those executed have been black, and many of those executed were enslaved or poor laborers. The top five occupations for those legally executed have been slave, laborer, farmhand, farmer, and farm laborer. The noose has played an integral role as the violent arm of America's struggles with race and class long before Jena and long before the heyday of lynching.\n\nIt is a serious symbol and, therefore, should be taken as a legitimate threat. The noose represents an act of ultimate violence, and when we look at it we are also gazing upon the sword, the gallows, the guillotine, the gun, the electric chair, the gas chamber, and the syringe. But do we really see these things? In the 1960s Robert Penn Warren wrote, \"When one is happy in forgetfulness, facts get forgotten.\" If we don't remember these things when we see the noose, then we have normalized violence. Or, rather, violence has normalized us. Ultimately that tree in the schoolyard at Jena High School is just a tree. But the noose always means much more than a knot in a rope. The tree can mean and be many things, but the noose can mean and be only one.\nChapter 13\n\nThe Noose in Our World\n\nThe death penalty seems to be on its way out around the world. Ninety-eight countries have abolished it for all crimes. The United Nations has called for a moratorium on the death penalty, most recently in 2010, with 109 votes in favor and 49 votes opposed. In 2013, 173 of the 193 UN member states were execution free. That same year, though, the United States was the only country in the Americas to carry out an execution. And yet in the United States rates of execution have dropped precipitously over the last century. James L. Payne points out that \"if the United States were applying the death penalty at the same rate it was applied in the 1640s, there would have been more than 88,000 executions in the decade 1990\u20131999, instead of the 478 there actually were.\" The total number of executions has dropped since about the middle of the twentieth century. And in the first years of this century they have as well: in 2000 there were 85, and in 2013 there were 39. The death penalty is applied with less and less frequency, in a fashion that borders arbitrariness, but still disproportionately affects the poor and racially marginalized\u2014as it always has. Numerous studies underscore that the death penalty is not a deterrent, that it costs more to put someone to death than to incarcerate them, and, increasingly, families of murder victims are suggesting that the drawn-out process of capital cases do not bring them closure. And sometimes the wrong person ends up on death row. Since 1976, 144 people have been exonerated from death row. In turn it's becoming less popular. A 2013 Pew Research Survey found that 55 percent of Americans support the death penalty, down from 78 percent, the year Billy Bailey was executed.\n\nAnd yet this punishment has not gone away entirely. In 2013 at least 778 executions were carried out in twenty-two countries worldwide. This figure is likely much higher, though, because it doesn't include China, which, according to some estimates, executed several thousand people in 2012 and 2013. The methods for these executions included firing squads, lethal injection, and even hanging, which is still used regularly in Bangladesh, Japan, India, Iran, Pakistan, and Singapore, among others. Currently the United States ranks in the top five worldwide for number of annual executions, trailing only Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Iran, and China. In the time it took me to write this book, 101 people were executed in the United States, though none of them by hanging and none of them in public.\n\nIf I want to witness a hanging execution\u2014if I really want to see the noose do its work\u2014I don't have to go very far. I don't even have to leave my office. There's plenty to see online. Indeed, you don't have to go anywhere special to watch an execution today. Pull out your smartphone. Turn on your laptop. It's right there on the screen: real human beings hanged.\n\nThe most famous hanging in recent years is that of Saddam Hussein on December 30, 2006, and it is readily accessible online. Ostensibly Hussein was executed for crimes against humanity related to his orders to kill 148 Shia men and boys in the town of Dujail in 1982. (His government also seized property and bulldozed homes.)\n\nOn YouTube and elsewhere you can see for yourself one result of the war in Iraq. The disgraced former dictator of Iraq was executed on December 30, 2006. At 5 a.m. that day he was transported from Camp Cropper near the airport to Camp Justice and, wearing a wool cap, scarf, and long black coat, handed over to the Iraqi National Police. Camp Justice is in Kazimain, a suburb northeast of Baghdad, and it used to be called Camp Banzai. And it was where his own operatives, the Istikhbarat (military intelligence group) had used the same gallows to kill Iraqis.\n\nSaddam execution still from Iraqi State Television.\n\nAt Camp Justice he was led into a small, dingy room, cramped with a film crew, guards, and witnesses, including Munkith al-Faourn, deputy prosecutor for the court; Munir Haddad, deputy chief judge for the Iraqi High Tribunal; and Sami al-Askari, member of Iraqi Parliament. The executioners took his hat and scarf and bound his hands in front. They sat him down, and the final verdict, which detailed his crimes against humanity, was read aloud. As it was read, he shouted, \"Long live the nation! Long live the people! Long live the Palestinians!\" He was asked \"if he had any remorse or fear\" and replied negatively: \"No. I am a militant and I have no fear for myself. I have spent my life in jihad and fighting aggression. Anyone who takes this route should not be afraid.\" Curses flew. One guard shouted, \"You have destroyed us!\" To which he replied, \"I have saved you.\" The guard retorted, \"God damn you!\" Hussein responded, \"God damn you.\"\n\nThe videos of the execution show what happened next. To be clear, there are two videos of Hussein's execution. One is official\u2014shot from the platform and aired on television without sound\u2014and doesn't show the drop. The unofficial one\u2014shot from below the scaffold and with sound\u2014is from a cell phone and a bit grainy. You can see and hear the masked executioners, who are apparently Shia. Hussein is led up to the gallows, and his hands are unbound and retied behind his back. He is offered a hood but refuses. Then you see one of the executioners talking to him, explaining what will happen when he's dropped, that the rope might cut through his neck. That executioner then takes Saddam's black scarf and wraps it around his neck. The noose is adjusted with wrapping turns under his left ear. Hussein prays, and then you hear shouts of the name of Shi'ite leader Moktada al Sadr.\n\n\"Moktada! Moktada! Moktada!\"\n\nHussein replies, \"Moktada. . . . Is this how real men behave?\"\n\nThen shouts and noise.\n\nAnd from somewhere, \"Go to hell!\"\n\n\"Please no! The man is about to die.\"\n\nHis head held high, eyes open. Hussein prays the Shahada, his final prayer before death. He says it once, and then, as he's about to repeat it, in midsentence\u2014the drop. After the execution there are shouts of \"The tyrant has fallen! May God curse him!\" And in the cell phone video there's a close-up of his eyes\u2014again wide open but now glassy. Later he was placed into a pine box and flown 110 miles in a helicopter to his hometown of Awja, courtesy of the US military.\n\nBut the story of the Saddam execution wasn't just that he was hanged; it was that things got out of hand, that the execution was not \"civilized\" and that images of the execution leaked. If the hanging had happened smoothly in private, few would have cared and it wouldn't have been an embarrassment for the Bush administration. Instead, a supposedly dignified affair was chaotic. Commentators noted that his executioners were clearly his enemies. A New York Times editorial called it a \"Shiite lynch mob.\" The editors claimed, \"Mr. Hussein has now gone to his grave. But the outrageous manner of his killing, deliberately mimicking his own depraved methods, assures that his cruelty will outlive him.\" The scene did have an air of revenge rather than the apparently high-minded dispensation of justice. Furthermore, amidst the yelling and name calling, Hussein appears to die a good death. He's calm, almost noble, when juxtaposed against that mocking masked crew. Daoud Kuttab, a Palestinian media critic, notes, \"If Saddam had media planners, he could not have planned it better than this. Nobody could ever have imagined that Saddam would have gone down with such dignity.\"\n\nIn the wake of the Hussein execution and viral videos there were at least a half-dozen copycat hangings around the world, including a ten-year-old in Texas, a nine-year-old Pakistani boy, and a twelve-year-old boy in Turkey, among others. Two weeks later Hussein's former intelligence chief Barzan Ibrahim al-Tikriti, and Awad Hamad al-Bandar, the former chief of Hussein's revolutionary court, were hanged. Al-Bandar's went smoothly, but the calculations for al-Tikriti's drop were apparently off\u2014his head was ripped off from his body after a drop of nearly eight feet.\n\nThe war produced other moments of destruction, degradation, and violence, not just for elite former leaders, and much of that was also caught on camera: Saddam's statue is noosed to the ground on April 9, 2003; on March 31, 2004, four armed contractors from Blackwater Security are attacked by a mob, beaten and burned, and their bodies hung from a bridge that crossed the Euphrates River, where civilization began; and then there was Abu Ghraib, with Lynndie England's \"thumbs up\" next to a pile of naked bodies or with cigarette dangling from her mouth as she yanks a dog collar on another naked body, and, of course, the hooded and robed figure of Abdou Hussain Saad Faleh. His arms are outstretched, Christ-like, the ghostly black sleeves of the robe hanging down, but with the tall black Klan-like hood, he looks almost sinister. He's standing on a box with wires attached to his fingers, toes, and penis; he'd been told that he'd be electrocuted if he fell. The photo was taken on November 4, 2003, and was later published in the New Yorker and quickly became the iconic image of the Abu Ghraib scandal. The image is compelling because, as art historian Dora Apel writes, it \"resonates with allusions to the crucifixion, robed monks, the Statue of Liberty, the Klan, the executioner, the mask of death.\" It also reminds one of the suspended figure of a lynched man. Artist Richard Serra made a sketch of the photo and mounted it on a billboard on Tenth Avenue in New York City, an image that was later displayed in the Whitney Museum of Art's Biennial.\n\nThe noose is missing in the Abu Ghraib images, but its work is not. The messy war in Iraq brought forth some of America's basest impulses, including, it seems, that of lynching. Dora Apel suggests that despite different motivations as well as historical moments, we can learn something from putting the Abu Ghraib images and lynching photographs in conversation with one another. Like lynching photographs, the viewer focuses attention on both the victimized body and the seeming shamelessness of the apparent perpetrators\u2014a terrifying juxtaposition. She writes, tellingly, that these scenes are staged by people who assume their actions are community sanctioned, and \"the viewer is meant to identify with the proud torturers in the context of the defense of a political and cultural hierarchy.\" America doesn't have the same history with Arabs and Muslims as it does with the history of slavery, but, she argues, \"the old and unresolved Israeli\/Palestinian conflict, and the effects of the first Gulf War in 1991 have encouraged many Americans to view many Arabs and Muslims with grown suspicion and distrust, which burst into open and wanton violence in the United States following 9\/11.\" Now \"just as black men were stereotyped en masse by white supremacists\" as \"'black beast rapists'; now they are all 'terrorists,' making them far easier to humiliate, torture, sexually exploit, and kill.\"\n\nEgyptian-born artist Haitham Eid made these connections in his 2008 painting \"Noose,\" which was first displayed at New Orleans African American Museum at the Tenth Annual MLK Commemorative Art Exhibit and later at the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Foundation Art Gallery. Eid was taking a graduate course at the New Orleans African American Museum of Art, Culture, and History, in a hall where an African warrior suit and mask were on display. The display mesmerized him\u2014it looked lifelike, like a human being hanging. Somehow, he says, that display merged not only with the image of Abdou Hussain Saad Faleh in his subconscious but also with the history of African Americans in the United States. Out of that merging he created an enormous mixed media painting of a figure with memories as a film strip coming out of his head.\n\n\"The Noose,\" painting by Hai\u00adtham Eid, 2008.   \nUsed with permission of the artist\n\n\"He's remembering,\" he told me in an interview, \"what's happened to him or to his people.\" The suit is that of the African warrior that was the genesis of this painting, the photos are from Abu Ghraib, and the noose, he says, represents the lynching of African Americans in the United States.\n\n\"It's three different cultures, three different injustices coming together, three different unnecessary sufferings.\"\n\nEid, who is working on a PhD in museum studies, insists that museums should be dynamic public spaces that contribute to the public conversation about controversial issues. His painting obviously fosters such a public conversation. At one of its showings it stirred up controversy. Some museum goers thought it was in bad taste and inappropriate for the eyes of young children. At least, he says, that's how the complaints were framed.\n\n\"I used to stand near it and look at people's expressions, and I saw different expressions. Most were shocked, and one person almost cried.\" Perhaps it was shocking and disconcerting, but can't images also be used to teach us, to provoke us? \"With this painting I think I'm trying to ask a very basic question: What kind of memories are we trying to make for ourselves and the generations that come when we create violence? Peace, justice, and human rights can never come through violence.\"\n\nThe Other Hanging Videos\n\nAs I wrote this book I kept coming back to the obvious: the violence of modern punishment and its concomitant culture of retribution have old roots, and despite much progress, we still aren't far from them. Medievalist Robert Mills gets it right when he notes that although there may have been a shift from regularized public torture, \"tell that to the people being tortured now, in the police cells, prisons, detention centres and execution chambers of\u2014yes\u2014the modern West. And tell that to all the people watching violence on television and the silver screen.\" And also, of course, watching execution videos online. There are dozens if not hundreds readily available. In 1908 the US Postmaster General banned mailing lynching postcards, but the World Wide Web doesn't function in the same way.\n\nExecution in Iran, a still from Iranian State Television.\n\nThere's much to be seen if you wish to look. Iraq's neighbor to the east, Iran, still uses the noose and often in a very public manner. Hangings are often publicized events, some are televised, and many are recorded and available on YouTube. At least 580 people were executed in Iran in 2012, and 625 in 2013. In Iran murder, rape, drug trafficking, sodomy, adultery, and apostasy, among other things, can lead to the death penalty. In 2012 the majority of all executions were for drug-related charges\u2014murder accounts for only 6 percent. In 2013 Ahmed Shaheed, the UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights in Iran, claims that, again, the majority of people executed were for drug charges. Iran executes more juvenile offenders than any other country and sets the bar at puberty\u2014age fifteen for boys and nine for girls.\n\nHadi Ghaemi, executive director of the International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran, told me that Iran, like most places, has a long history of hanging executions, but now it has become an important social and political control for the Islamic Republic. After the 1979 Revolution the number of executions in Iran spiked because of the new penal code, the Islamic penal code, and a number of crimes punishable by execution. During the first decade there were tens of thousands, he said. \"We don't know exact numbers, but in the summer of 1988, in the aftermath of the Iran-Iraq War, there were about 4,500 prisoners hanged throughout the country.\" At first executions were mostly by firing squads, but when a penal code was established, hanging became the preferred method, and the Islamic Republic justified it with religious doctrine.\n\nGhaemi says that capital punishment has become a major method for the Islamic Republic to maintain control. In the 1980s, he points out, most executions were of a political nature, but now public executions are often for \"moral\" issues\u2014drug crimes, perceived sexual deviance, and so on. \"According to their own admission and our accounts too, they have occurred over 70 percent for drug-related crimes. . . . But Iran does have a huge drug problem, being a neighbor to Afghanistan and Pakitsan.\" Officials will target poor local dealers who can't buy their way out of the judicial system. They think they could use capital punishment to fight the drug problem, but there's been no indication that it has worked\u2014the drug problem continues to grow. In a sense, Ghaemi says, this is \"a war on poor people, ethnic minorities like Baluchi or Kurdish people, for example. These people are being targeted and sacrificed.\"\n\nBut the increase in public hangings, Ghaemi says, is most disconcerting. \"I'm troubled by the psychological impact of the hangings on the viewer, particularly children. It desensitizes the public through violence, preparing them for further acts of official violence and making violence a formal element of public policy.\" And they are happening more often, he believes, than they did in the pre-Revolution era. There were at least fifty-eight public executions in 2012, and fifty-six in 2013.\n\nGhaemi has paid close attention to where the hangings are happening, when they're happening, and who's attending them. It's this last trend that he's most interested in. \"There seem to be three types of audiences. One, people who know the person to be executed and are angry. Two, people who are coming from the community where the crime was committed, full of this idea of revenge that they have made people accept. And the third are just curious and were raised after the Revolution to believe that this form of public execution is commonplace among people. Remember the majority of Iranians are under thirty-five. So you get a lot of young men who come out of curiosity, and that lynching atmosphere. Hanging people publicly has become normalized.\"\n\n\"But what do you think about the videos online? Don't they do that too?\" I ask.\n\n\"Iran is a closed society, but people are very tech savvy, and they resort to any method to get the material on the web. Many of the pictures come from the regime's own news agency.\"\n\n\"Who are they for?\"\n\n\"They are intended to spread the message that they are capable of extreme violence, a warning to the broader public that any kind of dissent or challenge to our role, we are capable of extreme violence and are not shy about it and international pressure will not deter us.\" And yet they can have the opposite effect.\n\n\"Globally, we're progressive. Things have changed. Change requires a generation of kids to learn something new, different, better.\" He tells me that he remembers in the 1980s hearing environmentalists talk about the need for widespread recycling. And now, lo and behold, people recycle. \"And that happened because young people were educated in schools and in popular culture.\"\n\nMaybe we should see these images as a weapon against tyranny. By documenting atrocities, they can hold a regime accountable in the public sphere. Responding to questions about violent content from the Syrian War posted on YouTube, a spokesperson for the website claimed, \"People around the world have used YouTube to document humanitarian disasters, war zones, and human rights abuses. This material can be quite graphic, yet the Web is a vital source of news and information, and these are events and perspectives that may otherwise never be seen.\" Images can raise awareness, the argument goes: the Marion lynching photo, the body of Emmett Till shown in an open rather than a closed casket, or that of Trayvon Martin. The hanging videos can teach us to respond to the noose in a certain way.\n\nBut what does seeing this violence do to us, viscerally, even if we're being educated? I've watched these videos, and I can't help wondering: How can this ever be normalized? I'm grasping for words here, trying to say something critical and articulate about watching these films, but I can't. I'm reaching, in my mind and in my body, the limits of this history of the noose. In one film a crane slowly lifts a man off the ground, red rope tied into noose. In another, the daytime hanging of an alleged rapist, crowds of spectators hold up their cell phones to take pictures. And then, five men standing on oil drums at a city intersection, the drums are kicked out, and they kick and lurch. The dark sky and a street light with rope attached, white pickup truck, red brake lights, truck goes into gear, moves forward, a man falls, but the film continues; he kicks, swings his arms, kicks, swings. The last one I watch gives me some hope: a crowd of onlookers rushes the gallows and pulls the hanged men down.\n\nThe Hanged Man's Tale\n\nIn 1996 a man named Niazali was hanged in Iran after having been convicted of manslaughter. After twenty minutes in the noose his face turned black and his tongue thrust forward. His executioners took him down from the rope and sent the body to the morgue. There the coroner began his inspection and discovered that Niazali was alive. He was revived in a local hospital and unceremoniously sent back to prison. He said, \"That first second lasted like a thousand years. I felt my arms and legs jerking out of control. Up on the gallows in the dark, I was trying to fill my lungs with air, but they were crumpled up like plastic bags.\" Niazali speaks to us from the ghostly interstices of limbo, somewhere between the living and the dead, from a place few can talk about\u2014from beneath the execution hood.\n\nSurviving the gallows, though, is extraordinary, but if the hanged could speak, what would they say? Would they be able to speak of their experience? Would they offer us a rarified calculus of pain? Would we comprehend it? Elaine Scarry notes that we have no words to describe pain, \"unlike any other state of consciousness\u2014[it] has no referential content.\" Most importantly, Scarry asserts, \"physical pain is not only itself resistant to language but also actively destroys language, deconstructing it into the pre-language of cries and groans. To hear those cries is to witness the shattering of language.\" Indeed, the knot constricts the throat, the vocal cords, and it effectively silences speech. It is, to borrow from John Conroy, an unspeakable act. Unspeakable because the deceased can't describe what they've experienced. Unspeakable because violence, any kind of violence, happens when we abandon speech, when we abandon language. Unspeakable because it is an act that I, the writer, cannot ever adequately describe.\n\nAnd yet the hangman's noose can tell us a story across time and place. It represents a history of violence, a history that for some signifies the proper execution of justice and, for others, the limits of government (or, better, human compassion). It represents horror, helplessness, and hopelessness. In a very material way the body hanged from the noose is a sign that someone has been accused and convicted, that some form of justice\u2014popular or governmental\u2014has been passed. It is an ignoble way to die, chosen for its victims in part because of the kind of death it imposes\u2014prolonged strangulation, the kicking legs, and the added shame of the body left to twist in the wind.\n\nIn the 1920s Danish explorer and anthropologist Knud Rasmussen recorded the songs and stories of Inuit people living throughout the Artic. In a Netsilik Inuit community near Hudson Bay he recorded the song of a shaman named Orpingalik. In translation it reads, \"Songs are thoughts, sung out with the breath when people are moved by great forces and ordinary speech no longer suffices.\" Those are some of the most beautiful words I've ever encountered, words that connect me with Orpingalik because I can empathize. I know what he's talking about; you know what he's talking about\u2014the beautiful things that make us all sing.\n\nRasmussen recorded these songs because he believed, as I do, that our humanity is found in what we leave behind. Our history is recalled, as any archaeologist or museum curator will tell you, in the objects we use, touch, and carry: a coffee mug, a hammer, a steering wheel. This is the kind of history I have been pursuing while writing this book: the history of an object and the human hands that formed it, the human necks it touched. Despite the morbid nature of this object and the topic, I've learned that despite all the death, there is life here. Much life. Beautiful life. Life in the fearless activism of Jason Upthegrove and J. B. Weston. Life in the stories of Bee Tompkins. Life in the artistry of Glenn Dickey.\n\nWhen I was in that casino in Flandreau, South Dakota, just after J. B. Weston told me a third time that I needed to think about putting that noose around my own neck, I lost it. Just a bit.\n\n\"Listen,\" I told him, \"I've been researching and writing about this thing, the noose, for a few years now. Do you think that I haven't thought about that? About what that might mean? When I was in high school my friend Pierce put a noose made from a belt around his neck and hanged himself. I get it. So you can just stop with the putting the noose around my neck stuff.\"\n\n\"Right there,\" he said. \"That. You need to write from that. That's from the heart.\"\n\nThis is not a book about suicide. I never intended it to be. But in that moment, the most confusing moment of this project, that's all I could think of. Herman Melville writes in \"Benito Cereno\" at the moment Captain Amasa Delano finally understands the truth of his situation: \"All this with what preceded, and what followed, occurred with such involutions of rapidity, that past, present, and future seemed one.\"\n\nAt Flandreau my past, present, and future collided, and all I could see was an image: I'm sitting on the floor of Pierce's bedroom. The place where it'd happened. Other teenagers too, in a circle on the beige-carpeted floor in an innocuous red-brick McMansion on an innocuous suburban street. Beige carpet. Beige walls. It's late in the afternoon, and the lights are off and the blinds drawn, sunshine and shadows on one wall. I didn't know Pierce that well. I'd met him a year before at South Carolina Governor's School for the Arts, a summer-long arts program for aspiring young artists. It was a pivotal moment for me\u2014for once someone besides myself thought of me as an artist, a writer. And I met other people like me and discovered I wasn't alone in this universe, that I could claim common cause with these people. Over the next year, my senior year in high school, a group of us gathered on occasion\u2014two actors, some painters, some musicians, and me, the writer. One August we went to Lollapalooza; Pierce came too. Someone brought a shampoo bottle full of bourbon, and they were drinking from the bottle in the backseat of my air-condition-less Jeep Cherokee as we drove to the concert. The windows were rolled down, and the noise from the Charlotte traffic competed with the sounds of teenage boys and Nirvana on the radio. And then, almost a year later, Pierce killed himself.\n\nI can hear J. B. Weston as I type at my desk, a rope formed into a hangman's knot buried under some scissors and pens and a hidden flask of bourbon in the desk drawer next to me. I hear him say, \"That was a man. That was a man. That was a man. That was a man.\" An incantation. A prayer. That was a man, arms bound behind his back, a walking spectacle, moving slowly down the road or across the prison yard. Up the steps of the gallows or ladder. The noose is placed around his neck. Adjusted. The drop, and that was a man, that was a man, that was a man, that was a man.\nNotes\n\nPreface\n\n. Kouross Esmaeli, Rick Rowley, and Jacqueline Soohen, The Jena 6, pt. 2, Big Noise Film, 2007. One local journalist claims there was no \"whites-only tree,\" but others contradict that story. There's enough evidence to believe that many black students believed it to be true. See Craig Franklin, \"Media Myths About the Jena 6,\" Christian Science Monitor, October 24, 2007, www .csmonitor.com\/2007\/1024\/p09s01-coop.html.\n\n. Craig Franklin, \"DA\/School Officials Grant Exclusive Interviews,\" Jena Times, October 3, 2007.\n\n. Quoted in Ibid.\n\n. \"EEOC Chairwoman Responds to Surge of Workplace Noose Incidents at NAACP Annual Convention,\" US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, Press Release, July 13, 2000, www.eeoc.gov\/eeoc\/newsroom \/release\/7\u201313\u201300-b.cfm.\n\n. I tracked from September 2010 to September 2013. My method for tracking was pretty simple and unscientific: I created a Google alert with the word \"noose\" and looked for stories that more than one media outlet covered.\n\n. See Bill McKelway, \"Thomas Dale Students Charged with Assault in Noose Incident,\" Richmond Times-Dispatch, May 17, 2011, http:\/\/www.timesdispatch.com\/news\/thomas-dale-students-charged-with -assault-in-noose-incident\/article_5d7e84cb-ab5f-57bd-9da7-09c48 8b0564e.html; \"Teens Suspended After 'Bullying' Girl with Noose at High School,\" WBTV (North Carolina), January 11, 2012, www.14news.com \/story\/16497338\/student-makes-noose-out-of-string-at-high-school-deputies -say; Larry McShane, \"3 White Chicago Teens Busted for Putting Noose Around Neck of Black Teen for Dating White Woman\" (New York) Daily News, January 26, 2012, www.nydailynews.com\/news\/crime\/3-white -chicago-teens-busted-putting-noose-neck-black-teen-dating-white -woman-police-article-1.1012379; \"School Probes Noose Hazing Accusations,\" Fox16.com, October 3, 2012, www.fox16.com\/news\/local\/story \/School-probes-noose-hazing-accusations\/d\/story\/9c2FtcPFzUC _KArafDaNxg.\n\n. Sheldon H. Laskin, \"Jena: A Missed Opportunity for Healing,\" Tikkun (November\u2013December 2007): 29\u201373. For more general information about lynching in Louisiana, see Michael J. Pfeifer's \"Lynching in Louisiana,\" http:\/\/academic.evergreen.edu\/p\/pfeiferm\/louisiana.html, and \"Apologizing to Lynching Victims and Their Descendants,\" US Congressional Record 151, no. 77 (June 13, 2005): S6364\u2013S6388.\n\n. Daniel T. Williams, Amid the Gathering Multitude: The Story of Lynching in America, A Classified Listing (Unpublished: Tuskegee University, 1968). This number has been questioned by scholars in recent years because there were frequent inconsistencies in how events were reported. See Chapter 8 for more on these numbers. Useful places to start researching the numbers of lynching include the Tuskegee Institute News Clippings File (Tuskegee Institute, Alabama: Division of Behavioral Science Research, Carver Research Foundation, Tuskegee Institute. Sanford, NC: Microfilming Corporation of America, 1976), NAACP's Thirty Years of Lynching, 1889\u20131918 (New York: NAACP, 1919), and Stewart E. Tolnay and E. M. Beck's A Festival of Violence: An Analysis of Southern Lynchings, 1882\u20131930 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995). See also, Lisa D. Cook, \"Converging to a National Lynching Database\" (May 2011), https:\/\/www.msu.edu\/~lisacook \/hist_meths_lynch_paper_final.pdf.\n\n. Christopher Waldrep, The Many Faces of Judge Lynch: Extralegal Violence and Punishment in America (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002): 149.\n\n. Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (New York: Picador, 2003), 92.\n\n. Natalie Zemon Davis, Society and Culture in Early Modern France (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1975). See also Raymond Williams, Television: Technology and Cultural Form (New York: Schocken Books, 1975) for another way to think about cultural technologies.\n\n. When I began work on this project a friend gifted me a 1953 edition of Charles Duff's A New Handbook on Hanging (Chicago: Henry Regnery Company, 1953), a revised version of his original polemic, A Handbook on Hanging. Duff's satire is a trove of anecdotes covering the vast history of hanging, and it is an important work in the anti\u2013capital punishment canon. I owe much respect to Duff as well as to August Mencken's 1942 By the Neck: A Book of Hangings (with a foreword written by his older brother, journalist and essayist Henry Louis) (New York: Hastings House) and Negley K. Teeters and Jack H. Hedblom's Hang by the Neck . . . : The Legal Use of Scaffold and Noose, Gibbet, Stake, and Firing Squad from Colonial Times to the Present (Springfield, IL: C. C. Thomas, 1967)\u2014these books helped shape my own vision.\n\nchapter 1\n\n. Cyrus L. Day, \"Knots and Knot Lore,\" Western Folklore 9, no. 3 (1950): 230.\n\n. Ibid., 231.\n\n. Donald P. Ryan and David H. Hansen, A Study of Ancient Egyptian Cordage (London: British Museum, 1987), 9. Some knots may be shared across species. In 2005 primatologists Chris Herzfeld and Dominique Lestel published an article claiming there is some verifiable evidence that great apes can in fact tie knots in captivity. They surveyed a number of captive apes that had demonstrated some ability to tie knots, and from this, they assert that much of this behavior could be learned from watching their keepers. They note that knot-tying skills would be useful for making nests but add that, with only one exception, no one has seen apes doing this in the wild. See Chris Herz\u00adfeld and Dominique Lestel, \"Knot Tying in Great Apes: Etho-Ethnology of an Unusual Tool Behavior,\" Social Science Information 44 (2005): 621\u2013653. Naturalist\u2014and latter-day cryptozoologist, a.k.a., Bigfoot hunter\u2014Ivan T. Sanderson claims to have discovered dozens of knots (grannies and reef knots) in a gorilla nest during an early twentieth-century expedition. See Ivan T. Sanderson, Animal Treasure (New York: Viking, 1937), 187.\n\n. \"What Does the IGKT Do?\" International Guild of Knot Tyers, www .igkt.net.\n\n. Tim Ingold, The Perception of the Environment: Essays in Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill (New York: Routledge, 2000), 347.\n\n. James George Frazer, The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion, vol. 1, pt. 1 (New York: Macmillan, 1922), 80.\n\n. Rodger Ide, \"Knots Under the Microscope: Part 1,\" Knotting Matters: The Magazine of the International Guild of Knot Tyers, June 2009, 25.\n\n. Ibid.\n\n. Middleton A. Harris et al., The Black Book (New York: Random House, 2009), 55.\n\n. Mel Distel, \"What Happened Tonight: Hanging a Noose on Someone's Door Is Not a Crime,\" Facebook, October 28, 2010, 10:36 p.m., http:\/\/facebook.com\/meldistel.\n\n. Clifford Ashley, Ashley Book of Knots (Garden City, NY: Doubleday and Co., 1944), 203.\n\n. Richard Godwin, \"Power Dressing Now Means a Pair of Plimsolls,\" London Evening Standard, May 23, 2012.\n\n. \"The Burden of Being 'Most Likely to Succeed,'\" Talk of the Nation, National Public Radio, May 31, 2011.\n\n. Ashley, Ashley Book of Knots, 203.\n\n. Ibid., 204.\n\n. Ibid., 118.\n\n. Ashley mentions a few heaving line knots, including #538 and #540. Author, IGKT member, and respected forensic knot expert Lindsey Philpott suggested to me in an interview that it may have a relationship to a heaving line. That's his \"best bet,\" he said, and added, \"the people who took cargo from one place to another, they were using a monkey fist as a heaving line. But they also used the heaving line knot, which used multiple wraps around the rope and then is tucked through to make weight. And they realized that this is a very stiff object. And then I guess they put two and two together and said, 'well, if I can put multiple wraps on the rope to make it stiff, maybe that will help to make it stiff and can help snap their neck when they drop.' And then you just have to get them to drop far enough.\"\n\n. Ashley (Ashley Book of Knots, 204) notes that a knot with a similar appearance is mentioned in Diderot's 1762 Encyclopedia.\n\n. \"Man Survives Passing Out with Head in Museum Noose,\" Associated Press, September 23, 2010.\n\n. \"Teen Worker at Haunted House 'Creepyworld' Found Caught in Noose,\" St. Louis Post-Dispatch, October 28, 2011.\n\n. Julian Kesner, \"Quick, Painless End, Unless, . . .\" New York Daily News, December 30, 2006.\n\n. Richard Clark, \"Hanged by the Neck Until Dead! The Processes and Physiology of Judicial Hanging,\" Capital Punishment UK, www.capital punishment.uk.\n\n. Harold Hillman, \"The Possible Pain Experienced During Executions by Different Methods,\" Perception 22 (1993): 746.\n\n. Quoted in Jacob Weisberg, \"This Is Your Death,\" New Republic, July 1, 1991, 24.\n\n. Hillman, \"The Possible Pain Experienced,\" 746; The Oxford Handbook of Forensic Medicine notes that if the rope is behind the head, death might be caused by \"compression of the arteries to the brain.\" If the rope is to the side, there may be other factors involved like \"laryngeal disruption and airway disruption\" or brainstem\/spinal cord injuries, blood flow to the brain, and so forth. See Jonathan Wyatt et al., Oxford Handbook of Forensic Medicine (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 106.\n\n. Hillman, \"The Possible Pain Experienced,\" 745.\n\n. Ibid., 50.\n\n. Ibid., 749.\n\n. Elie Boghossian et al., \"Respiratory, Circulatory, and Neurological Responses to Hanging: A Review of Animal Models,\" Journal of Forensic Sciences 55, no. 5 (September 2010), 1272.\n\n. Anny Sauvageau and Stephanie Racette, \"Agonal Sequences in a Filmed Suicidal Hanging: Analysis of Respiratory and Movement Responses to Asphyxia by Hanging,\" Journal of Forensic Sciences 52, no. 4 (July 2007), 957.\n\nchapter 2\n\n. Christian Fischer, Tollund Man: Gift to the Gods (Stroud, Gloucestershire: History Press, 2012), 31.\n\n. As of late there have been many thoughtful discussions about the ethics of displaying a body in a museum. A good place to start is Samuel J. M. M. Alberti, Rose Drew, Piotr Beinkowski, and Malcolm J. Chapman, \"Should We Display the Dead?\" Museum and Society 7, no. 3 (November 2009): 133\u2013149.\n\n. P. V. Glob, The Bog People: Iron-Age Man Preserved, trans. Rupert Bruce-Mitford (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1969), 33.\n\n. Fischer, Tollund Man, 49.\n\n. Glob, The Bog People, 32.\n\n. W. A. B. van der Sanden, Through Nature to Eternity: The Bog Bodies of Northwest Europe (Amsterdam: Batavian Lion International, 1996), 155.\n\n. The exact ethnic origin has long been in dispute among historians.\n\n. Ahmad Ibn Fadlan, Ibn Fadlan's Journey to Russia, trans. Richard N. Frye (Princeton, NJ: Markus Wiener Publishers, 2005), 66.\n\n. Cornelius Tacitus, The Germany and the Agricola of Tacitus: The Oxford Translation Revised, with Notes, with an Introduction by Edward Brooks, Jr. (Philadelphia: David McKay, 1897), 31.\n\n. Ibid.\n\n. Morten Ravn, \"Burials in Bogs: Bronze and Early Iron Age Bog Bodies from Denmark,\" Acta Archaeologica 81 (2010): 112\u2013123, 115; Richard J. Evans, Rituals of Retribution: Capital Punishment in Germany, 1600\u20131987 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 3\u20137.\n\n. Glob, The Bog People, 147.\n\n. Ibid., 192.\n\n. Fischer, Tollund Man, 180.\n\n. Ibid., 181.\n\n. Ibid., 182.\n\n. Ibid., 184\u2013185.\n\n. Ibid., 186.\n\nchapter 3\n\n. Pierpont Morgan Library, Manuscript.M.390, Catholic Church Book of Hours, Bruge Belgium, ca. 1500, 197 Leaves (1 column, 17 lines), bound: 230 x 170mm.\n\n. Sophocles, Sophocles I: Oedipus the King, Oedipus at Colonus, and Antigone, trans. David Greene (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 1274.\n\n. Eva Cantarella, \"Dangling Virgins: Myth, Ritual, and the Place of Women in Ancient Greece,\" Poetics Today 6, no. 1\/2 (1985): 91\u2013101, 94.\n\n. Homer, The Odyssey, trans. Robert Fitzgerald (New York: Vintage, 1990), 422.\n\n. An interesting exception when hanging may have been used is discussed in Frederic Wood Jones, \"The Examination of the Bodies of 100 Men Executed in Nubia in Roman Times,\" British Medical Journal 1, no. 2465 (March 28, 1903): 736\u2013737.\n\n. Richard A. Bauman, Crime and Punishment in Ancient Rome (New York: Routledge, 1996), 23\n\n. Quoted in Cantarella, \"Dangling Virgins,\" 95.\n\n. Joshua 8:29 and Joshua 10:26. See also II Samuel 4:12.\n\n. II Samuel 17:23 (NIV).\n\n. H. H. Halley, Halley's Bible Handbook (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1965), 258.\n\n. Marvin Meyer, Judas: The Definitive Collection of Gospels and Legends about the Infamous Apostle of Jesus (New York: Harper, 2007), 21.\n\n. Matthew 27:5 (KJV).\n\n. Trans. in Otfried Lieberknecht, Death and Retribution: Medieval Visions of the End of Judas the Traitor (Collegeville, MN: Saint John's University, May 13, 1997), 2.\n\n. Acts 1:18 (KJV).\n\n. See Gospel of Judas, trans. Rodolphe Kasser et al., in collaboration with Fran\u00e7ois Gaudard, from The Gospel of Judas, eds. Rodolphe Kasser and others (Washington, DC: National Geographic Society, 2006).\n\n. Lieberknecht, Death and Retribution, 6.\n\n. Kurt Weitzmann, \"Age of Spirituality: Late Antique and Early Christian Art, Third to Seventh Century,\" Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin 35, no. 2 (Autumn 1979): 70\u201371.\n\n. Quoted in Susan Gubar, Judas: A Biography (New York: Norton, 2009), 113; see also St. Jerome, Contra Jovinianus, Book II, para.25.\n\n. St. Ambrose's Three Books on the Holy Spirit, Book 3, trans. H. de Romestin, E. de Romestin, and H. T. F. Duckworth, from Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, 2nd Series, vol. 10, eds. Philip Schaff and Henry Wace (Buffalo, NY: Christian Literature Publishing, 1896), 123.\n\n. Leo the Great, Sermon 55, sec. 3, trans. Charles Lett Feltoe, from Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, 2nd Series, vol. 12, eds. Philip Schaff and Henry Wace (Buffalo, NY: Christian Literature Publishing, 1895).\n\n. Thomas Aquinas, Catena Aurea, Catecheticsonline, www.catechetics online.com\/CatenaAurea-Matthew27.php.\n\n. Archer Taylor, \"The Gallows of Judas Iscariot,\" Washington University Studies 9, no. 2 (1922), 135.\n\n. Ibid., 140.\n\n. Ibid., 142, 144.\n\n. See Richard Axton's \"Interpretations of Judas in Middle English Literature,\" Religion in the Poetry and Drama of the Late Middle Ages in England, eds. Piero Botani and Anna Torti (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1990).\n\n. Recto, Judas: Returning Silver: miniature, full-page, quadripartite, Bologna, Italy, 1325\u201313351 miniature, 206 x 151mm (Manuscript M.360.8), MLM.\n\n. Quoted in Lieberknecht, Death and Retribution, 5.\n\n. The Hanging of Judas, c. 1520, Stained glass, 57.2 x 44.6cm (22 1\/2 x 17 9\/16in.), Kate S. Buckingham Endowment, 1949.494, Art Institute of Chicago. Of course, throughout the Middle Ages Judas is also associated with the Jews. For more about the relationship between Judas and myths of Jewish evil, see Hyam Maccoby, Judas Iscariot and the Myth of Judas Evil (New York: Free Press, 1992).\n\n. Lee R. Sullivan, \"The Hanging of Judas: Medieval Iconography and the German Peasants' War,\" Essays in Medieval Studies 15 (1998), 101.\n\n. Curiously, in an article exploring a more \"humane\" method of hanging, Samuel Haughton writes that hanging executions should be regarded as an Anglo-Saxon method of punishment which seems to have been used in the past for \"cases in which especial ignominy was intended to be attached to the criminal.\" \"On Hanging Considered from a Mechanical and Physiological Point of View,\" The London, Edinburgh, and Dublin Philosophical Magazine and Journal of Science 32 (1866), 23.\n\n. Lynn White Jr., \"The Legacy of the Middle Ages in the American Wild West,\" Speculum 40, no. 2 (April 1965), 199.\n\n. Robert Mills, Suspended Animation: Pain, Pleasure, and Punishment in Medieval Culture (London: Reaktion Books, 2005), 23\u201325.\n\n. Robert Bartlett, The Hanged Man: A Story of Miracle, Memory, and Colonialism in the Middle Ages (Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 2006), 44.\n\n. Ibid., 43.\n\n. The hangman's knot is absent from images of hangings in the Middle Ages, but that doesn't mean that the knot, or a version of it, didn't exist, of course. (Although there seems to be one around Mel Gibson's neck in the incredibly historically inaccurate film Braveheart.)\n\n. Bartlett, The Hanged Man, 45\u201346.\n\n. Peter Linebaugh, \"The Tyburn Riot Against the Surgeons,\" in Albion's Fatal Tree: Crime and Society in Eighteenth-Century England, eds. Douglas Hay et al. (New York: Pantheon, 1975), 102\u2013105.\n\n. Bartlett notes that some were blindfolded but that wasn't a universal practice until the nineteenth century (The Hanged Man, 43). Robert Mills notes the problem of archive: few hangings were recorded, really only the most noteworthy ones, and \"detailed commentaries on the physiological facts of hanging are rare\" (Suspended Animation, 26).\n\n. Lisa McClain, Lest We Be Damned: Practical Innovation and Lived Experience Among Catholics in Protestant England, 1559\u20131642 (New York: Routledge, 2003), 163\u2013165; Constance Classen, The Deepest Sense: A Cultural History of Touch (Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2012), 35.\n\n. Linebaugh, \"The Tyburn Riot,\" 109\u2013111.\n\n. Mitchell Merback, The Thief, the Cross, and the Wheel: Pain and the Spectacle of Punishment in Medieval and Renaissance Europe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 141.\n\n. C. V. Calvert, \"A Brief Account of Criminal Procedure in Germany in the Middle Ages,\" A Hangman's Diary, ed. Albrecht Keller (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1928), 56.\n\n. Merback, The Thief, the Cross, and the Wheel, 142.\n\n. Esther Cohen, The Crossroads of Justice: Law and Culture in Late Medieval France (New York: E. J. Brill, 1993), 93.\n\n. Peter Linebaugh, The London Hanged: Crime and Civil Society in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 53.\n\n. Merback, The Thief, the Cross, and the Wheel, 68.\n\n. Cohen, Crossroads of Justice, 150.\n\n. Esther Cohen, \"Symbols of Culpability and the Universal Language of Justice: The Ritual of Public Executions in Late Medieval Europe,\" History of European Ideas 11 (1989): 404\u2013416, 409.\n\n. Cohen, Crossroads of Justice, 152.\n\n. Cohen, \"Symbols of Culpability,\" 407\n\n. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1995), 48.\n\n. Ibid., 57\u201358.\n\n. Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy: Volume 1, Inferno, trans. Mark Musa (New York: Penguin, 1984), 381 (Canto XXXIV: 61\u201363).\n\n. Ibid., 383 (Canto XXXIV: 136\u2013139).\n\nchapter 4\n\n. Steven Wilf, Law's Imagined Republic: Popular Politics and Criminal Justice in Revolutionary America (New York: Cambridge, 2010), 139\u2013146.\n\n. Clifford M. Lewis and Albert J. Loomie, The Spanish Jesuit Mission in Virginia, 1570\u20131572 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1953). The first execution in the British colonies, though not a hanging, was that of Captain George Kendall by firing squad for mutiny.\n\n. Toni Morrison, A Mercy (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008), 75.\n\n. Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1998), 53\u201354.\n\n. Graham Russell Hodges, Root and Branch: African Americans in New York and East Jersey, 1613\u20131863 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), 14.\n\n. Berlin, Many Thousands Gone, 51; Hodges, Root and Branch, 32.\n\n. Hodges, Root and Branch, 36.\n\n. Berlin, Many Thousands Gone, 187.\n\n. Ibid., 47.\n\n. Ibid., 49.\n\n. Hodges, Root and Branch, 78.\n\n. Berlin, Many Thousands Gone, 58.\n\n. Jerome R. Reich, Colonial America (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1998), 191. Some streets were mostly dark at night though on some streets lanterns were hung after every seventh house.\n\n. Hodges, Root and Branch, 89.\n\n. Berlin, Many Thousands Gone, 59.\n\n. Hodges, Root and Branch, 65; Kenneth Scott, \"The Slave Insurrection in New York in 1712,\" New York Historical Society Quarterly 45 (1961), 47.\n\n. Edgar J. McManus, A History of Negro Slavery in New York (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1966), 95; Scott, \"The Slave Insurrection,\" 45.\n\n. Boston News-Letter, April 7\u201314, 1712.\n\n. Jill Lepore, \"The Tightening Vise: Slavery and Freedom in British New York,\" Slavery in New York, eds. Ira Berlin and Leslie M. Harris (New York: New Press, 2005), 79. For more on trial outcomes, see Scott, \"The Slave Insurrection,\" 62\u201369.\n\n. David Freeman Hawke, Everyday Life in Early America (New York: Harper and Row, 1989), 109; Reich, Colonial America, 192\u2013193.\n\n. Stuart Banner, The Death Penalty: An American History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 10.\n\n. Ibid.\n\n. Ibid., 6; See William Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation (1642).\n\n. David D. Hall, Worlds of Wonder, Days of Judgment (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1989), 168.\n\n. Banner, The Death Penalty, 25.\n\n. Joshua Hempstead, Diary of Joshua Hempstead of New London, Connecticut (New London, CT: New London County Historical Society, 1901), 616\u2013619.\n\n. Banner, The Death Penalty, 24.\n\n. Ibid., 27\u201328.\n\n. See, for example, Increase Mather, \"The Folly of Sinning\" (1698). For more on this genre see Ronald A. Bosco, \"Lectures at the Pillory: The Early American Execution Sermon,\" American Quarterly 30 (1978), or Wayne C. Minnick, \"The New England Execution Sermon,\" Speech Monographs 35 (1968).\n\n. Banner, The Death Penalty, 26.\n\n. Ibid., 22.\n\n. Ibid., 13.\n\n. Daniel E. Williams, \"Rogues, Rascals, and Scoundrels: The Underworld Literature of Early America,\" American Studies 24, no. 2 (Fall 1983), 6.\n\n. Hall, Worlds of Wonder, 181.\n\n. John Winthrop, \"A Modell of Christian Charity,\" Heath Anthology of American Literature: A, ed. Paul Lauter (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2009), 341.\n\n. Louis P. Masur, Rites of Execution: Capital Punishment and the Transformation of American Culture, 1776\u20131865 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 39.\n\n. Banner, The Death Penalty, 8\u20139.\n\n. Winthrop Jordan, White Over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550\u20131812 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1968), 112.\n\n. \"Executions in the U.S. 1608\u20132002: The ESPY File,\" Death Penalty Information Center, www.deathpenaltyinfo.org\/executions-us-1608 \u20132002-espy-file.\n\n. Jill Lepore's New York Burning (New York: Vintage, 2005) offers a thorough examination of this event and exceptional tables of data analysis, xii and 246\u2013259. See also Daniel Horsmanden, The New York Conspiracy, ed. Thomas J. Davis (Boston: Beacon Press, 1971), 467\u2013473.\n\n. This is right where Church becomes Trinity Place.\n\n. Horsmanden, New York Conspiracy, 18\u201320.\n\n. Ibid., 15.\n\n. Ibid., 27.\n\n. Ibid., 26\u201331.\n\n.  New York Weekly Journal, April 27, 1741.\n\n. Ibid.\n\n. Horsmanden, New York Conspiracy, 39\u201342.\n\n. Lepore, \"The Tightening Vise,\" 60.\n\n. Michael Kammen, Colonial New York: A History (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1975), 213\u2013214.\n\n. Horsmanden, New York Conspiracy, 57.\n\n. Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra (Boston: Beacon Press, 2001), 177.\n\n. Boston Weekly News-Letter, June 4\u201311, 1741; Lepore, New York Burning, 104\u2013106.\n\n. Boston Weekly News-Letter, June 18\u201325, 1741.\n\n. Charles Peter Hoffer, The Great New York Conspiracy of 1741 (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2003), 160.\n\n. Horsmanden, New York Conspiracy, 165.\n\n. John Laurence, A History of Capital Punishment (New York: Citadel Press, 1960), 44.\n\n. Banner, The Death Penalty, 47.\n\n. Ibid., 37.\n\n. Horsmanden, New York Conspiracy, 273.\n\n. Ibid., 276.\n\n. Ibid., 274.\n\n. New York Weekly Journal, June 22, 1741.\n\n. Boston Weekly News-Letter, July 16\u201323, 1741.\n\n. Horsmanden, New York Conspiracy, 325.\n\n.  New York Weekly Journal, July 20, 1741.\n\n. American Weekly Mercury, August 13\u201320, 1741.\n\n. New York Weekly Journal, August 17, 1741.\n\n. New York Weekly Journal, June 29, 1741.\n\n. Lepore, New York Burning, 196.\n\n. Lepore and Horsmanden write that his execution was on the 29th, though Hoffer says the 15th.\n\n. Boston Weekly News-Letter, September 3\u201310, 1741.\n\n. Boston Evening-Post, October 5, 1741.\n\n. Boston Weekly News-Letter, September 3\u201310, 1741.\n\n. Lepore, New York Burning, 201\u2013202.\n\n. Quoted in ibid., 205.\n\n. Hoffer, Great New York Conspiracy, 153.\n\n. See, for example, Herbert Aptheker, American Negro Slave Revolts (New York: International Publishers, 1993), 192\u2013195.\n\n. Linebaugh and Rediker, Many-Headed Hydra, 193.\n\n. Ibid., 176.\n\n. Ibid., 206.\n\n. Ibid., 207.\n\n. Jordan, White Over Black, 116\u2013118.\n\n. Philip D. Morgan, \"Conspiracy Scares,\" William and Mary Quarterly 59, no. 1 (January 2002), 166.\n\n. Andy Doolen, \"Reading and Writing Terror: The New York Conspiracy Trials of 1741,\" American Literary History 16, no. 3 (September 2004), 382.\n\n. Berlin, Many Thousands Gone, 1.\n\n. Horsmanden, New York Conspiracy, 105\u2013106.\n\n. Ibid., 168.\n\n. Natalie Zemon Davis, Society and Culture in Early Modern France (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1975), 187.\n\n. \"Geert Wilders Speech at New York's Ground Zero Mosque (11\/09 \/2010),\" Youtube.com.\n\n. Rocco Parascandola, \"Noose Found Hanging in World Trade Center,\" New York Daily News, December 29, 2011.\n\nchapter 5\n\n. Quoted in Laurence M. Hauptman, \"The Pequot War and Its Legacies,\" The Pequots in Southern New England: The Fall and Rise of an American Indian Nation, eds. Laurence M. Hauptman and James D. Wherry (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1990), 73.\n\n. Ibid., 76\u201377.\n\n. Ron Eyerman, Cultural Trauma: Slavery and the Formation of African American Identity (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 2.\n\n. See Henry Channing, God Admonishing His People of Their Duty, as Parents and Masters: A Sermon, Preached at New-London, December 20th, 1786, Occasioned by the . . . (New London, CT: Timothy Green, 1787); Nancy H. Steenburg, \"Murder and Minors: Changing Standards in the Criminal Law of Connecticut, 1650\u20131853,\" Murder on Trial: 1620\u20132002, eds. Robert Asher, Lawrence B. Goodheart, and Alan Rogers (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005), 119.\n\n. Channing, God Admonishing His People, 29.\n\n. Ibid., 29.\n\n. Ibid.\n\n. See Ruth Wallis Herndon and Ella Wilcox Sekatu, \"Colonizing the Children: Indian Youngsters in Servitude in Early Rhode Island,\" Reinterpreting New England Indians and the Colonial Experience, eds. Colin G. Calloway and Neal Salisbury (Boston: Colonial Society of Massachusetts, 2003).\n\n. Connecticut Courant, July 28, 1786.\n\n. Jan Schenk Grosskopf, \"For Mischief Done\" (Niantic, CT: Andres and Blanton, 2012), 250; Channing, God Admonishing His People, 29.\n\n. Channing, God Admonishing His People, 29\u201330.\n\n. Ibid., 30.\n\n. Ibid.\n\n. Ibid.\n\n. Steenburg, \"Murder and Minors,\" 119.\n\n. Ibid., 119\u2013120.\n\n. Channing, God Admonishing His People, 29.\n\n. Victor L. Streib, Death Penalty for Juveniles (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), 75.\n\n. Connecticut Courant, October 9, 1786.\n\n. Quoted in Streib, Death Penalty for Juveniles, 75.\n\n. Channing, God Admonishing His People, 31.\n\n. Steenburg, \"Murder and Minors,\" 120\u2013121.\n\n. Connecticut Courant, December 25, 1786; Channing, God Admonishing His People, 31.\n\n. Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (New York: Viking, 2011), 133.\n\n. Lynn Hunt, Inventing Human Rights: A History (New York: Norton, 2007), 33.\n\n. Hauptman, \"The Pequot War and Its Legacies,\" 45.\n\n. V. A. C. Gattrell, The Hanging Tree: Execution and the English People 1770\u20131868 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 52.\n\n. Gentleman's Magazine, December 1783, 990.\n\n. Hunt, Inventing Human Rights, 103.\n\n. Cesare Beccaria, On Crimes and Punishments and Other Writings, trans. Richard Davies (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 39, 31.\n\n. Ibid., 66\u201367.\n\n. Ibid., 70.\n\n. Ibid., 71.\n\n. Louis P. Masur, Rites of Execution: Capital Punishment and the Transformation of American Culture, 1776\u20131865 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 54.\n\n. Ibid., 58.\n\n. Ibid., 61.\n\n. Thank you to Denison University student Mimi Mendes DeLeon for pointing this out.\n\n. Channing, God Admonishing His People, 5.\n\n. Ibid.\n\n. Ibid., 6.\n\n. Ibid., 9\u201310.\n\n. Ibid., 11\u201312.\n\n. Ibid., 17.\n\n. Ibid., 19.\n\n. Ibid., 26.\n\n. Ibid., 27.\n\n. Katherine Grandjean, \"'Our Fellow-Creatures and Our Fellow-Christians': Race and Religion in Eighteenth-Century Narratives of Indian Crime,\" American Quarterly 62, no. 4 (December 2010): 925\u201350, 927.\n\n. Channing, God Admonishing His People, 23.\n\n. Grandjean, \"'Our Fellow-Creatures',\" 942.\n\n. Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia (New York: Penguin Books, 1999), 146.\n\n. Ibid., 151.\n\n. Daniel E. Williams, \"Rogues, Rascals, and Scoundrels: The Underworld Literature of Early America,\" American Studies 24, no. 2 (Fall 1983): 5\u201319, 6; Sara Crosby, \"Early American Crime Writing,\" The Cambridge Companion to American Crime Fiction, ed. Catharine Ross Nickerson (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 6.\n\n. Crosby, \"Early American Crime Writing,\" 9.\n\n. Richard Slotkin, \"Narratives of Negro Crime in New England, 1675\u20131800,\" American Quarterly 25, no. 1 (March 1973): 3\u201331, 4. For examples of this phenomenon, see Samuel Danforth, \"The Woeful Effects of Drunkenness . . .\" (Boston: B. Green, 1710); John Grimes, \"The Last Speech, Confession, Birth, Parentage and Education of John Grimes, John Fagan, and John Johnson . . .\" (Woodbridge, NJ: James Parker, 1765); Aaron Hutchinson, \"Iniquity Purged by Mercy and Truth\" (Boston: Thomas and John Fleet, 1769); and Samson Occom, \"A Sermon Preached at the Execution of Moses Paul, an Indian\" (Boston: John Boyle, 1773).\n\n. Jeannine Marie Lombard, In the Shadow of the Gallows: Race, Crime, and American Civic Identity (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), 4\u20135.\n\n. Ibid., 19.\n\n. John Joyce, \"Confession of John Joyce\" (Philadelphia: Printed . . . for the benefit of Bethel Church, 1808), documenting the American South, http:\/\/docsouth.unc.edu.\n\n. Jenn Williamson, \"John Joyce, 1784 (ca.)\u20131808 and Peter Matthias, ca. 1782\u20131808 Summary,\" Documenting the American South, http:\/\/docsouth .unc.edu.\n\n. Grandjean, \"'Our Fellow-Creatures',\" 945.\n\n. Connecticut Courant, December 25, 1786.\n\n. Ibid.\n\n. Benjamin Rush, An Enquiry into the Effects of Public Punishments upon Criminals and upon Society (Philadelphia: Joseph James, 1787), 4.\n\n. Ibid., 6\u20137.\n\n. Ibid., 7.\n\n. Ibid., 13.\n\n. Ibid., 14.\n\n. Ibid., 18.\n\n. Masur, Rites of Execution, 71.\n\n. Ibid., 96\n\n. James L. Payne, A History of Force (Sandpoint, ID: Lytton, 2004), 130.\n\n. Thank you to my Denison colleague, psychology professor Erin Henshaw, for walking me through this research.\n\n. Catherine Lebel, Florence Roussotte, and Elizabeth R. Sowell, \"Imaging the Impact of Prenatal Alcohol Exposure on the Structure of the Developing Human Brain,\" Neuropsychology Review 21, no. 2 (2011): 102\u2013118.\n\n. A. Painter, A. D. Williams, and L. Burd, \"Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorders\u2014Implications for Child Neurology, Part 1: Prenatal Exposure and Dosimetry,\" Journal of Child Neurology 27, no. 2 (February 2012): 258\u2013263.\n\n. Dana K. Smith, Amber B. Johnson, Katherine C. Pears, Philip A. Fisher, and David S. DeGarmo, \"Child Maltreatment and Foster Care: Unpacking the Effects of Prenatal and Postnatal Parental Substance Abuse,\" Child Maltreatment 12, no. 2 (May 2007): 120\u2013160.\n\n. Svetlana Popova, Shannon Lange, Dennis Bekmuradov, Alanna Mihic, and J\u00fcrgen Rehm, \"Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder Prevalence Estimates in Correctional Systems: A Systematic Literature Review,\" Canadian Journal of Public Health 102, no. 5 (September\/October 2011): 336\u2013340.\n\n. David Collins, \"Five Connecticut Inmates Challenging Death Penalty,\" Associated Press, September 5, 2012.\n\nchapter 6\n\n. Louis P. Masur, Rites of Execution: Capital Punishment and the Transformation of American Culture, 1776\u20131865 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 115.\n\n. Jack Kenny Williams, Vogues in Villainy: Crime and Retribution in Ante-Bellum South Carolina (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1959): 102.\n\n. Edward L. Ayers, Vengeance and Justice: Crime and Punishment in the Nineteenth-Century American South, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), 136.\n\n. Williams, Vogues in Villainy, 102.\n\n. Ayers, Vengeance and Justice, 136.\n\n. Charles Ball, Slavery in the United States (New York: John S. Taylor, 1837), 375.\n\n. Ibid., 376.\n\n. Ibid., 378.\n\n. In a strange confluence of events 1800 was a most auspicious year: John Brown and Nat Turner were born, Denmark Vesey bought his freedom, and a Gabriel Prosser's revolt conspiracy was uncovered in Virginia.\n\n. James Sidbury, Ploughshares into Swords: Race, Rebellion, and Identity in Gabriel's Virginia, 1730\u20131810 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 6.\n\n. Douglas R. Egerton, Gabriel's Rebellion: The Virginia Slave Conspiracies of 1800 and 1802 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993), 111.\n\n. Ibid., 187.\n\n. Ibid., 188.\n\n. Kenneth Greenberg, ed., The Confessions of Nat Turner and Related Documents (Boston: Bedford\/St. Martin's, 1996), 120.\n\n. Ibid., 120.\n\n. Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (Mineola, NY: Dover, 2001), 56, 58.\n\n. John W. Cromwell, \"The Aftermath of Nat Turner's Insurrection,\" in The Nat Turner Rebellion: The Historical Event and the Modern Controversy, eds. John B. Duff and Peter M. Mitchell (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), 101. See also Greenberg, Confessions of Nat Turner, 19\u201320.\n\n. \"Confession Made by John, the Slave of W. Enslow the Cooper, of Participation in Vesey Revolt,\" Henry Ravenel Papers, South Carolina Historical Society (SCHS).\n\n. Ibid.\n\n. Bernard F. Powers, Jr., Black Charlestonians: A Social History, 1822\u20131885 (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1994), 34.\n\n. Douglas R. Egerton, He Shall Go Out Free: The Lives of Denmark Vesey (Madison, WI: Madison House, 1999), 54.\n\n. Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra (Boston: Beacon Press, 2001), 299.\n\n. Egerton, He Shall Go Out Free, 32\u201333.\n\n. See Michael Johnson, \"Denmark Vesey and His Co-Conspirators,\" William and Mary Quarterly, 58, no. 4 (October 2001): 915\u2013976. Johnson writes that \"historians have been wrong about the conspiracy. . . . In general, I argue that almost all historians have failed to exercise due caution in reading the testimony of witnesses recorded by the conspiracy court, thereby becoming unwitting co-conspirators with the court in the making of the Vesey conspiracy; that the court, for its own reasons, colluded with a handful of intimidated witnesses to collect testimony about an insurrection that, in fact, was not about to happen; that Denmark Vesey and the other men sentenced to hang or to be sold into exile were not guilty of organizing an insurrection; that, rather than revealing a portrait of thwarted insurrection, witnesses' testimony discloses glimpses of ways that reading and rumors transmuted white orthodoxies into black heresies.\" See also Richard C. Wade, \"The Vesey Plot: A Reconsideration,\" Journal of Southern History 30, no. 2 (May 1964): l43\u2013161.\n\n. Egerton, He Shall Go Out Free, 200.\n\n. John B. Adger, My Life and Times, 1810\u20131899 (Richmond, VA: Presbyterian Committee of Publication, 1899), 52.\n\n. David Robertson, Denmark Vesey (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999), 103; Egerton, He Shall Go Out Free, 190.\n\n. Nic Butler, e-mail message to author, September 24, 2012. Charleston librarian and historian Nic Butler told me that he's heard locals refer to a tree that was once in the middle of Ashley Avenue as the site of Vesey's hanging but that he's not sure of the authenticity of the story. He noted that in 1822 that site would have been part of an old fortification and \"on farmland belonging to one Mr. Horsey. Thus the oak tree site is much too far west to be considered part of the 'Blake lands.'\"\n\n. Robertson, Denmark Vesey, 104.\n\n. Mary Lamboll Beach to Elizabeth Gilchrist, July 27, 1822, Lamboll Thomas Beach Papers, SCHS.\n\n. Adger, My Life and Times, 52.\n\n. Ibid., 53.\n\n. Egerton, He Shall Go Out Free, 196.\n\n. Quoted in John Peyre Thomas, The History of the South Carolina Military Academy (Charleston, SC: Walker, Evans and Cogswell Company, 1893), 18.\n\n. Mary Lamboll Beach to Elizabeth Gilchrist, July 23, 1822, Lamboll Thomas Beach Papers, SCHS.\n\n. Ibid.\n\n. Ibid.\n\n. Bertram Wyatt-Brown, Honor and Violence in the Old South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 154\u2013155.\n\n. Ibid., 58.\n\n. Ibid., 70.\n\n. \"Brown's Interview with Mason, Vallandigham, and Others,\" reprinted in Louis Ruchames, ed., John Brown: The Making of a Revolutionary (New York: University Library, Grosset and Dunlap, 1969), 132.\n\n. \"Last Address of John Brown to Virginia Court, November 2, 1859,\" reprinted in Zoe Trodd and John Stauffer, Meteor of War: The John Brown Story (Maplecrest, NY: Brandywine Press, 2004), 132.\n\n. \"Death Warrant of John Brown,\" November 2, 1859, John Brown Papers, Jefferson County Circuit Clerk's Office.\n\n. \"John Brown to Brother Jeremiah, Nov. 12, 1859,\" Ruchames, John Brown, 142.\n\n. There are a number of accounts for Brown's execution. I relied on the following: New York Daily Tribune, December 3 and 5, 1859; Perrysburg Journal (Perrysburg, OH), December 8, 1859; David Hunter Strother, \"The Hanging of John Brown,\" ed. Boyd B. Stutler, American Heritage VI (February 1955), 6\u20139; Thomas J. Jackson to his Wife, Mary Anna Jackson, December 2, 1859, and John T. L. Preston to Margaret Junkin Preston, December 2, 1859, reprinted in Elizabeth Preston Allen, The Life and Letters of Margaret Junkin Preston (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1903), 111\u2013117; \"The Execution of Captain Brown,\" Liberator, December 9, 1859; S. K. Donovan, John Brown at Harper's Ferry and Charlestown: A Lecture (Columbus, OH: F. J. Heer Printing, 1924), Ohio State Historical Society; and New York Times, December 3, 1859.\n\n. James Redpath, The Public Life of Capt. John Brown (Boston: Thayer and Eldridge, 1860), 392; Boyd B. Stutler to Barrie Stavis, March 10, 1969, Boyd B. Stutler Collection of John Brown (BBS).\n\n. Zeb Ward to Governor Henry Wise, November 23, 1859, Library of Virginia. Some believe the rope was made at a ropeworks in nearby Hagerstown, Maryland. Historian and blogger Tim Talbot writes that \"since he mentions that the rope was made in Frankfort, it was most likely made at the state penitentiary. Ward was the former keeper of the facility, and one of their major prisoner manufacturing operations there during the antebellum era was rope making.\" See Tim Talbot, \"John Brown Hanged with Kentucky Hemp,\" March 3, 2010, Random Thoughts on History, randomthoughtsonhistory .blogspot.com.\n\n. Perrysburg Journal (Perrysburg, OH), December 8, 1859.\n\n. New York Daily Tribune, December 3, 1859.\n\n. Strother, \"The Hanging of John Brown,\" 7.\n\n. Donovan, John Brown at Harper's Ferry.\n\n. Boston Daily Advertiser, Friday, December 2, 1859, reprinted in Stauffer, Meteor of War, 163.\n\n. Barrie Stavis, John Brown: The Sword and the Word (South Brunswick and New York: A.S. Barnes, 1970), 169; Tony Horwitz, Midnight Rising: John Brown and the Raid That Sparked the Civil War (New York: Henry Holt, 2011), 254.\n\n. John Brown to Reverend James W. McFarland of Wooster, Ohio, November 23, 1859, reprinted in Ruchames, John Brown, 154.\n\n. John Brown to Mrs. George Stearns, November 29, 1859, reprinted in Ruchames, John Brown, 142.\n\n. Elijah Avey, The Capture and Execution of John Brown: A Tale of Martyrdom (Elgin, IL: Brethren Publishing, 1906), 43, Jefferson County Museum (JCM).\n\n. Thomas J. Jackson to his wife, Mary Anna Jackson, December 2, 1859, Life and Letters of Thomas J. Jackson, ed. Mary Anna Jackson (New York: Harper, 1892), 130\u2013132.\n\n. Katherine Mayo, \"Execution of Old John Brown,\" 1909, BBS.\n\n. Strother, \"The Hanging of John Brown,\" 8.\n\n. Cleon Moore, Epitome of the Life of Ossawatomie John Brown, Including the Story of His Attack on Harpers Ferry and His Capture, Trial, and Execution, as Related by Cleon Moore Esq., of Charles-Town WV (Point Pleasant, WV: Mrs. Livia-Simpson Poffenbarger, editor and publisher, 1904), 15, OHS.\n\n. Douglas P. Perks, \"'The Old Wagon Will Make a Fine Exhibit . . . ,'\" The Magazine of the Jefferson County Historical Society John Brown Raid Issue, 1859\u20132009, 111\u2013122, JCM.\n\n. Boyd B. Stutler, as quoted in Perks, \"'The Old Wagon Will Make a Fine Exhibit,'\" 119\u2013120.\n\n. This much-commented-on conversation has been cited in a number of ways. I rely here on Thomas Drew, John Brown Invasion; An Authentic History of the Harper's Ferry Tragedy (Boston: James Campbell, 1860), BBS; Barrie Stavis, John Brown: The Sword and the Word (South Brunswick and New York: A. S. Barnes and Company, 1970); Redpath, The Public Life of Capt. John Brown; and the New York Daily Tribune, December 5, 1859.\n\n. John T. L. Preston to Margaret Junkin Preston, December 2, 1859. In Elizabeth Preston Allan, The Life and Letters of Margaret Junkin Preston (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1903), 111\u2013117.\n\n. Avey, The Capture and Execution of John Brown, 40.\n\n. Edmund Ruffin, The Diary of Edmund Ruffin: Volume 1, ed. William Kaufmann Scarborough (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1972), 588.\n\n. Ibid., 369.\n\n. Parke Poindexter to His Sister Eliza C. Perkins, John Brown Pamphlets, vol. 4, BBS.\n\n. Louis A. DeCaro Jr., \"Fire from the Midst of You\": A Religious Life of John Brown (New York: New York University Press, 2002), 278.\n\n. Thomas Gordon Pollock, \"Eye-Witness Account of the Hanging of John Brown,\" The Magazine of the Jefferson County Historical Society, vol. LIV (December 1988), 113, JCM.\n\n. John Brown to His Children at North Elba, November 22, 1859, reprinted in Ruchames, John Brown, 150\u2013151.\n\n. Ruffin, The Diary of Edmund Ruffin, 369\u2013370.\n\n. Avey, The Capture and Execution of John Brown, 40.\n\n. Ruffin, The Diary of Edmund Ruffin, 370; Strother, \"The Hanging of John Brown,\" 9.\n\n. Strother, \"The Hanging of John Brown,\" 9.\n\n. Thomas J. Jackson (\"Stonewall\") to his wife, Mary Anna Jackson, December 2, 1859, Life and Letters of Thomas J. Jackson, edited by Mary Anna Jackson (New York: Harper, 1892).\n\n. New York Daily Tribune, December 3, 1859.\n\n. Strother, \"The Hanging of John Brown,\" 9.\n\n. Ruffin, The Diary of Edmund Ruffin, 370; Thomas J. Jackson to his wife, Mary Anna Jackson, December 2, 1859, Life and Letters of Thomas J. Jackson.\n\n. New York Daily Tribune, December 3, 1859.\n\n. John T. L. Preston to Margaret Junkin Preston, December 2, 1859, in Allan, The Life and Letters of Margaret Junkin Preston.\n\n. Ruchames, John Brown, 189.\n\n. New York Daily Tribune, December 3, 1859.\n\n. John T. L. Preston to Margaret Junkin Preston, The Life and Letters of Margaret Junkin Preston, 115.\n\n. New York Herald, December 3, 1859.\n\n. Quoted in David Karsner, John Brown: Terrible Saint (New York: Dodd, Mead, and Company, 1934), 331, OHS.\n\n. \"Execution of John Brown,\" Register (Raleigh, NC), December 3, 1859, Secession Era Editorials Project, Furman University Department of History, http:\/\/history.furman.edu\/editorials\/see.py.\n\n. Mayo, \"Execution of Old John Brown.\"\n\n. Joseph Barry, The Strange Story of John Brown (Martinsburg, WV: Thompson Brothers, 1903), 85, JCM.\n\n. Massachusetts Historical Society Artifact no. 0544, length of rope with noose, supposedly used to hang John Brown, 1859.\n\n. Pieces of the rope can be found in the Warren Rifles Confederate, Front Royal, Virginia, as well as in the Historic Sandusky Historic Site and Civil War Museum, Lynchburg, Virginia.\n\n. \"Brown Rope Is Given Stutler on Birthday,\" Charleston Gazette, July 14, 1929.\n\n. Stella I. Brown to Boyd B. Stutler, September 17, 1933, BBS.\n\n. Louisa Williamson to Jebidiah Williamson, December 8, 1859, BBS.\n\n. Boyd B. Stutler, \"Notes on John Brown Hanging Rope,\" BBS. Stutler cites an excerpt from a letter by Theodore Tilton (no date given) and from the library of the late Frederick S. Wait that was sold at auction in New York City in 1900. Tilton apparently accompanied the body from Philadelphia to New York City.\n\n. Horwitz, Midnight Rising, 181\u2013182.\n\n. Henry David Thoreau, \"The Last Days of John Brown,\" in Collected Essays and Poems (New York: Library of America, 2001), 427.\n\n. Ralph Waldo Emerson, \"Courage,\" lecture at the Boston Music Hall (November 8, 1859), reprinted in New-York Daily Tribune, November 24, 1859, Chronicling America, Library of Congress (LOC).\n\n. Quoted in David S. Reynolds, John Brown, Abolitionist (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005), 339.\n\n. Ibid., 340.\n\n. Ibid., 343.\n\n. Henry David Thoreau, \"A Plea for John Brown,\" in Collected Essays and Poems, 416.\n\n. John Brown to His Wife and Children, November 8, 1859, reprinted in Ruchames, John Brown, 140.\n\n. John Brown to Rev. H. L. Vaill, November 15, 1859, reprinted in Ruchames, John Brown, 143. See also John Brown to Thomas B. Musgrave Jr., November 17, 1859, reprinted in Ruchames, John Brown, 147.\n\n. John Brown to Rev. Luther Humphrey, November 19, 1859, reprinted in Ruchames, John Brown, 148.\n\n. John Brown to J. B. Musgrave, November 17, 1859, reprinted in Ruchames, John Brown, 147.\n\n. John Brown to Wife, Sons, and Daughters, November 30, 1859, reprinted in Ruchames, John Brown, 164\u2013166. In this last letter to his wife and family on November 30 he implores them to live as Christians and to not be ashamed that he is about to die on the gallows and to follow the golden rule, which means to abhor, above all else, slavery, the \"sum of all villainies.\"\n\n. John Brown to Rev. James W. McFarland, November 23, 1859, reprinted in Ruchames, John Brown, 154.\n\n. \"John Brown Dead,\" New York Daily Tribune, December 3, 1859.\n\n. Trodd and Stauffer, Meteor of War, 163.\n\n. Laurence Greene, The Raid: A Biography of Harpers Ferry (New York: Henry Holt, 1953), 205. See also Extract from a letter to Burton from Mauzy, December 1859, BBS, and Boyd B. Stutler to Samuel Ha. Miller, April 15, 1961, BBS.\n\n. Bluford Adams, E Pluribus Barnum: The Great Showman and the Making of U.S. Popular Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 157.\n\n. Barry, The Strange Story of John Brown, 85\u201386.\n\n. \"John Brown's Scaffold,\" New York Times, February 26, 1884; \"In John Brown's Land,\" New York Tribune, May 25, 1884; and Susan Collins, \"Given in Evidence,\" Magazine of the Jefferson County Historical Society: John Brown Raid Issue, 1859\u20132009, 97. The land on which Brown was hanged was bought in 1891 by Colonel John Thomas Gibson. He was among the first to respond to Harpers Ferry with his 55th Regiment of the Virginia Militia and was on hand when Brown was arrested.\n\n. A note in the papers of Oswald Garrison Villard from an unidentified newspaper claimed that the scaffold was owned by Messrs. John M. Coyle & Co. and that they planned to publish a pamphlet proving the origins of the scaffold and then carve it up into \"watch charms, chains, finger rings, earrings\" and sell them. Oswald Garrison Villard John Brown Manuscripts, Box 3, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University in the City of New York.\n\n. Herman Melville, \"The Portent,\" in Tales, Poems, and Other Writings, ed. John Bryant (New York: Modern Library, 2001), 337.\n\nchapter 7\n\n. The name is spelled variously Chaskay, Chaske, or Caske (it is pronounced Chas-kay). Typically among Dakota \"Caske\" is the public name of the first-born son (and Winona is the public name of the first-born daughter).\n\n. Gwen Westerman and Bruce White, Mni Sota Makoce: The Land of the Dakota (St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 2012), 15, 19; Waziyatawin, What Does Justice Look Like?: The Struggle for Liberation in the Dakota Homeland (St. Paul, MN: Living Justice Press, 2008), 21.\n\n. Westerman and White, Mni Sota Makoce, 134: \"Both the Dakota people and the Europeans have an intense and intimate relationship with the land, but that relationship springs from strikingly different sources of understanding. Dakota people view the land as their homeland, their relative, their mother; the Europeans see it as a possession.\"\n\n. David A. Nichols, Lincoln and the Indians (St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 2012), 11\u201312.\n\n. Ibid., 20.\n\n. Ibid., 18.\n\n. Ibid., 23\u201324.\n\n. George E. H. Day to President Lincoln, January 1, 1862, Abraham Lincoln Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress (LOC).\n\n. Bishop Henry B. Whipple to Abraham Lincoln, March 6, 1862, reprinted in Bishop Henry Whipple, Lights and Shadows of a Long Episcopate (New York: Macmillan, 1899), 510\u2013514.\n\n. Mary Lethert Wingerd, North Country: The Making of Minnesota (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), 304.\n\n. H. L. Gordon, The Feast of the Virgins and Other Poems (Chicago: Laird and Lee, 1891), 343\u2013344.\n\n. Wingerd, North Country, 307.\n\n. Samuel J. Brown, \"Samuel J. Brown's Recollections,\" Through Dakota Eyes: Narrative Accounts of the Minnesota Indian War of 1862, ed. Gary Clayton Anderson and Alan R. Woolworth (St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press), 227.\n\n. Carol Chomsky, \"The United States-Dakota War Trials: A Study in Military Injustice,\" Stanford Law Review 13, no. 1 (November 1990), 91.\n\n. In Dakota, Wica\u019e\u1e23pi Wasteda\u019epi (Little Good Stars). Carrie Zeman explained in an e-mail exchange (October 18, 2012), \"In the modern Dakota orthography it [his Dakota name] is written Wica\u019e\u1e23pi Wasteda\u019epi. In English, it is spelled 'Wicanpi Wastedanpi,' which translates as Little Good Stars.\" Caske's 1862 War Trial Record (Case #21). Transcription from National Archives microfilm and compared to holograph in the National Archives, by Walt Bachman Walt and Elizabeth Bachman via Carrie Zeman. Thank you, Carrie Zeman, for sharing this valuable resource with me.\n\n. Caske's 1862 War Trial Record (Case #21).\n\n. Chomsky, \"The United States-Dakota War Trials,\" 34.\n\n. Richard Mott Jackson, \"Rescue of White Girl Captives from Indians: An Incident of the Minnesota Massacre of 1862,\" Minnesota Historical Society (MHS).\n\n. Carl Sandburg, Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years and the War Years (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1954), 90\u201391.\n\n. Nichols, Lincoln and the Indians, 5\u20136.\n\n. Bethany Schneider, \"Abraham Lincoln and the American Indians,\" The Cambridge Companion to Abraham Lincoln, ed. Shirley Samuels (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 93.\n\n. Mankato Daily Review, December 26, 1896.\n\n. Henry L. Mills and Family Papers, 1851\u20131894, MHS.\n\n. Chomsky, \"The United States-Dakota War Trials,\" 33\u201334.\n\n. St. Paul Press, December 28, 1863.\n\n. New York Times, January 11, 1863.\n\n. St. Paul Press, December 28, 1863.\n\n. Ibid.; Eli K. Pickett Correspondence, 1861\u20131865, MHS.\n\n. St. Paul Press, December 28, 1863.\n\n. Chomsky, \"The United States-Dakota War Trials,\" 36.\n\n. New York Times, January 11, 1863.\n\n. Ibid.\n\n. Ibid.\n\n. Henry L. Mills and Family Papers, 1851\u20131894, MHS.\n\n. St. Paul Press, December 28, 1863.\n\n. Ibid.\n\n. In the same issue of Harper's Weekly (January 17, 1863) that published Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation is an image from the Mankato execution. Thank you to Mark Noonan for bringing this to my attention.\n\n. New York Times, January 11, 1863. The translations I have used are from \"Names of the Condemned Dakota Men,\" American Indian Quarterly 28, no. 1\/2 (Winter-Spring 2004): 175\u2013183.\n\n. J. K. Arnold to J. Fletcher Williams, July 26, 1869, MHS.\n\n. For more on this ceremony, see George Blue Bird, \"Wicozani Wakan Ota Akupi (Bringing Back Many Sacred Healings),\" American Indian Quarterly 28, no. 1\/2 (Winter-Spring 2004): 252\u2013257. George Blue Bird explains, \"This ceremony is very important because it unites the spirits of our dead relatives and lets them pass on to the world up above. In this ceremony we gather the family and the relatives of those who are deceased, and we release the dead through prayer, memorial songs, food, tobacco, and crying,\" 255.\n\n. Carrie Reber Zeman, \"A Veiled Cabinet of Curiosities: A Preliminary Report on Minnesota's 1862 Gallow's Artifacts,\" http:\/\/athrillingnarrative.files .wordpress.com\/2012\/04\/execution-artifacts-report.pdf.\n\n. Ibid.\n\n. \"Cane from Mankato,\" MHS, Collections Online, http:\/\/collections.mnhs .org.\n\n. Carrie Reber Zeman, e-mail message to author, August 26, 2013.\n\n. Ian Lilligran, e-mail message to author, November 2, 2012. The Barnum museum subsequently burnt down.\n\n. Tim Khron, \"Wood Believed to Be from 1862 Gallows Stashed Away,\" Mankato Free Press, February 4, 2012.\n\n. \"The Timber History Mystery,\" Blue Earth County Historical Society, www.bechshistory.com\/timber.\n\n. Scott W. Berg, 38 Nooses (New York: Pantheon, 2012), 299.\n\n. Chomsky, \"The United States-Dakota War Trials,\" 43\u201346.\n\n. \"Execution of Two Indians at Fort Snelling, Minnesota,\" Cleveland Plain Dealer, November 17, 1865.\n\n. Ibid.\n\n. Rick Lybeck's analysis of the ways Minnesota has and has not remembered the war shaped how I wrote this chapter. I am grateful for his assistance.\n\n. For a recent example of the issues facing some Dakota communities, see \"Abandoned in Indian Country,\" New York Times, July 23, 2013, www.nytimes.com\/2013\/07\/24\/opinion\/abandoned-in-indian-country .html?_r=0.\n\n. From \"Black Elk Speaks,\" reprinted in Masterpieces of American Indian Literature, ed. Willis G. Regier (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2005), 466\u2013477.\n\nchapter 8\n\n. This initial version of the story relies on \"Lynched at Lyndrum: Acquitted Lawfully but Hung,\" Spartanburg Herald, November 23, 1894. This story was reproduced in the Greenville Mountaineer (Greenville, SC), November 28, 1894, vol. LXX, no. 25, Microfilm (Reel 4, January 1893\u2013Marce 30, 1895) and in the Laurens Advertiser in Laurens, South Carolina. A truncated version was published in The State (Columbia, SC). However, there was no mention of the Dick Wofford lynching in other local papers in Pickens, Edgefield, Walhahla, or Abbeville, South Carolina. Nor was it reported in any other North Carolina newspaper that I could uncover.\n\n. From roughly July 16, 1894, to July 26, 1894, rain and cooler temperatures prevailed across the region. See \"The Weather,\" Charlotte Daily Observer, July 19, 1894, and \"Heavy Rains,\" Charlotte Daily Observer, July 26, 1894.\n\n. For the State: James Frank Henderson, E. J. Foster, and J. G. Waldrop. For the Defense: Slick Balin, Eunice Booker, Eli Shehan, Una Raines, and the defendant himself (his employer did not testify on his behalf). Eli Shehan was a thirty-year-old white male farm laborer, married, with two sons.\n\n. Spartanburg Herald, November 23, 1894.\n\n. Edward Ayers, Vengeance and Justice: Crime and Punishment in the 19th Century American South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), 155.\n\n. Stewart E. Tolnay and E. M. Beck, A Festival of Violence: An Analysis of Southern Lynchings, 1882\u20131930 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995), 57.\n\n. See Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863\u20131877 (New York: Harper Row, 1988), 425\u2013429. The Ku Klux Klan's disguises and rituals were a great mechanism for reasserting white power in the wake of the Civil War. Foner notes that in western North Carolina's Rutherford County (Polk's neighbor to the east) the Klan went after white Republicans as well as those who had supported keeping the Union. They also attacked black-led institutions: churches, schools\u2014anything that reeked of \"black autonomy.\" They attacked literate black people and black people who had been financially successful. The Klan's actions had significant social and political implications. The federal government began to crack down on the Klan in the early 1870s, but federal as well as locally organized African American responses to the Klan could not undo the damage this group had wrought. Republicans, both black and white, had been pushed out of office and the party itself made virtually impotent in most of the South. With Democrats in charge by the late 1870s, states began enacting a white supremacist agenda.\n\n. Philip Dray, At the Hands of Persons Unknown: The Lynching of Black America (New York: Random House, 2002), vii.\n\n. Vann R. Newkirk, Lynching in North Carolina: A History, 1865\u20131941 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Company, 2009), 1.\n\n. Tolnay and Beck, A Festival of Violence, ix.\n\n. Ibid.\n\n. Daniel T. Williams, Amid the Gathering Multitude: The Story of Lynching in America, A Classified Listing (Unpublished: Tuskegee University, 1968).\n\n. NAACP, Thirty Years of Lynching in the United States, 1889\u20131918 (New York: NAACP, 1919), 29.\n\n. Manfred Berg, Popular Justice: A History of Lynching in America (Chicago: Iva R. Dee, 2011), 117.\n\n. Christopher Waldrep, The Many Faces of Judge Lynch: Extralegal Violence and Punishment in America (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 13\u201325.\n\n. Catharine Van Cortlandt Mathews, Andrew Ellicott: His Life and Letters (New York: Grafton Press, 1908), 221.\n\n. For example, on March 2, 1819, the Norfolk-based American Beacon published a story regarding a group of Charleston, South Carolina, citizens who ran a \"gang of desperadoes\" out of town by burning down the buildings they were using as hideouts. The article claims they acted under \"Lynch's Law.\" The term \"Lynch Law\" appeared as the title for a brief article in the New York Evening Post on December 1, 1826, describing the beating death of a man in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. The man fell victim to \"Lynch's Law\" and eventually died.\n\n. \"Origin of Lynch Law,\" Baltimore Gazette and Daily Advertiser, January 10, 1827.\n\n. Washington Irving, A Tour on the Prairies (Paris: Baudry's European Library, 1835), 33\u201334.\n\n. W. J. Cash, The Mind of the South (New York: Random House, 1969), 43.\n\n. Waldrep, The Many Faces of Judge Lynch, 2. Waldrep notes that the \"NAACP definition,\" which the organization never actually agreed upon, added that the killing must have been committed in order to serve \"justice or tradition.\" See my Preface above.\n\n. Leon F. Litwack, Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow (New York: Vintage, 1999), 294.\n\n. Memphis Commercial, July 23, 1892.\n\n. Edward Ayers, The Promise of the New South: Life after Reconstruction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 156.\n\n. Ibid., 156\u2013157.\n\n. Jack Bass and Jack Nelson, The Orangeburg Massacre (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 2002), 161.\n\n. I can only speculate as to how Dick Wofford's murder qualifies as a lynching based on the definition mentioned above, but there is evidence he was killed illegally, likely by several people, based on reports it was a posse and because his murder follows a court decision setting a black man free after the alleged rape of a white woman.\n\n. In Ida B. Wells-Barnett's The Red Record: Tabulated Statistics and Alleged Cause of Lynchings in the United States (1895 Chicago: Donohue & Henneberry, 1895), she lists his death under those lynched for \"Unknown Offenses\": \"Nov. 23, unknown, Landrum, S.C.\" In 1919 the NAACP reported his death as follows: \"Nov. 29 . . . Unknown Negro . . . Landrum, Spartanburg Co . . . Cause Unknown\" (Thirty Years of Lynching, 89). More recent scholars like Tolnay and Beck (A Festival of Violence) as well as Newkirk (Lynching in North Carolina) correctly identify Wofford.\n\n. Anna Pack Conner, Tryon: An Illustrated History (Spartanburg, SC: Reprint Company, 2008), 14.\n\n. Ibid., 20.\n\n. \"Polk County and Slavery,\" For the Record: A Journal of Polk County History and Genealogy (Fall 1982), 76.\n\n. Ibid., 77. For example, Reuban Jordan owned thirty slaves, and Daniel Harvey, fourteen.\n\n. Ibid., 78.\n\n. 1880 US Federal Census.\n\n. Thank you to Susan Thoms of the Spartanburg County Library for helping me with this.\n\n. General Index to Criminal Minutes Books, Polk County, NC, Defendants, 63. In Spring 1894 Court Minutes Dick Wofford appears in a list of defendants.\n\n. William S. Powell, North Carolina through Four Centuries (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989), 376.\n\n. Litwack, Trouble in Mind, 304.\n\n. Ibid., 302.\n\n. Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases (New York: New York Age Print, 1892).\n\n. Ibid.\n\n. Ibid.\n\n. Wells-Barnett, Red Record.\n\n. NAACP, Thirty Years of Lynching, 10. Of African American victims, \"35.8 per cent were accused of murder; 28.4 per cent of rape and 'attacks upon women'\" during the period of their research, 1889 to 1918.\n\n. Ayers, Vengeance and Justice, 241.\n\n. Elizabeth Henderson Michaels, The Hannon Family of Polk County, North Carolina, 3rd ed. (Morganton, NC: self-published, 2008), 82\u201383.\n\n. Ibid., 107.\n\n. Ayers, Vengeance and Justice, 242.\n\n. The Spartanburg Herald had another suggestion, that Dick Wofford was found innocent because of local politics. They claim \"that care was taken by the counsel for the defendant that all the jurymen be of one political opinion. . . . The judge and lawyers and everybody were surprised [by the verdict], for all who heard the evidence in the case were unanimous in the opinion that he was proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt and universal indignation prevailed at the finding of the jury.\"\n\n. Michaels, The Hannon Family, 83.\n\n. Ibid., 84.\n\n. Newkirk, Lynching in North Carolina, 4\u20135; Tolnay and Beck, A Festival of Violence, 72, 257.\n\n. Ayers, Vengeance and Justice, 250.\n\n. Tolnay and Beck, A Festival of Violence, 149.\n\n. Foner, Reconstruction, 12.\n\n. Milton Ready, The Tar Heel State: A History of North Carolina (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2005), 253.\n\n. Newkirk, Lynching in North Carolina, 170.\n\n. Ibid., 4.\n\n. Stephen West, From Yeoman to Redneck in the South Carolina Upcountry, 1850\u20131915 (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2008), 137.\n\n. Quoted in W. J. Megginson, African American Life in the South Carolina Upper Piedmont (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2006), 386.\n\n. Stephen Kantrowitz, Ben Tillman and the Reconstruction of White Supremacy (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 167\u2013168.\n\n. Ibid., 157.\n\n. West, From Yeoman to Redneck, 134\u2013135.\n\n. Ibid., 135.\n\n. Newkirk, Lynching in North Carolina, 169.\n\n. Ayers, Promise of the New South, 137\u2013140. By the 1880s the legal structures of Jim Crow were not completely in place across the South (the word \"segregation\" was not part of common usage until the twentieth century), but the attitudes were already there. Those attitudes were best observed on the railroads, an especially contested site for race relations in the late nineteenth century. Black people were often forced to sit in the dirty, smoky, second-class cars. Those who could afford first-class tickets were often sent to the second-class car anyway. By the late 1880s southern states began making laws require separate cars. In 1892 a light-skinned African American man named Homer Adolph Plessy contested these laws by taking a seat in the white car on the East Louisiana Railroad and refused to leave. The case made its way to the Supreme Court, and the idea of \"equal accommodations\" or \"separate but equal\" was born.\n\n. Ibid., 136.\n\n. D. William Bennett, ed., Polk County, North Carolina History (Spartanburg, SC: Reprint Company, 2006), 9.\n\n. Conner, Tryon, 15.\n\n. Ibid., 15.\n\n. Nina Simone, I Put a Spell on You (New York: Da Capo, 2003), 1.\n\n. Ibid.\n\nchapter 9\n\n. For example, James Elbert Cutler's Lynch Law (New York: Longman's, Green, and Co., 1905); Walter White's Rope and Faggot: A Biography of Judge Lynch (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1929); and the NAACP's Thirty Years of Lynching in the United States, 1889\u20131918 (New York: NAACP, 1919). Add to this countless reports written by often anonymous NAACP investigators. Though first published in 1962, Ralph Ginzburg's 100 Years of Lynching (Baltimore, MD: Black Classic Press, 1988) offers a useful compendium of newspaper articles that cover the lynching years.\n\n. Report of the Secretary for the April Meeting of the Board, April 4, 1937, Papers of the NAACP, Microfilm, part I, reel 6.\n\n. Tolnay and Beck, A Festival of Violence, 203\u2013204.\n\n. Thank you to Glenn Dickey for his help with reading this photograph.\n\n. Sherwood Anderson, Winesburg, Ohio (New York: Viking Press, 1919), 28.\n\n. Ibid., 32.\n\n. Ibid., 33.\n\n. Table 13: State Population, US Census Bureau, www.census.gov\/compendia \/statab\/2011\/tables\/11s0013.pdf.\n\n. NAACP Thirty Years of Lynching.\n\n. Sloane Gordon, \"Booze, Boodle, and Bloodshed in the Middle West,\" Cosmopolitan, November 1910, 765.\n\n. Ibid., 766.\n\n. Ray Stannard Baker, \"The Thin Crust of Civilization: A Study of the Liquor Traffic in a Modern American City,\" American Magazine (April 1911), 691.\n\n. \"Blind Pig Raider Lynched by Mob,\" Oregonian, July 9, 1910.\n\n. According to local historian Chris Evans, Etherington's gravesite in Willisburg, Kentucky, indicates that Etherington was seventeen years old when he was lynched in Newark. US Marine Corps, Discharge, November 2009.\n\n. William T. Utter, Granville: The Story of an Ohio Village (Granville, OH: Granville Historical Society and Denison University, 1956), 284.\n\n. Hubert Howe Bancroft, Popular Tribunals, vol. 1 (San Francisco: History Company, 1887), 8.\n\n. Chris Evans, interview with author, August 1, 2011.\n\n. Ray Stannard Baker, \"The Thin Crust of Civilization: A Study of the Liquor Traffic in a Modern American City,\" American Magazine (April 1911): 691\u2013704.\n\n. Evans, interview with author.\n\n. \"Detective Lynched by Ohio Mob at Jail,\" New York Times, July 9, 1910.\n\n. Evans, interview with author.\n\n. Newark Advocate, July 9, 1910.\n\n. \"Detective Lynched by Ohio Mob at Jail.\"\n\n. Baker, \"The Thin Crust of Civilization,\" 692.\n\n. \"Detective Lynched by Ohio Mob at Jail.\"\n\n. Wayne B. Wheeler, The Newark Lynching: Its Causes and Results (Westerville, OH: American Issue Publishing, 1910), 19.\n\n. \"Blind Pig Raider Lynched by Mob.\"\n\n. Ibid.\n\n. Wheeler, The Newark Lynching, 19.\n\n. \"Murder\u2014Mob\u2014Lynching,\" Johnstown Independent, July 14, 1910.\n\n. Ibid.\n\n. Newark Advocate, July 9, 1910.\n\n. Baker, \"The Thin Crust of Civilization,\" 692.\n\n. \"Blind Pig Raider Lynched by Mob.\"\n\n. Gordon, \"Booze, Boodle, and Bloodshed,\" 769.\n\n. \"Scent of Riot,\" Newark Advocate, July 9, 1910.\n\n. \"Blame Sheriff for Lynching,\" New York Times, July 10, 1910.\n\n. \"Newark Must Clean House,\" Newark Advocate, July 11, 2010.\n\n. See Wheeler, The Newark Lynching.\n\n. Paul Thompson, A Most Stirring and Significant Episode: Religion and the Rise and Fall of Prohibition in Black Atlanta, 1865\u20131887 (Dekalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2013), 129\u2013134, 166\u2013170.\n\n. \"Cause of the Lynching,\" Newark American Tribune, July 14, 1910. See also \"A Northern Lynching,\" Outlook, July 23, 1910: 597\u2013598. Another interesting source is Alonzo B. Shaw's Trails in Shadow Land: Stories of a Detective (Columbus, OH: Hahn and Adair, 1910).\n\n. Gordon, \"Booze, Boodle, and Bloodshed,\" 775.\n\n. \"Blame Sheriff for Lynching.\"\n\n. Katy Klettinger, \"County Records Shed Fresh Light on Historic Crime,\" Newark Advocate, July 24, 2012.\n\n. Bertillon Cards with Photographs, 1888\u20131919, and State Bertillon Cards with Photographs, 1913\u20131982, Ohio State Historical Society (OSHS).\n\n. Marion Daily Star (Ohio), July 11, 1910.\n\n. Hartwell Etherington Certificate of Death, June 25, 1912, Commonwealth of Kentucky, State Board of Health, Bureau of Vital Statistics.\n\n. See comments after Anna Sudar, \"100 Years Ago, Newark's Streets were Lawless,\" Newark Advocate, July 12, 2010.\n\n. \"Lynch Replay Draws Wrath,\" Newark Advocate, March 15, 1972.\n\n. Baker, \"The Thin Crust of Civilization,\" 692.\n\n. Gordon, \"Booze, Boodle, and Bloodshed,\" 762.\n\n. Sherwood Anderson, \"This Lynching,\" An Art Commentary on Lynching, Arthur U. Newton Galleries, 1935.\n\n. Bertram Wyatt-Brown, Honor and Violence in the Old South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 212.\n\nchapter 10\n\n. James H. Madison, A Lynching in the Heartland: Race and Memory in America (New York: Palgrave, 2001), 113.\n\n. Ibid., 115.\n\n. Quoted in Ed Breen, \"Aug. 7, 1930, Returns to Haunt Us,\" Chronicle Tribune (Marion, IN), April 3, 1988.\n\n. Madison, Lynching in the Heartland, 115.\n\n. 100 Photographs That Changed the World (New York: Life Books, 2011), 56.\n\n. Alistair Cooke, Allistair Cooke's America (New York: Alfred A Knopf, 1973), 311\u2013313.\n\n. Breen, \"Aug. 7, 1930, Returns to Haunt Us.\"\n\n. Madison, Lynching in the Heartland, 112.\n\n. James H. Madison, Indiana Way: A State History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press; Indianapolis: Indiana Historical Society, 1986), 122.\n\n. Madison, Lynching in the Heartland, 29.\n\n. Ibid.\n\n. Wyn Craig Wade, The Fiery Cross: The Ku Klux Klan in America (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987), 138.\n\n. See Kenneth Jackson, The Ku Klux Klan in the City (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967).\n\n. Allen Safianow, \"The Klan Comes to Tipton,\" Indiana Magazine of History 95, no. 3 (September 1999), 203.\n\n. Madison, Lynching in the Heartland, 40.\n\n. William Munn, interview with author, August 6, 2011.\n\n. Madison, Lynching in the Heartland, 6.\n\n. National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, \"Report of the Acting Secretary for the September Meeting of the Board,\" September 1930, Papers of the NAACP Microfilm, part 1, reel 5. The sheriff told this to Walter White of the NAACP.\n\n. From \"Strange Fruit: Anniversary of a Lynching,\" All Things Considered, National Public Radio, August 6, 2010.\n\n. James Cameron, A Time of Terror (Baltimore, MD: Black Classic Press, 1994), 9.\n\n. Ibid., 10\n\n. Ibid., 54.\n\n. Ibid., 73\u201374.\n\n. \"Strange Fruit: Anniversary of a Lynching.\"\n\n. Original Depositions of the Lynching in Marion, Indiana, August 13\u201315, 1930, Marion Public Library (MPL). Tellingly, a man who must have known many of the community's residents, Sheriff Campbell, says he couldn't identify any particular persons.\n\n. Paul Laurence Dunbar, \"The Haunted Oak,\" in The Collected Words of Paul Laurence Dunbar, ed. Joanne M. Braxton (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1993), 219\u2013220.\n\nchapter 11\n\n. \"Hickock and Smith Die Early Today at K.S.P.,\" Leavenworth Times, April 14, 1965.\n\n. Kansas City Star, April 13, 1965.\n\n. Truman Capote, In Cold Blood: A True Account of a Multiple Murder and Its Consequences (New York: Random House, 1965), 337.\n\n. Capote's physical descriptions of the gallows and warehouse seem to match those of other reporters. See \"Pair Meet Death on KSP Gallows,\" Garden City Telegram, April 14, 1965, and \"Two Die on Gallows for Kansas Killings,\" New York Times, April 14, 1965.\n\n. Capote, In Cold Blood, 337\u2013338.\n\n. \"Hickock and Smith Die.\"\n\n. Capote, In Cold Blood, 338.\n\n. \"Hickock and Smith Die\"; Capote, In Cold Blood, 338.\n\n. Capote, In Cold Blood, 338.\n\n. Ibid., 339. \"Hickock and Smith Die\" reported his words as, \"I don't have any hard feelings. You're sending me to a better place.\"\n\n. \"Hickock and Smith Die.\"\n\n. Capote, In Cold Blood, 339.\n\n. Ibid., 340.\n\n. There's a dispute about what he said. \"Hickock and Smith Die\" reported it as such: \"'I think it's a hell of a thing that a life has to be taken in this manner. . . . I think capital punishment is legally and morally wrong.' Commenting that apologies for what he had done were meaningless, Smith climbed the gallows at 1 a.m.\"\n\n. Kansas City Star, April 14, 1965.\n\n. Quoted in Kansas City Star, April 14, 1965.\n\n. Their bodies were exhumed as part of an investigation into the December 1959 murder of Cliff and Christine Walker and their two children in Osprey, Florida. Hickock and Smith had long been suspects in the case because they had fled to Florida around the same time and had been in the area where the murders occurred, among other things. DNA testing was inconclusive and failed to link the two to the grizzly murders, but it also failed to rule them out.\n\n. In an interview, Michael McKnight told me, \"That was the first thing I thought of. It's almost like I could see myself hanging from that particular rope. When I saw it I had a vision\u2014like I was in a movie and I saw myself hanging from a tree. Seriously! Me hanging from a tree.\"\n\n. There are so many of these I couldn't begin to discuss them all. More recently the video for Toby Keith's song \"Beer for my Horses\" plays with this genre.\n\n. The most recent and well-known film hanging with a hangman's knot was in Steve McQueen's adaptation of Solomon Northrup's Twelve Years a Slave (2013).\n\n. Samuel Haughton, \"On Hanging Considered from a Mechanical and Physiological Point of View,\" The London, Edinburgh, and Dublin Philosophical Magazine and Journal of Science 32 (1866), 29.\n\n. Anthony Stokes, Pit of Shame: The Real Ballad of Reading Gaol (Sherfield on Loddon: Waterside Press, 2007), 54.\n\n. Edward J. Akins, e-mail message to author, July 30, 2013; Jerry Akins, Hangin' Times in Fort Smith: A History of Executions in Judge Parker's Court (Little Rock, AK: Butler Center Books, 2012).\n\n. Department of the Army, Pamphlet No. 27\u20134, Procedure for Military Executions, Department of the Army, December, 1947. The inclusion of the drop table may have been due to what many believed were \"botched\" executions at Nuremberg, though there is evidence to suggest that those hanging executions were just as violent as hanging executions had always been. Nonetheless, it appears the military wanted to make hangings seem more precise than they had been in the past:\n\n120 lbs or less | 8'1\" | 170 lbs | 6'0\"\n\n---|---|---|---\n\n125 lbs | 7'10\" | 175 lbs | 5'11\"\n\n130 lbs | 7'7\" | 180 lbs | 5'9\"\n\n135 lbs | 7'4\" | 185 lbs | 5'7\"\n\n140 lbs | 7'1\" | 190 lbs | 5'6\"\n\n145 lbs | 6'9\" | 195 lbs | 5'5\"\n\n150 lbs | 6'7\" | 200 lbs | 5'4\"\n\n155 lbs | 6'6\" | 205 lbs | 5'2\"\n\n160 lbs | 6'4\" | 210 lbs | 5'1\"\n\n165 lbs | 6'2\" | 220 lbs and over | 5'0\"\n\n. Quoted in Campbell v. Wood, 18 F.3d 662 (9th Cir. 1994), 21.\n\n. Quoted in Campbell v. Wood, 27.\n\n. \"Executions by Method, 1608\u20132002,\" Death Penalty, Pro-Con.org.\n\n. According to the Espy file a black male named John Marshall was hung in chains in McDowell County, West Virginia, on April 4, 1913, but I have had trouble confirming this information. See M. Watt Espy and John Ortiz Smykla, \"Executions in the U.S.: The Espy File,\" Death Penalty Information Center, www.deathpenaltyinfo.org\/documents\/ESPYyear.pdf.\n\n. \"Coroner Concludes Murderer Felt Little Pain When Hanged,\" New York Times, January 10, 1993.\n\n. Ibid.\n\n. Timothy Egan, \"For First Time Since '65, a State Uses Its Gallows,\" New York Times, January 6, 1993.\n\n. Quoted in Egan, \"For First Time Since '65.\"\n\n. \"Coroner Concludes Murderer Felt Little Pain.\"\n\n. Campbell v. Wood, 21\u201322.\n\n. Ibid. 22.\n\n. Ibid., 14, 23.\n\n. Ibid., 29.\n\n. Ibid., 39.\n\n. Ibid., 41.\n\n. Ibid., 25.\n\n. Ibid., 28.\n\n. Ibid.\n\n. Ibid.\n\n. \"Washington Hangs Murderer; Texas Executed Officer Killer,\" New York Times, May 28, 1994.\n\n. \"Charles Campbell Execution by Hanging and Press Conference Afterward\u2014Parts 11\u201314,\" King 5 Television News, Youtube.com.\n\n. Bob Faw, \"Death Penalty: Hanging,\" NBC Evening News, Wednesday, January 24, 1996.\n\n. Ibid.\n\n. Quoted in Richard Clark, \"Billy Bailey\u2014Delaware, January 25, 1996,\" Capital Punishment UK, www.capitalpunishment.uk\/bailey.\n\n. Faw, \"Death Penalty: Hanging.\"\n\n. Clark, \"Billy Bailey.\"\n\n. Gary Tuchman, \"Death Penalty\u2014Delaware Hanging,\" CNN Evening News, January 1, 2007.\n\n. \"Killer of Two Is Hanged in Delaware as Kin of Victims Watch,\" New York Times, January 26, 1996; Rich Heidorn Jr., \"Bailey Is Hanged in Delaware,\" Philadelphia Inquirer, January 25, 1996; Tuchman, \"Death Penalty.\"\n\n. Tuchman, \"Death Penalty.\"\n\n. Heidorn, \"Bailey Is Hanged in Delaware.\"\n\n. Tuchman, \"Death Penalty.\"\n\n. Clark, \"Billy Bailey.\"\n\n. On February 11, 2014, Washington state Governor Jay Inslee declared a moratorium on the state's death penalty.\n\n. \"Delaware Gallows the Victim at Final Public Spectacle,\" Baltimore Sun, July 9, 2003. In California a prisoner snuck into the execution chamber and destroyed the gallows with a crowbar; see Clinton T. Duffy, The San Quentin Story (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1950), 84.\n\nchapter 12\n\n. Greg Sowinski, \"Cops Explain Third St. Drug Investigation,\" Lima News, May 31, 2008.\n\n. Jennifer Feehan, \"Lima Police Pressed for Racial Fairness,\" Toledo Blade, January 27, 2008.\n\n. Tom Walton, \"Racial Harmony in Lima Still a Work in Progress,\" Toledo Blade, June 23, 2008.\n\n. 2010 US Federal Census, www.census.gov.\n\n. Walton, \"Racial Harmony in Lima.\"\n\n. 2010 United States Federal Census.\n\n. Sowinski, \"Cops Explain Third St. Drug Investigation.\"\n\n. He was sentenced under USC, Section 3553(a).\n\n. Transcript of the Sentencing Proceedings Before the Honorable David A. Katz, US District Judge, USA vs. Daniel Lee Jones, Case No. 3:09cr0441, Toledo, Ohio, November 8, 2010, 6.\n\n. Transcript, USA vs. Daniel Lee Jones, 7.\n\n. Ibid., 7.\n\n. Ibid., 8.\n\n. Ibid., 11; see also Greg Sowinski, \"Prison for Noose,\" Lima News, November 9, 2010.\n\n. Transcript, USA vs. Daniel Lee Jones, 15.\n\n. \"Oregon Man Sentenced for Threatening Lima, Ohio, Civil Rights Leader by Mailing Noose,\" Department of Justice, Office of Public Affairs, November 8, 2010, http:\/\/www.justice.gov\/opa\/pr\/2010\/November \/10-crt-1265.html. I made repeated attempts to interview Jones, to no avail.\n\n. Daniel T. Williams, Amid the Gathering Multitude: The Story of Lynching in America, A Classified Listing (Unpublished, Tuskegee University, 1968).\n\n. Another interesting example is when George Haley found a noose hanging from the ceiling of his room while attending law school at the University of Arkansas in the early 1950s.\n\n. Quoted in Michael Newton, The Invisible Empire: The Ku Klux Klan in Florida (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2001), 83.\n\n. Newton, The Invisible Empire, 83.\n\n. See \"Hangman's Noose,\" Hate on Display: A Visual Database of Extremist Symbols, Logos, and Tattoos, Anti-Defamation League, http:\/\/archive.adl .org\/hate_symbols\/racist_noose.asp. See also the black baby doll with noose around its neck at 4:07 minutes in the History Channel\u2013produced documentary The Ku Klux Klan: A Secret History (1998).\n\n. \"No Negroes at Early Classes in Texarkana,\" Del Rio News Herald, September 11, 1956.\n\n. \"Artist to Lynch Confederate Flag,\" USA Today, August 27, 2004, http:\/\/usatoday30.usatoday.com\/life\/2004\u201308\u201327-confederate-flag_x.htm.\n\n. See Timothy Clark, \"Lynching in Another America: Race, Class, and Gender in Brazil, 1980\u20132003,\" in Globalizing Lynching History, eds. Manfred Berg and Simon Wendt (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2011).\n\n. \"Ruston, Louisiana, Man Sentenced for Federal Hate Crime,\" Department of Justice, Public Affairs, November 5, 2010, www.justice.gov\/opa \/pr\/2010\/November\/10-crt-1259.html.\n\n. Abbey Doyle, \"Employee in Elwood Factory Noose Incident Speaks Out,\" Herald Tribune, September 13, 2010, www.newsandtribune.com\/statenews \/x204465677\/Employee-in-Elwood-factory-noose-incident-speaks-out\/print.\n\n. \"Family Claims Noose Found in Front Yard,\" RTV6, October 2, 2010, www.theindychannel.com\/news\/family-claims-noose-found-in-front -yard.\n\n. Zellie Pollon, \"African American Soldier Says Noose Strung Outside Barracks,\" Reuters, June 7, 2011, www.reuters.com\/article\/2011\/06\/07 \/us-soldier-racism-new-mexico-idUSTRE75674C20110607.\n\n. Erica Lovely, \"Race Tensions Build at Capitol Architect's Office,\" Politico, October 21, 2010, www.politico.com\/news\/stories\/1010\/43933.html.\n\n. \"Noose Found on Tree Limb Outside Varina High School,\" Richmond Times-Dispatch, May 17, 2012, www.timesdispatch.com\/news \/noose-found-on-tree-limb-outside-varina-high-school\/article_01473b0a -cb4e-5dac-8e35\u20138fc2374bb1ec.html?mode=jqm; \"Student Admits Placing Noose Outside Varina High,\" Richmond Times-Dispatch, May 17, 2012, www .timesdispatch.com\/news\/student-admits-placing-noose-outside-varina-high \/article_d15f6162-dd03\u20135c84-b4b1\u20134b5bdc366988.html?mode=jqm_com.\n\n. Drew Karedes, \"Interracial Couple Overwhelmed with Support After Racist Vandalism,\" KHOU, June 7, 2012, www.khou.com\/news\/Interracial -couple-overwhelmed-with-support-after-racist-vandalism-157993535.html.\n\n. \"FBI Joins Investigation into Noose Found Outside Business,\" WAPT, April 26, 2013, http:\/\/www.wapt.com\/news\/mississippi\/fbi-joins-investigation -into-noose-found-outside-business\/19910390; \"Noose Hung at Mayoral Candidate's Office,\" Clarion-Ledger, April 29, 2013.\n\n. \"Clyburn: Racist Faxes, Image of Noose Were Sent to Office,\" Huffington Post, March 23, 2010, www.huffingtonpost.com\/2010\/03\/23\/clyburn -racist-faxes-imag_n_509365.html.\n\n. \"State Senator Leland Yee Receiving Hateful, Racist and Threatening Emails,\" Los Angeles Times, April 20, 2010.\n\n. Arlene Johns, \"Text Message Is Hate Crime, Parent Says,\" Tribune-Democrat (Johnstown, PA), September 8, 2010.\n\n. Toya Graham, \"School Bus Driver Loses Job over Noose in Text Message,\" Post and Courier (Charleston, SC), www.postandcourier.com \/article\/20110211\/PC1602\/302119983.\n\n. \"Halloween Noose Sparks Controversy,\" 10 News Tampa Bay, September 27, 2012, www.wtsp.com\/news\/article\/275700\/19\/Halloween -noose-decoration-sparks-controversy; \"Racially-Driven Halloween Display Removed at Sheriff's Request,\" KFVS 12, October 20, 2010, www.kfvs12 .com\/story\/13358148\/halloween-display-of-black-man-in-tree-kkk-member -causes-stir.\n\n. \"Halloween Billboard Stirs Controversy on North Side,\" CBS Pittsburgh, October 14, 2011, http:\/\/pittsburgh.cbslocal.com\/2011\/10\/14 \/halloween-billboard-stirs-controversy-on-north-side\/.\n\n. \"Idaho Snowman Shaped Like KKK Member Appalls Local Residents,\" Huffington Post, December 2, 2010, www.huffingtonpost.com\/2010\/12\/03 \/idaho-kkk-snowman-_n_791939.html.\n\n. Robert Kahn, \"Liars or Cowards?\" Courthouse News Service, October 15, 2010, www.courthousenews.com\/2010\/10\/15\/31111.htm.\n\n. Ed Kemmick, \"Members of the Tea Party Spewing Hate,\" Billings Gazette, September 11, 2010, http:\/\/billingsgazette.com\/news\/opinion\/blogs \/city-lights\/city-lights-members-of-tea-party-spewing-hate\/article_dd99052c -be17\u201311df-817f-001cc4c002e0.html.\n\n. \"Noose, Watermelons on Anti-Obama Display Called Racist,\" Morgan Hill-Times, October 10, 2012, www.morganhilltimes.com\/articles_from _gilroy\/noose-watermelons-on-anti-obama-display-called-racist\/article_c884adeb-55c2\u201357e3-ace3\u20137896c5c95616.html?mode=image&photo=0; Lisa Edge, \"Noose on Empty Chair Display Causes Concern in Horry County,\" Carolina Live, October 29, 2012, www.carolinalive.com\/news\/story.aspx ?id=818861.\n\n. \"Italy: Nooses Protest Over First Black Minister,\" Sky News, July 15, 2013, http:\/\/news.sky.com\/story\/1116068\/italy-nooses-protest-over -first-black-minister.\n\n. Barbara Perry, In the Name of Hate: Understanding Hate Crimes (New York: Routledge, 2001), 3.\n\n. US Department of Justice, \"Hate Crime Victimization Report, 2003\u20132011,\" US Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, Bureau of Justice Statistics, March 2013, www.bjs.gov\/content\/pub\/pdf\/hcv0311.pdf.\n\n. Jeannine Bell, \"The Hangman's Noose and the Lynch Mob: Hate Speech and the Jena Six,\" Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review 44 (2009): 329\u2013359, 342.\n\n. Ibid., 343.\n\n. Ibid., 350.\n\n. Allison Barger, \"Changing State Laws to Prohibit the Display of Hangman's Nooses: Tightening the Knot Around the First Amendment?\" William and Mary Bill of Rights Journal 17, no. 1 (2008): 263\u2013292.\n\n. \"Senate Passes Bill to Make It a Felony to Display a Noose on Public or Private Property,\" US States News, October 22, 2007. One of the most well-known noose incidents from this period was the discovery of a noose on the door of former Columbia University Teacher's College professor Madonna Constantine.\n\n. Bell, \"The Hangman's Noose,\" 352.\n\n. Ibid., 354.\n\n. Ibid., 358.\n\n. Ibid., 359.\n\n. My description of what happened in Jena is based on interviews with Alan Bean as well as accounts from local and national newspapers including Craig Franklin, \"Media Myths About the Jena 6,\" Christian Science Monitor, October 24, 2007, www.csmonitor.com\/2007\/1024\/p09s01-coop.html; and various articles from the New York Times including Richard G. Jones's \"In Louisiana, a Tree, a Fight, and a Question of Justice\" (September 19, 2007) and \"Louisiana Protest Echoes the Civil Rights Era\" (September 21, 2007); and a report prepared by Alan Bean for Friends of Justice entitled, \"Responding to the Crisis in Jena, Louisiana: The Jena Case in Brief.\"\n\n. Alan Bean, interview with author, October 27, 2011.\n\n. Quoted in Alan Bean, \"Challenging the New Jim Crow: Part 3,\" Friends of Justice, November 29, 2010, http:\/\/friendsofjustice.wordpress .com\/2010\/11\/29\/challenging-the-new-jim-crow-part-3\/.\n\n. Franklin, \"Media Myths About the Jena 6.\"\n\n. Craig Franklin, \"DA\/School Officials Grant Exclusive Interviews.\" Jena Times, October 3, 2007.\n\n. Ibid.\n\n. Ibid.\n\n. For example, Tom Mangold, \"'Stealth Racism' Stalks Deep South,\" BBC News, September 21, 2007, http:\/\/news.bbc.co.uk\/2\/hi\/programmes \/this_world\/6685441.stm.\n\n. Anonymous, phone interview with author, September 2011.\n\n. \"Committee to Examine Race Relations in Jena,\" Associated Press, November 14, 2007. I was unable to track down further evidence that this committee still exists.\n\n. Alan Bean noted that Jena is not a typical southern town. In 1990 Jena's LaSalle Parish was the strongest supporter of former Klansman David Duke in Louisiana. \"He got 70 percent of the vote and roughly 15 percent of the Parish is African American,\" Bean said. District Attorney Reed Walters was Speedy Long's prot\u00e9g\u00e9e; Speedy Long once sought Klan support and was a Dixiecrat Congressman in 1973. \"So,\" Bean said, \"they would have been taking a major risk if they'd said it was a hate crime\u2014and they probably didn't see it as a hate crime. The problem is that the leadership in that community was incapable of responding to a hate crime, they didn't have the language for it.\" See Alan Bean, \"Challenging the New Jim Crow: Part 3.\"\n\n. Bennett Wall et al., Louisiana: A History, 3rd ed. (Wheeling, IL: Harlan Davidson, 1997), 237. I cite this source because it is often used as a textbook.\n\n. See, for example, Terry Jones, The Louisiana Journey (Layton, UT: Gibbs Smith, 2007). This book is geared toward seventh and eighth graders.\n\n. \"Social Studies Grade-Level Expectations,\" Louisiana Department of Education, www.doe.state.la.us\/lde\/uploads\/3948.pdf.\n\n. During the Jim Crow years some young people were educated about lynching in very vivid ways. A friend of mine remembers a story he heard in the 1980s from his great-grandmother. She had grown up in rural Mississippi, and sometime around the First World War some men came into her elementary classroom and led all the students to a tree in a nearby field from which a black man was hanging. The men told them he had been lynched. I have no way of proving or disproving this story.\n\n. Mangold, \"'Stealth Racism' Stalks Deep South.\"\n\n. \"Nooses Result in Jail Time,\" Associated Press, August 16, 2008, http:\/\/query.nytimes.com\/gst\/fullpage.html?res=9C03E3D91F38F935A2 575BC0A96E9C8B63.\n\n. Daryl Fears, \"La. Town Fells 'White Tree,' But Tension Runs Deep,\" Washington Post, August 4, 2007, www.washingtonpost.com\/wp-dyn\/content \/article\/2007\/08\/03\/AR2007080302098.html. See also James H. Cone, The Cross and the Lynching Tree (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2011).\n\n. \"F.B.I. Expert Ties Blood to Jasper Defendant,\" New York Times, February 20, 1999, www.nytimes.com\/1999\/02\/20\/us\/fbi-expert-ties-blood -to-jasper-defendant.html; Rick Lyman, \"Man Guilty of Murder in Texas Dragging Death,\" New York Times, February 24, 1999, www.nytimes.com \/1999\/02\/24\/us\/man-guilty-of-murder-in-texas-dragging-death.html.\n\n. B. J. Hollers, Thirteen Loops: Race, Violence, and the Last Lynching in America (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2011).\n\n. State v. Cox, no. cc-87\u20132143, ALA 1987, 1059\u20131071, Alabama Supreme Court and State Law Library, Heflin-Torbert Judicial Building, Montgomery, Alabama.\n\n. \"Espy File: 1608\u20132002,\" Death Penalty Information Center, http:\/\/dpic.org; \"Searchable Execution Database,\" Death Penalty Information Center.\n\n. \"US Executions from 1608\u20132002: A Demographic Breakdown of the Executed Population,\" Death Penalty, Pro-Con.org, http:\/\/deathpenalty .procon.org\/view.resource.php?resourceID=004087.\n\n. \"Top 20 Occupations of the Executed, 1608\u20132002,\" Death Penalty Pro-Con, http:\/\/deathpenalty.procon.org\/view.resource.php?resource ID=004087#II.\n\n. Robert Penn Warren, Legacy of the Civil War (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998), 60.\n\nchapter 13\n\n. \"Abolitionist and Retentionist Countries,\" Death Penalty Information Center, www.deathpenaltyinfo.org\/abolitionist-and-retentionist-countries ?scid=30&did=140#all%20crimes.\n\n. Amnesty International, Death Sentences and Executions: 2013 (London: Amnesty International, March 2013).\n\n. J. L. Payne, A History of Force (Sandpoint, ID: Lytton, 2004), 129.\n\n. \"US Executions from 1608\u20132002: A Demographic Breakdown of the Executed Population,\" Death Penalty. Pro-Con.Org, http:\/\/deathpenalty.procon .org\/view.resource.php?resourceID=004087.\n\n. \"Executions by Year Since 1976,\" Death Penalty Information Center, http:\/\/www.deathpenaltyinfo.org\/executions-year.\n\n. John J. Donohue, \"Capital Punishment in Connecticut, 1973\u20132007: A Comprehensive Evaluation from 4686 Murders to One Execution,\" Stanford Law School, National Bureau of Economic Research, October 15, 2011.\n\n. National Research Council, Deterrence and the Death Penalty, eds. Daniel S. Nagin and John V. Pepper (Washington, DC: National Academies Press, 2012); Justin F. Marceau and Hollis A. Whitson, \"The Cost of Colorado's Death Penalty,\" University of Denver Criminal Law Review 3 (2013): 145\u2013163; \"Creating More Victims: How Executions Hurt the Families Left Behind,\" Murder Victim's Families for Human Rights, 2006, www.mvfhr .org\/sites\/default\/files\/pdf\/MVFHReport.pdf.\n\n. \"The Innocence List,\" Death Penalty Information Center, www.death penaltyinfo.org\/innocence-list-those-freed-death-row.\n\n. Michael Lipka, \"Support for Death Penalty Drops Among Americans,\" Pew Research Center, February 12, 2014, www.pewresearch.org\/fact -tank\/2014\/02\/12\/support-for-death-penalty-drops-among-americans\/.\n\n. Amnesty International, Death Sentences and Executions: 2013 (London: Amnesty International, March 2013). According to Amnesty International there are no accurate numbers for China, Iran had 369+, Iraq 169+, and Saudi Arabia 79+.\n\n. \"Annual Report, 2012,\" Dui Hua Foundation, http:\/\/duihua.org\/wp \/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/05\/AR2012\/2012AR_Eng_web.pdf. The Dui Hua Foundation estimated 4,000 in 2011 and less than that in 2012.\n\n. \"Searchable Execution Database,\" Death Penalty Information Center, http:\/\/www.deathpenaltyinfo.org\/views-executions. I counted executions occurring between September 1, 2011, and February 12, 2013.\n\n. Marc Santora, \"On the Gallows, Curses for U.S. and 'Traitors,'\" New York Times, December 31, 2006, www.nytimes.com\/2006\/12\/31\/world\/middleeast \/31gallows.html?_r=2&oref=slogin&.\n\n. Ibid.\n\n. Ibid.\n\n. Ibid.\n\n. Ibid.\n\n. Ibid.\n\n. John F. Burns and Marc Santora, \"U.S. Questioned Iraq on the Rush to Hang Saddam,\" New York Times, January 1, 2007, www.nytimes .com\/2007\/01\/01\/world\/middleeast\/01iraq.html?pagewanted=all.\n\n. Ibid.\n\n. \"The Ugly Death of Saddam Hussein,\" New York Times, January 4, 2007, www.nytimes.com\/2007\/01\/04\/opinion\/04thur1.html.\n\n. Quoted in Hassan Fattaj, \"Images of Hanging Make Hussein a Martyr to Many,\" New York Times, January 6, 2007, www.nytimes.com\/2007\/01\/06 \/world\/middleeast\/06arabs.html?pagewanted=all.\n\n. \"Saddam Hanging Sets Off Copy-Cat Deaths of Boys,\" Associated Press, January 15, 2007.\n\n. John F. Burns, \"Two Hussein Allies Are Hanged; One Is Decapitated,\" New York Times, January 15, 2007, www.nytimes.com\/2007\/01\/15\/world \/middleeast\/16iraqcnd.html?pagewanted=all.\n\n. Dora Apel, \"Torture Culture: Lynching Photographs and the Images of Abu Ghraib,\" Art Journal 64, no. 2 (Summer 2005), 91.\n\n. See Phong Bui, \"In Conversation: Richard Serra with Phong Bui,\" Brooklyn Rail, June 12, 2006, www.brooklynrail.org\/2011\/07\/art\/richard -serra-with-phong-bui-july11.\n\n. Apel, \"Torture Culture,\" 89.\n\n. Ibid., 89.\n\n. Ibid., 91.\n\n. Ibid., 93.\n\n. Haitham Eid, \"Noose,\" mixed media, 71\" x 45,\" 2008. The painting was displayed at the Eighth Annual Martin Luther King Exhibit at New Orleans African American Museum of Art, Culture and History and at the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Foundation Art Gallery.\n\n. Robert Mills, Suspended Animation: Pain, Pleasure, and Punishment in Medieval Culture (London: Reaktion Books, 2005), 13.\n\n. Ensemble Contre la Peine de Mort and Iran Human Rights, \"Annual Report on the Death Penalty in Iran, 2012,\" Ensemble Contre la Peine de Mort and Iran Human Rights, www.abolition.fr\/sites\/default\/files\/rapport _iran_2012-gb-270313-mdb.pdf, 2; Ahmed Shaheed, \"Stop the Executions,\" UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights in Iran, January 22, 2014, http:\/\/shaheedoniran.org\/english\/dr-shaheeds-work\/press-releases\/stop-the -executions-un-rights-experts-alarmed-at-the-sharp-increase-in-hangings-in -iran\/. Shaheed notes that at least forty people were executed in Iran during the first two weeks of January 2014. Because many executions are held in secret, Amnesty International claims the total executed in 2013 could be as high as 704. See \"Death Sentences and Executions 2013,\" Amnesty International, 2014.\n\n. Ensemble Contre la Peine de Mort, \"Annual Report,\" 3.\n\n. Shaheed, \"Stop the Executions.\"\n\n. Human Rights Watch, \"Iran,\" World Report 2013, Human Rights Watch, www.hrw.org\/world-report\/2013\/country-chapters\/iran.\n\n. Ahmed Shaheed, \"The Special Rapporteur's March 2013 Report on the Situation of Human Rights in the Islamic Republic of Iran,\" Human Rights Council Twenty-Second Session, Agenda Item 4, February 28, 2013; \"IHRDC Chart of Executions by the Islamic Republic of Iran, 2013,\" Iran Human Rights Documentation Center, www.iranhrdc.org\/english\/publications \/1000000225-ihrdc-chart-of-executions-by-the-islamic-republic-of -iran-2013.html.\n\n. Bryan Walsh, \"What Should Social-Media Sites Do About Syria's Savage War Videos?\" Time, May 27, 2013, http:\/\/content.time.com\/time \/magazine\/article\/0,9171,2143567,00.html.\n\n. \"Execution in Iran,\" Youtube.com, www.youtube.com\/watch?v=K8y 7VNL-FhU. A similar execution occurs on the television series Homeland, \"The Star,\" season 3.\n\n. \"Rapist Hanged in Public in the Town of Pakdasht,\" Youtube.com, www.youtube.com\/watch?v=y6bKT7q5yBg.\n\n. \"Political Executions in Iran,\" Youtube.com, www.youtube.com\/watch ?v=CO4br72yOBo.\n\n. \"Iranian Authorities Hang an Accused Rapist Off the Back of a Pick-up Truck,\" Youtube.com, www.youtube.com\/watch?v=Wb4hx80tYT0.\n\n. \"Saving People Being Executed in Iran by People,\" Youtube.com, www.youtube.com\/watch?v=ylWYNCJ9aVY.\n\n. \"Iranian Asks to Be Spared After Surviving Hanging,\" Orlando Sentinel, July 5, 1996, http:\/\/articles.orlandosentinel.com\/1996\u201307\u201305\/news\/9607040701 _1_hanging-iranian-newspaper-survived.\n\n. Quoted in Richard Clark, \"Hanged by the Neck Until Dead! The Processes and Physiology of Judicial Hanging.\" Capital Punishment UK, www.capitalpunishment.uk\/hanging2.\n\n. Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 5.\n\n. Ibid., 172.\n\n. John Conroy, Unspeakable Acts, Ordinary People: The Dynamics of Torture (New York: Knopf, 2000).\n\n. Orpingalik, \"Songs are Thoughts . . . ,\" in Poems for the New Millennium, vol. 1, eds. Jerome Rothenberg and Pierre Joris (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 735.\nSources\n\nArchives\n\nAlabama Supreme Court and State Law Library, Heflin-Torbert Judicial Building, Montgomery, Alabama.\n\nAutry National Center, Los Angeles, California (ANC).\n\nBoyd B. Stutler Collection of John Brown. West Virginia Archives and History (BBS).\n\nCarolina First South Carolina Room at Greenville Public Library, Greenville, South Carolina (CFSC).\n\nColumbia University Rare Book and Manuscript Library. New York, New York (CRB).\n\nJefferson County Museum. 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American Heritage VI (February1955): 6\u20139.\n\nSullivan, Lee R. \"The Hanging of Judas: Medieval Iconography and the German Peasants' War.\" Essays in Medieval Studies 15 (1998): 93\u2013102.\n\nTacitus, Cornelius. The Germany and the Agricola of Tacitus: The Oxford Translation Revised, with Notes, With an Introduction by Edward Brooks, Jr. Philadelphia: David McKay, 1897.\n\nTaylor, Archer. \"The Gallows of Judas Iscariot.\" Washington University Studies 9, no. 2 (1922): 135\u2013156.\n\nThomas J. Jackson (\"Stonewall\") to his wife, Mary Anna Jackson, December 2, 1859. Life and Letters of Thomas J. Jackson. Edited by Mary Anna Jackson. New York: Harper, 1892.\n\nThomas Lamboll Beach Papers. SCHS.\n\nThoreau, Henry David. Collected Essays and Poems. New York: Library of America, 2001.\n\nTilles, Stanley, and Jeff Denhart. By the Neck Until Dead: The Gallows at Nuremburg. Bedford, Indiana: JoNa Books, 1999.\n\nTolnay, Stewart E., and E. M. Beck. A Festival of Violence: An Analysis of Southern Lynchings, 1882\u20131930. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995.\n\nTrodd, Zoe, and John Stauffer. Meteor of War: The John Brown Story. Maple\u00adcrest, NY: Brandywine Press, 2004.\n\nTuchman, Gary. \"Death Penalty\u2014Delaware Hanging.\" CNN Evening News, January 1, 2007.\n\nTuskegee Institute News Clippings File. Tuskegee Institute, Alabama: Division of Behavioral Science Research, Carver Research Foundation, Tuskegee Institute. Sanford, NC: Microfilming Corporation of America, 1976. Microfilm. Reels 221 and 226.\n\nUS Army, Military Commission. Sioux War Trials 1862. Trial Transcripts. File P1423. MHS.\n\nvan der Sanden, W. Through Nature to Eternity: The Bog Bodies of Northwest Europe. Amsterdam: Batavian Lion International, 1996.\n\nWaldrep, Christopher. The Many Faces of Judge Lynch: Extralegal Violence and Punishment in America. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002.\n\n______. \"Prologue.\" In Lynching in America: A History in Documents. Edited by Christopher Waldrep. New York: New York University Press, 2006.\n\nWalsham, Alexandra. \"Introduction: Relics and Remains.\" Relics and Remains. Edited by Alexandra Walsham. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010.\n\nWar Department. Pamphlet No. 27\u20134. Procedure for Military Executions. War Department, June 12, 1944.\n\nWeisberg, Jacob. \"This Is Your Death.\" New Republic. July 1, 1991.\n\nWeitzmann, Kurt. \"Age of Spirituality: Late Antique and Early Christian Art, Third to Seventh Century.\" Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin 35, no. 2 (Autumn 1979).\n\nWells-Barnett, Ida B. \"Lynch Law in Georgia.\" Chicago: Chicago Colored Citizens, 1899.\n\n______. The Red Record: Tabulated Statistics and Alleged Cause of Lynchings in the United States. Chicago: Donohue and Henneberry, 1895. www .gutenberg.org\/files\/14977\/14977-h\/14977-h.htm.\n\n______. Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases. New York: New York Age Print, 1892.\n\nWest, Stephen A. From Yeoman to Redneck in the South Carolina Upcountry, 1850\u20131915. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2008.\n\nWesterman, Gwen, and Bruce White. Mni Sota Makoce: The Land of the Dakota. St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 2012.\n\nWheeler, Wayne B. The Newark Lynching: Its Causes and Results. Westerville, OH: American Issue Publishing, 1910.\n\nWhipple, Bishop Henry. Lights and Shadows of a Long Episcopate. New York: Macmillan, 1899.\n\nWhite, Lynn Jr. \"The Legacy of the Middle Ages in the American Wild West.\" Speculum 40, no. 2 (April 1965): 191\u2013202.\n\nWhitney R. Harris to Justice Robert H. Jackson. In Douglas O. Linder, \"Nuremberg Trials (1945\u20131949)\" Famous Trials. University of Missouri-Kansas City, School of Law. 2012. http:\/\/law2.umkc.edu\/faculty\/projects \/ftrials\/ftrials.htm.\n\nWilliams, Daniel E. \"'Behold a Tragic Scene Strangely Changed into a Theater of Mercy': The Structure and Significance of Criminal Conversion Narratives in Early New England.\" American Quarterly 38, no. 5 (Winter 1986): 827\u2013847.\n\n______. Pillars of Salt: An Anthology of Early American Criminal Narratives. Madison, WI: Madison House, 1993.\n\n______. \"Rogues, Rascals, and Scoundrels: The Underworld Literature of Early America.\" American Studies 24, no. 2 (Fall 1983): 5\u201319.\n\nWilliams, Daniel T. Amid the Gathering Multitude: The Story of Lynching in America, A Classified Listing. Unpublished, Tuskegee University, 1968.\n\nWilliams, Jack Kenny. Vogues in Villainy: Crime and Retribution in Ante-Bellum South Carolina. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1959.\n\nWilson, Angela Cavender. What Does Justice Look Like?: The Struggle for Liberation in the Dakota Homeland. St. Paul, MN: Living Justice Press, 2008.\n\nWingerd, Mary Lethert. North Country: The Making of Minnesota. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010.\n\nWyatt, Jonathan, Tom Squires, Guy Norfolk, and Jason Payne-James. Oxford Handbook of Forensic Medicine. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011.\n\nWyatt-Brown, Bertram. Honor and Violence in the Old South. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986.\n\nZeman, Carrie Reber. \"A Veiled Cabinet of Curiosities: A Preliminary Report on Minnesota's 1862 Gallow's Artifacts.\" http:\/\/athrillingnarrative.files .wordpress.com\/2012\/04\/execution-artifacts-report.pdf.\nIndex\n\nAbu Ghraib scandal, 271\u2013272\n\nAcme News Service,\n\nAdger, John, 103\u2013104\n\nAfrican Americans, ,\n\nnegative texts on, 92\u201393\n\nNew York burial ground, 77\u201379\n\nnoose symbolization for,\n\nracial category of,\n\nviolence against, after Reconstruction, 161\u2013162\n\nSee also Black rape; Slave rebellion; Slavery; Slaves\n\nAfrican Burial Ground National Monument, 77\u201379\n\nAge of Enlightenment, 85\u201386\n\nliteracy during,\n\nracial categories,\n\nAhithophel hanging, in Bible, 43\u201344\n\nAlistair Cooke's America,\n\nAllen, James,\n\nAmerican art, on noose, 248\u2013249\n\nAmerican Historical Association,\n\nAmerican Indian and Fine Arts Collections, at MHS, 142\u2013143\n\nAmerican Weekly Mercury,\n\nAmes, Levi,  (photo)\n\nAmnesty International,\n\nAnderson, Sherwood, 186\u2013187,\n\nAnonymity, of communications technology, 252\u2013253\n\nAnti-Defamation League,\n\nAnti-Saloon League, , ,\n\nApel, Dora, ,\n\nArnold, Benedict,\n\nArnold, J. K.,\n\nArtifacts\n\nof Dakota tribe,\n\nof US-Dakota War, at MHS, 142\u2013147\n\nAshley, Clifford, ,\n\nAshley Book of Knots (Ashley),\n\nAsphyxiation, ,\n\nAssociation of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching,\n\nAssyrians, hanging among, 42\u201344\n\nAtherton, Herbert, , , 194\u2013195\n\nAtlantic Slave Trade, organizations against,\n\nAvery, William H.,\n\nAvis, John,\n\nAyers, Edward,\n\nAyers, Stephen,\n\nBailey, Billy, , 231\u2013233,\n\nBailey, Robert, , 259\u2013260\n\nBailey, Flossie, ,\n\nBaker, David,\n\nBaker, Ray Stannard,\n\nBall, Charles,\n\nBall, Mary, , 215\u2013216\n\nBan\n\nof capital punishment, in 1794 Pennsylvania,\n\nof crucifixion, in Middle Ages,\n\nlegislative, of hangings, 256\u2013257\n\nof lynching postcards,\n\nof public executions, eighteenth century move toward,\n\nBancroft, Ashley,\n\nBancroft, Hubert Howe, 189\u2013190\n\nal-Bandar, Awad Hamad,\n\nBanner, Stuart, , 61\u201362\n\nBarker, Justin,\n\nBarnes, E. J.,\n\nBarnum, P. T.,\n\nBarr, Daisy Douglass,\n\nBarry, Joseph,\n\nBattle at Wood Lake,\n\nBattle of Round Mountain, ,\n\nBeach, Mary Lamboll, 104\u2013105\n\nBean, Alan, 257\u2013258, 260\u2013263\n\nBeard, Jesse Ray,\n\nBeccaria, Cesare, 87\u201389\n\nBeck, E. M.,\n\nBeitler, Lawrence, 202\u2013204,  (photo), , ,\n\nBell, Jeannine, 257\u2013258\n\nBell, Mychal, ,\n\n\"Benito Cereno\" (Melville),\n\nBenjamin, Walter,\n\nBennett, Batteau,\n\nBennett, Ned,\n\nBennett, Rolla,\n\nBernard of Clairvaux,\n\nBeshire, Robert,\n\nBethea, Rainey,\n\nBethune, Mary McLeod,\n\nBible\n\nAhithophel hanging, 43\u201344\n\nhangings in, 42\u201344\n\nJudas Iscariot, , 44\u201347,  (photo),\n\nsuicide in, 43\u201344\n\nBillington, John,\n\nBinding knot,\n\nThe Birth of a Nation, ,\n\nThe Black Book, 17\u201318\n\nBlack Hawk War,\n\nBlack rape, of white women, , , , ,\n\nAyers, E., on,\n\nTillman on lynching for,\n\nBlackwater Security contractors, hanging of,\n\nBlackwood, Jake,\n\nBland, Percy,\n\nBlood and Bone (Shuler),\n\nBloody Code (1688\u20131815) hangings,\n\nBog bodies\n\nas executed criminals,\n\nNazis interest in,\n\nNielson on,\n\nas sacrifices to gods, 33\u201335,\n\nSee also Tollund Man\n\nBolles, Eunice, 83\u201384\n\nBooth, John Wilkes,\n\nBorremose Man,\n\nBradley, Richard, 73\u201374\n\nBramble, Sarah,\n\nBreithaupt, Roy,\n\nBrown, Bill, 224\u2013225\n\nBrown, John,\n\nascending scaffold, ,  (photo)\n\nChrist comparison to, 116\u2013125\n\nCockerell gallows construction, ,\n\nfurniture wagon to transport, ,  (photo)\n\nHarpers Ferry raid, 105\u2013106,\n\nletters by, , , , 119\u2013120\n\nLincoln on,\n\nas martyr, 116\u2013125\n\nmilitary at execution of, , ,\n\nRedpath as biographer of, ,\n\nrope for hanging of, 107\u2013108, 116\u2013118,  (photo),\n\nStrother on hanging of, , ,\n\nThoreau on, 118\u2013119\n\nBruno, Joseph L.,\n\nBurning cross, new, , 239\u2013266\n\nJones, D., and, , 244\u2013245, 255\u2013256\n\nnoose, from tool to symbol, 246\u2013257\n\nUpthegrove and, 240\u2013243, , 255\u2013256,\n\nWilson, T., and, 239\u2013241\n\nBurning cross, of KKK, , , ,\n\nBurrhus, Don,\n\nBurton, Mary, 64\u201366, , ,\n\nBush, George, Sr.,\n\nByrd, James, Jr., ,\n\nCalifornia Equality Now,\n\nCalvert, C. V.,\n\nCameron, James, 209\u2013211\n\nCampbell, Charles, 229\u2013231\n\nCampbell, Jake,\n\nCantarella, Eva,\n\nCapital punishment, , ,\n\nGhaemi on,\n\nLeopold abolishment of,\n\nPennsylvania 1794 ban of,\n\npost\u2013Revolutionary War,\n\nSmith, A., on,\n\nUS history of,\n\nCapote, Truman, 221\u2013225,\n\nCash, W. J., 164\u2013165\n\nCaske, hanging of, , ,\n\nCaske's noose\n\nGeshick on,\n\nGessner on, 142\u2013143,\n\nat MHS, , 143\u2013146, 154\u2013155\n\nas NAGPRA item,\n\nCastro, Ida L.,\n\nCatahoula Parish, Louisiana, 3\u20134\n\nCatholic Book of Hours, Manuscript.M.390, 39\u201340,  (photo)\n\nCato, Gavin,\n\nChanning, Henry\n\nGrandjean on, ,\n\nOccuish execution sermon by, , 89\u201395\n\nCharleston, South Carolina\n\nslave rebellions in, , , 101\u2013105\n\nslavery in,\n\nStono Rebellion and,\n\n\"Charleston,\"\n\nCheney, James,\n\nCherokee tribe, 179\u2013180\n\nChina, executions in,\n\nChurch, Roy,\n\nCivil Rights Act (1964),\n\nCivil rights demonstration, in Jena, Louisiana, , 260\u2013261\n\nCivil War\n\nBrown, J.'s hanging and, 105\u2013125,  (photo),  (photo),  (photo),\n\nracial stereotypes after,\n\nslavery end, 99\u2013125\n\nClem, Johnny,\n\nCleveland, Robert,\n\nClutter, Herb,\n\nClutter murders\n\nBrown, B., and, 224\u2013225\n\ngallows exhibition and, ,\n\nby Hickock and Smith, P., 221\u2013225\n\nClyburn, Jim,\n\nCockerell, David, ,\n\nCohen, Esther, 50\u201351\n\nColden, Cadwallader, 70\u201371\n\nCollins, Roy,\n\nColonial New York\n\nAfrican American burial ground, 77\u201379\n\nBanner on crimes in, , 61\u201362\n\nfree black community in,\n\nslave rebellion, 58\u201359, 63\u201374\n\nslavery in, 57\u201358\n\nviolence in, 74\u201375\n\nSee also Hangings, in colonial New York\n\nColumbus, Christopher, 129\u2013130\n\nColumbus, North Carolina, 167\u2013168\n\nWofford in, , , 177\u2013180\n\nCommunications technology, 252\u2013253\n\nCommunity relations, hate crimes and, 255\u2013256\n\nConan, Neal,\n\nConnecticut,\n\ndeath penalty repeal, in 2012,\n\nOccuish in, ,\n\nSteenburg on, 96\u201398\n\nConner, Anna, 178\u2013179\n\nCook, John,\n\nCopeland, John,\n\nCopenhagen, National Museum in, ,\n\nCoppoc, Edwin,\n\nCox, Frank,\n\nCriminals, bog bodies as executed,\n\nCromwell, John W.,\n\nCrucifixion\n\nban, in Middle Ages,\n\nof Jesus Christ, , ,\n\nCultural myths, on knots,\n\nCultural technology\n\nlynching as, ,\n\nnoose as,\n\nCultural trauma,\n\nDakota Expulsion Act (1863),\n\nDakota tribe, , , ,\n\nartifacts,\n\nnames of,\n\nsense of loss of, 149\u2013150,\n\nstarvation of, 133\u2013134\n\nsuicide in, 151\u2013152\n\nUS treaties with,\n\nSee also US-Dakota War\n\nDark Corner, in South Carolina,\n\nDavis, Jefferson,\n\nDavis, Natalie Zemon, ,\n\nDay, Cyrus,\n\nDay, George E. H., 132\u2013133\n\nDean, James,\n\nDeath\n\nby firing squad,\n\nby guillotine,\n\ninstantaneous, 23\u201324\n\nlynching torture to,\n\nfrom noose, 22\u201326\n\nDeath penalty,\n\nBeccaria on, 87\u201389\n\nConnecticut 2012 repeal of,\n\nFurman vs. Georgia on,\n\nPayne on,\n\nracial bias in,\n\nDebs, Eugene,\n\nDecapitation, , , ,\n\nDeclaration of Independence, ,\n\nDeclaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen,\n\nDeeter, Claude,\n\nDewey, Alvin, 222\u2013223\n\nDickey, Glenn, 20\u201321, 25\u201326, ,\n\non knot-tying nostalgia, 13\u201314\n\nDiscipline and Punish (Foucault),\n\nDistel, Mel,\n\nDixon, Thomas,\n\nDodd, Westley, 229\u2013230\n\nDonahue, Jon,\n\nDonald, Michael, 264\u2013265\n\nDouglas, Aaron,\n\nDove, William P.,\n\nDraft Riots, New York City (1863),\n\nDray, Philip,\n\nDred Scott v. Sanford,\n\nDrop distance, in hangings,\n\ncalculations for,\n\ndecapitation and, ,\n\nhangman's fracture, ,\n\nstrangulation, , , ,\n\nDuntz, Clarence,\n\nEarle, Willie,\n\nEdwards, Melinda, ,\n\nEEOC. See Equal Employment Opportunity Commission\n\nEid, Haitham, 272\u2013273\n\nElectric chair, for executions,\n\nElling Woman, ,\n\nEmancipation Proclamation,\n\nEmerson, Ralph Waldo, ,\n\nEngland, Lynndie,\n\nEqual Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC),\n\nEtherington, Carl\n\nlynching of, 189\u2013195, 214\u2013215\n\nlynching pole,  (photo)\n\nEurope\n\nhanging executions in,\n\nhanging roots in Northern, 32\u201333\n\nEvans, Chris, 196\u2013198\n\nExecution sermons\n\nby Channing, at Occuish hanging, 89\u201395\n\nat hangings, in colonial New York, 61\u201362\n\nExecutions\n\nof Brown, J., military at, , ,\n\nin China,\n\nelectric chair and gas chamber for,\n\nextrajudicial, 3\u20134, 164\u2013165\n\nin Iran, for drug charges,\n\nduring Revolutionary War,\n\nSee also Hanging executions; Public executions\n\nExtrajudicial executions, 3\u20134, 164\u2013165\n\nEyerman, Ron,\n\nFair Housing Act,\n\nFASD. See Fetal Alcohol Syndrome Disorder\n\nFaw, Bob,\n\nFetal Alcohol Syndrome Disorder (FASD), 97\u201398\n\n51st Psalm,\n\nFiring squad, Gilmore death by,\n\nFirst Amendment, noose incident and,\n\nFischer, Christian, 33\u201334\n\nFlaccus, Quintus Flavius,\n\nFlandreau Santee Sioux Tribe,\n\nFoner, Eric,\n\nForensics, knots and,\n\nForman, Cyrus, 78\u201379\n\nFortis, Edmund,\n\nFoucault, Michel,\n\nFourteenth Amendment equal protection,\n\nFrank, Daniel,\n\nFrank, Leo, 184\u2013185,  (photo)\n\nFranklin, Craig,\n\nFree black community, in colonial New York,\n\nFreedman's Bureau,\n\nFurman vs. Georgia, on death penalty,\n\nGaines, Miller, 3\u20134\n\nGaines, Sam, 3\u20134\n\nGalbraith, Thomas J., 133\u2013134\n\nGallaher, W. W. B.,\n\nGallows, hanging on,\n\nCockerell and, ,\n\nin Kansas,  (photo), 233\u2013237\n\npublic executions, improvements on, 86\u201387\n\ntrapdoor drop,\n\nGardner, Alexander,\n\nGarlock, Greg,\n\nGarner, William,\n\nGas chamber, for executions,\n\nGeshick, Sandee, ,\n\nGessner, Ben, 142\u2013143,\n\nGettysburg College's Schmucker Gallery,\n\nGhaemi, Hadi, ,\n\nGilmore, Gary,\n\nGleason, George H.,\n\nGlob, Peter, ,\n\nGodlin, Albert, 3\u20134\n\nGods, bog bodies as sacrifices to, 33\u201335,\n\nGodwin, Richard, 18\u201319\n\nGood Day for a Hanging,\n\nGoodman, Andrew,\n\nGordon, Sloane, ,\n\nGrandjean, Katherine, ,\n\nGreece, ,\n\nGreen, Shields,\n\nGriffith, D. W., ,\n\nGriffith, Michael,\n\nGround Zero, ,\n\nGuillotine,\n\nHale, Nathan, , ,\n\nHall, Jaqueline Dowd,\n\nHall, Prince,\n\n\"Hands\" (Anderson), 186\u2013187\n\nHanging executions, ,  (photo),\n\nasphyxiation,\n\nCohen on, 50\u201351\n\nhood or cap and, ,\n\nof Hughson, 66\u201369, , 76\u201377\n\ninstantaneous death and, 23\u201324\n\nof Lincoln Conspirators,  (photo), ,\n\nin Middle Ages, 49\u201350\n\npain experienced during, ,\n\nprotocol for, 22\u201323\n\nturning off in, 48\u201352\n\nSee also Hangings; Noose\n\nHanging executions, last, 226\u2013233\n\ndrop distance,\n\nof Hussein, 268\u2013271,  (photo)\n\non Internet,\n\nin Islam Republic,\n\nnoose knot placement,\n\npublic, of Bethea,\n\nUS Military table for,\n\nHanging videos, 274\u2013277\n\nHangings\n\namong Assyrians, 42\u201344\n\nduring Bloody Code,\n\nas disgraceful punishment,\n\nas dramatic ritual,\n\ndrop distance in, , , , , , , ,\n\non gallows, , 86\u201387, , ,  (photo), 233\u2013237\n\nibn Fadhlan on, 32\u201333\n\nof Judas Iscariot, , 44\u201347,  (photo),\n\nlegislature ban of, 256\u2013257\n\nMosaic Law on, 42\u201343\n\nNiazali recovery from, 277\u2013278\n\nNorthern Europe roots of, 32\u201333\n\nreligion relationship to,\n\nfrom Roman Empire to Middle Ages, 39\u201352\n\nTollund Man, evidence of, 31\u201332\n\nof Vesey, , ,\n\nwestern films and,\n\nwomen suicides,\n\nSee also Hanging executions; Noose; Public executions\n\nHangings, in colonial New York, 55\u201379\n\nexecution sermons at, 61\u201362\n\nimmigrants and,\n\npublic executions in, 60\u201362\n\nritual of, 59\u201363\n\nsigns and symbols, 74\u201379\n\nslave rebellion, 58\u201359, 63\u201374\n\nwitchcraft,\n\nHangman's fracture, , , , ,\n\nHangman's knot, , , , , , ,\n\nin art, ,\n\nAshley on,\n\ndevelopment over time,\n\nHollywood and, 225\u2013226\n\nJack Ketch's knot name,\n\nfor lynching, in Midwest, 184\u2013186,  (photo)\n\npremeditation in making,\n\nrope types for, 21\u201322\n\nShipp and,\n\nHannon, William, 179\u2013180\n\nHannon Massacre, by Cherokees,\n\nHardin, Harley,\n\nHarmon, Judson, 194\u2013195\n\nHarpers Ferry raid, 105\u2013106,\n\nHastings, John,\n\nHatch, Edwin,\n\nHate crime laws\n\nCivil Rights Act and,\n\nFourteenth Amendment equal protection and,\n\nHate Crimes Statistics Act,\n\nHate crimes\n\ncommunity relations and, 255\u2013256\n\nnoose incident as, , ,\n\nsocial order enforcement and,\n\nvictim-centered approach to,\n\nHate Crimes Statistics Act,\n\nHatred, noose as symbol of,\n\nHaughton, Samuel,\n\n\"The Haunted Oak\" (Laurence),\n\nHawkins, Yusef,\n\nHawthorne, Nathaniel,\n\nHaynes, Lemuel,\n\n\"Hazy Shade of Criminal,\"\n\nHdainyanka \"Rattling Runner,\" 140\u2013141\n\nHenderson, Elizabeth \"Lizzie Boad,\"\n\nbackground of, 172\u2013173\n\nburial of,\n\nTompkins as descendent of, 180\u2013182,\n\nWofford alleged rape of, , , 172\u2013173\n\nHenderson, James Frank, , ,\n\nHickock, Richard, 221\u2013225,\n\nHigginson, Thomas Wentworth,\n\nHill, David B.,\n\nHillman, Harold,\n\nHo-Chunk (Winnebago) tribe, 147\u2013148\n\nHobart, Indiana,\n\nHollywood, hangman's knot and, 225\u2013226\n\nHomestead Act (1862),\n\nHood, in hanging execution, ,\n\nHorsmanden, Daniel, , , 72\u201373\n\nHovenden, Thomas,  (photo)\n\nHoward, Thomas,\n\nHoward, William,\n\nHughson, John\n\nBurton as indentured servant of, 64\u201366\n\nhanging of, 66\u201369, , 76\u201377\n\nHuman Rights Watch,\n\nHunt, Lynn, ,\n\nHunter, Robert,\n\nHunter's Bend knot,\n\nHussein, Saddam, 268\u2013271,  (photo)\n\nIbn Fadhlan, Ahmad, 32\u201333\n\nIde, Rodger,\n\nIGKT. See International Guild of Knot Tyers\n\nImmigrants\n\nin colonial New York,\n\nin Marion, Indiana, ,\n\nIn Cold Blood: A True Account of a Multiple Murder and Its Consequences (Capote), , ,\n\nIncidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (Jacobs),\n\nIndiana KKK, 207\u2013208\n\nIngold, Tim,\n\nInstantaneous death, in hanging execution, 23\u201324\n\nInternational Campaign for Human Rights, in Iran,\n\nInternational Guild of Knot Tyers (IGKT), , , 16\u201317\n\nInternet, hanging execution on,\n\nIntimidation\n\nnoose as symbol of, , , ,\n\nnoose incidents for, ,\n\nIran\n\ncapital punishment in,\n\nexecutions for drug charges,\n\npublic executions in, ,\n\nIron Age, ,\n\nIrving, Washington,\n\nJack Ketch's knot,\n\nJackson, Ed,\n\nJackson, Robert,\n\nJackson, Thomas L. \"Stonewall,\" 112\u2013113,\n\nJacobs, Harriet,\n\nJarrell, Adam,\n\nJefferson, Thomas,\n\nJefferson County Museum, 116\u2013117\n\nJena, Louisiana noose incident, 1\u20132, , ,\n\nBean on, 257\u2013258, 260\u2013263\n\ncivil rights demonstration, , 260\u2013261\n\nHuman Relations Committee,\n\nnoose significance and, 2\u20133, , , 261\u2013263, 265\u2013266\n\nracial tensions after, 259\u2013260\n\nwhite students' punishment for, 1\u20132,\n\nJena 6, ,\n\nJesus Christ\n\nBrown, J., comparison to, 116\u2013125\n\ncrucifixion of, , ,\n\nJim Crow, , , , ,\n\nJohn Brown. See Brown, John\n\nJohn Brown Museum,\n\n\"John Brown's Blessing\" (Noble),\n\nJon, Gee,\n\nJones, Carwin,\n\nJones, Daniel Lee, , 244\u2013245, 255\u2013256\n\nJones, Robert, ,  (photo)\n\nJones, Thomas, ,  (photo)\n\nJones, Virgil, ,  (photo)\n\nA Journal of the Proceedings in the Detection of the Conspiracy formed by Some White People, in Conjunction with Negro and Other Slaves, for Burning the City of New York in America, and Murdering the Inhabitants (Horsmanden), 72\u201373\n\nJoyce, John, 93\u201394\n\nJudas Iscariot,\n\nBernard of Clairvaux on noose of,\n\nChrist's crucifixion and,\n\nhanging of, , 44\u201347,  (photo)\n\nsuicide, 45\u201346\n\nJuran, Nathan,\n\nKammen, Michael,\n\nKansas, warehouse gallows,\n\nexhibition of, ,\n\nMuseum of History storage of, 233\u2013236\n\nKansas Bureau of Investigations (KBI) detectives,\n\nKansas Museum of History, 233\u2013236\n\nKansas state gallows,  (photo)\n\nKatz, David A.,\n\nKayenge, C\u00e9cile,\n\nKBI. See Kansas Bureau of Investigations\n\nKerry, Peggy, , 66\u201368\n\nKilling\n\nextrajudicial, in Catahoula Parish, Louisiana, 3\u20134\n\nhangman's knot for,\n\nin Wisconsin Sikh Temple,\n\nKing, William,\n\nKKK. See Ku Klux Klan\n\nKnots\n\nbinding,\n\ncultural myths on,\n\nDickey on, 13\u201315\n\nforensics and,\n\nhistory of,\n\nHunter's Bend,\n\nJack Ketch's,\n\nmysteries of, 15\u201316\n\nnoose origin, , 19\u201321\n\nnoose placement of,\n\ntechnology and,\n\nYouTube demonstration of,\n\nKnowles, James,\n\nKu Klux Klan (KKK),\n\nburning cross of, , , ,\n\nCheney, Goodman, and Schwerner 1960 murder by,\n\nIndiana, 207\u2013208\n\nlobbying efforts of,\n\nMidwest growth of,\n\nwith noose,  (photo)\n\nin North Carolina, ,  (photo)\n\nSimmons and, 205\u2013206\n\nWashington, DC, parade,  (photo),\n\nKuttab, Daoud, 270\u2013271\n\nLambertson, Clara,\n\nLambertson, Gilbert,\n\nLarrabee, Timothy, 84\u201385\n\n\"The Last Moments of John Brown\" (Hovenden),  (photo)\n\n\"The Last Words and Dying Speech of Edmund Fortis,\"\n\nLatham, James, ,\n\nLaurence, Paul,\n\nLaw, Richard,\n\nLaw and Order League, of prohibitionists, 188\u2013189\n\nLawsuits, noose incidents and,\n\nLee, Darrell,\n\nLee, Robert E., ,\n\nLegenda Aurea (Golden Legend) (de Voraigine),\n\nLennon, Charles,\n\nLeo the Great (pope), 45\u201346\n\nLeonard, Ben,\n\nLeopold, capital punishment abolishment by,\n\nLima, Ohio,\n\nAfrican American population in,\n\ndemographics of,\n\nracial profiling in, 240\u2013241\n\nLincoln, Abraham, , 132\u2013133, ,\n\nLincoln Conspirators, hanging execution of,  (photo), ,\n\nLinebaugh, Peter, ,\n\nLiteracy, ,\n\nLittlefield, John,\n\nLobbying efforts, of KKK,\n\nLouisiana\n\nextrajudicial killing, in Catahoula Parish, 3\u20134\n\nnoose incidents, in Jena, 1\u20132, , , 256\u2013266\n\nrecorded lynchings in,\n\nLower Sioux Agency, ,\n\nLybeck, Rick, 149\u2013150\n\nLynch, Charles,\n\nLynch, William,\n\nLynch Law,\n\nLynching photograph,\n\nby Beitler, on Shipp and Smith, A., 202\u2013204,  (photo), , ,\n\nLynching postcards, ,\n\nLynchings\n\nin The Black Book, 17\u201318\n\nCash on, 164\u2013165\n\ncommunity support of,\n\nas cultural technology, ,\n\nas felony, in North Carolina,\n\nof Gaines, M., Gaines, S., and Godlin, 3\u20134\n\ngeographical location of, 165\u2013166\n\nLynch, C., and Lynch, W.,\n\nlynchers lack of secrecy,\n\nmob violence and, ,\n\nreasons for,\n\nrecorded, ,\n\nroughing up,\n\ntorture to death,\n\nTuskegee Institute on, 4\u20135, 162\u2013163\n\nWest on,\n\nwhipping and,\n\nWWII and,\n\nLynchings, in Midwest twentieth-century,\n\nEtherington, Carl, lynching of, 189\u2013195,  (photo), 214\u2013215\n\nhangman's knots for, 184\u2013186,  (photo)\n\nlynching photograph and postcard,\n\nin Newark, Ohio, 188\u2013199,  (photo),  (photo), 213\u2013214\n\ntechnology documentation of,\n\nLynchings, in Post\u2013Reconstruction South, 159\u2013182\n\nblack rape, of white women, , , , , , ,\n\nHenderson, Elizabeth and, , , 172\u2013173, , 179\u2013182\n\nhistory of, 161\u2013166\n\nPolk County, North Carolina and, 166\u2013173\n\nTuskegee Institute research on, 162\u2013163\n\nWofford, Dick and, 159\u2013161, 166\u2013180\n\nMacMurray, Fred,\n\nMadison, James H., ,\n\nMagnum Photo Agency,\n\nManuscript.M.390, Catholic Book of Hours, 39\u201340,  (photo)\n\nMarion, Indiana, 201\u2013217\n\nBeitler lynching photograph, 202\u2013204,  (photo), , ,\n\nhistory of, 204\u2013205\n\nimmigrants in, ,\n\nKKK in, 207\u2013208\n\nNative Americans in, 204\u2013205\n\nShipp, Thomas, 201\u2013204,  (photo), , , ,\n\nSmith, A., and, 201\u2013204,  (photo), , , , , ,\n\nMarion Chronicle,\n\nMartial law,\n\nMartin, Trayvon,\n\nMarwood, William,\n\nMassachusetts Historical Society,\n\nMasur, Louis P., 88\u201389\n\non private executions,\n\nMayo, Katherine,\n\nMayo, William Worrall, 141\u2013142\n\nMcFarland, James W.,\n\nMeeropol, Abel, , ,\n\nMelville, Herman, 123\u2013124,\n\nMerback, Mitchell,\n\nA Mercy (Morrison),\n\nMerkel, Angela,\n\nMHS. See Minnesota Historical Society\n\nMiddle Ages\n\ncrucifixion ban during,\n\nhanging executions in, 49\u201350\n\nhangings from Roman Empire to, 39\u201352\n\nJudas and noose, , 44\u201347,  (photo),\n\nMidwest\n\nKKK growth in,\n\nNAACP on lynchings in,\n\npopulation decline,\n\nSee also Lynchings, in Midwest twentieth-century\n\nMills, Columbus,\n\nMills, Henry L.,\n\nMinnesota, , , 132\u2013133,\n\nMinnesota Historical Society (MHS)\n\nAmerican Indian and Fine Arts Collections at, 142\u2013143\n\nCaske's noose at, , 143\u2013146, 154\u2013155\n\nnooses, cultural sensitivity of, 142\u2013143\n\nUS-Dakota War artifacts in, 142\u2013147\n\nMob\n\njustice,\n\npsychology, 212\u2013213\n\nviolence, ,\n\nMorgan, Philip D.,\n\nMorrison, Toni,\n\nMosaic law, on hangings, 42\u201343\n\nMubarak, Hosni,\n\nMuckraking, of Wells-Barnett, 170\u2013171\n\nMunn, Bill, 215\u2013217\n\nMunsen, Jeremiah,\n\nMyrick, Andrew J., ,\n\nMysteries, of knots, 15\u201316\n\nNAACP. See National Association for the Advancement of Colored People\n\nNAGPRA. See Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act\n\nNational Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), , ,\n\non Midwest lynchings,\n\nnoose incident at,\n\nThirty Years of Lynching in the United States,\n\nUpthegrove and, ,\n\nWilkins of,\n\nNational Museum in Copenhagen, ,\n\nNational Socialist Workers Party,\n\nNative American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA),\n\nCaske's noose as item of,\n\nNative American hangings\n\nDakota tribe and, 127\u2013153\n\nNorth American first,\n\nWeston, J. B., on, 127\u2013128, , ,\n\nNative Americans,\n\nin Marion, Indiana, 204\u2013205\n\nNazis, bog bodies interest in,\n\nNew York\n\nDraft Riots (1863),\n\nnoose incidents law, 256\u2013257\n\nSee also Colonial New York\n\nNew York Conspiracy (1741), 63\u201374\n\nNew York Times, , ,\n\non Hussein hanging execution,\n\non noose incidents,\n\nNewark, Ohio, 213\u2013214\n\nClem of,\n\nEtherington lynching in, 189\u2013195,  (photo), 214\u2013215\n\nEvans on, 196\u2013198\n\njail,  (photo)\n\nlynching in, 188\u2013195\n\nNewark Advocate, , , ,\n\nNewkirk, Vann R.,\n\nNiazali hanging, recovery of, 277\u2013278\n\nNielson, Ole, , , 34\u201337\n\nNoble, Thomas Satterwhite,\n\nNoose,\n\nAmerican art on, 248\u2013249\n\nas cultural technology,\n\nat Ground Zero,\n\nhistory of violence and,\n\nhistory symbol represents,\n\nOccuish as youngest victim of, 81\u201398\n\nritual and spectacle,\n\nsignificance, lack of knowledge on, 2\u20133, , , 261\u2013263, 265\u2013266\n\non Tollund Man,  (photo)\n\nSee also Burning cross, new; Hanging executions\n\nNoose, as symbol, 246\u2013257\n\nfor African Americans,\n\nof genocide, 127\u2013129\n\nof hatred,\n\nof intimidation, , , ,\n\nKKK and,\n\nof white supremacy, 203\u2013204,\n\nNoose, death from, 22\u201326\n\ndecapitation, , , ,\n\nhanging execution protocol, 22\u201323\n\nhangman's fracture, , , , ,\n\nstrangulation, , , , , , , , , ,\n\nNoose, origins of\n\ncause of death, 22\u201326\n\nDickey on, 12\u201315, 20\u201321, 25\u201326\n\nIGKT and, , , 16\u201317\n\nknots, , 19\u201321\n\nof word, 18\u201319\n\n\"Noose,\" ,  (photo)\n\nNoose incidents, , 251\u2013252\n\nFirst Amendment and,\n\nas hate crime, , ,\n\nfor intimidation, ,\n\nby Jackson, R.,\n\nJena, Louisiana, 1\u20132, , , 256\u2013266\n\nby Jones, D., , 244\u2013245, 255\u2013256\n\nlawsuits,\n\nat NAACP,\n\nNew York law on, 256\u2013257\n\nObama and, 253\u2013254\n\nPotok on,\n\nSPLC on, 2\u20133\n\nNorth America, hanging and, , 127\u2013156\n\nDakota tribe, , , 129\u2013152\n\nMHS and, , 142\u2013147, 154\u2013155\n\nnoose as genocide symbol, 127\u2013129\n\nUS-Dakota War, 127\u2013147,  (photo),  (photo),  (photo)\n\nNorth Carolina\n\nKKK in, ,  (photo)\n\nlynching as felony,\n\nSee also Columbus; Polk County\n\nNotes on the State of Virginia (Jefferson),\n\nNye, Harold,\n\nObama, Barack, 253\u2013254\n\nOberholtzer, Madge,\n\nOccuish, Hannah, 81\u201398\n\nBolles murder by, 83\u201384\n\nChanning execution sermon at hanging of, 89\u201395\n\nSteenburg on, 96\u201398\n\ntrial of, 84\u201385\n\nOdem, Dan,\n\nOdin, ,\n\nOdyssey (Homer), , 41\u201342,\n\nOedipus Rex (Sophocles),\n\nOf Crimes and Punishment (Beccaria), 87\u201388\n\nOffice of Indian Affairs,\n\n\"On Being Brought from Africa to America\" (Wheatley),\n\n\"100 Photographs That Changed the World,\" Shipp and Smith, A., photo in,\n\nOrangeburg Massacre (1968),\n\nOrpingalik, on song,\n\nPage, Thomas Nelson,\n\nPage, Wade Michael,\n\nPain, during hanging executions, ,\n\nParker, Theodore,\n\nPayne, James L.,\n\nPeasants' War,\n\nPennsylvania, capital punishment ban in 1794,\n\nPequot Indians massacre,\n\nPerez, Thomas E.,\n\nPew Research Survey (2013),\n\nPhagan, Mary,\n\nPierpont Morgan Library, Sherman Fairchild Reading Room at, 39\u201340\n\nPinker, Steven, 85\u201386\n\nPolk County, North Carolina\n\nbackground of, 166\u2013167\n\nrailroad, 167\u2013168\n\nslavery in,\n\nWofford family in,\n\nWofford lynching and, 166\u2013173\n\nPolk County Historical Society museum, 178\u2013179\n\nPollock, Thomas Gordon,\n\nPopular Tribunals (Bancroft, H.),\n\n\"The Portent\" (Melville), 123\u2013124\n\nPotok, Mark, ,\n\nPoyas, Peter,\n\nPreston, John, , ,\n\nProhibitionists, 188\u2013189\n\n\"The Proper Way to Hang the Confederate Flag,\" 248\u2013249\n\nProsser, Gabriel, ,\n\nhanging of, 100\u2013101\n\nslave rebellion of, 100\u2013101\n\nPublic Enemy,\n\nPublic executions, 49\u201351, 99\u2013101,\n\nban of, eighteenth century move toward,\n\nin colonial New York, 60\u201362\n\ngallows improvements for, 86\u201387\n\nRush on, 95\u201396\n\nfor slave discipline, 100\u2013104\n\nstate power and,\n\nof twenty-two, in Charleston, 103\u2013104\n\nYouTube on Iran,\n\nPurvis, Bryan,\n\nRacial bias, in death penalty,\n\nRacial categories, Age of Enlightenment on,\n\nRacial profiling, in Lima, Ohio, 240\u2013241\n\nRacial stereotypes, after Civil War,\n\nRacial tensions, after Jena noose incident, 259\u2013260\n\nRamsey, Alexander, , , 147\u2013148\n\nRape, of white women by blacks, , , , , , ,\n\nRasmussen, Knud,\n\nReconstruction (1865\u20131877), 161\u2013162\n\nRed Record (Wells-Barnett),\n\nRediker, Marcus, ,\n\nRedpath, James, ,\n\nRegarding the Pain of Others (Sontag), 5\u20136\n\nReinhardt, Stephen, 230\u2013231\n\nReligion, hangings relationship to,\n\nReservations, of Dakota tribe,\n\nRevolutionary War\n\nexecutions during,\n\nlynch word development during,\n\nOccuish hanging, post, 81\u201398\n\nRiley, Joseph, ,  (photo)\n\nRituals\n\nof hanging in colonial New York, 59\u201363\n\nhangings as dramatic,\n\nreligious, hangings as,\n\nspectacle and, of noose,\n\nRobertson, Angus,\n\nRobertson, David,\n\nRodgers, Esther,\n\nRodrigues, Jan,\n\nRope\n\nfor hanging of Brown, J., 107\u2013108, 116\u2013118,  (photo),\n\nstrangulation by, in Greece,\n\ntypes, for hangman's knot, 21\u201322\n\nRose County Local Option Law, in Ohio,\n\nRosse, Cornelius, 23\u201324\n\nRoughing up, as lynching,\n\nRuffin, Edmund, ,\n\nRush, Benjamin, 95\u201396\n\nSaad Faleh, Abdou Hussain, ,\n\nSadler, George W., ,\n\nSakpe \"Little Six,\"\n\nSan Francisco Vigilance Committees,\n\nSandburg, Carl,\n\nde Sant\u00e1ngel, Luis,\n\nScarry, Elaine,\n\nSchneider, Bethany,\n\nSchwerner, Michael,\n\nSeparate but equal,\n\nSeptember 11 attack, 74\u201375, ,\n\nSerra, Richard, 271\u2013272\n\nShaheed, Ahmed,\n\nShaw, Theo, 259\u2013260\n\nShepard, Matthew, ,\n\nSherman Fairchild Reading Room, at Pierpont Morgan Library, 39\u201340\n\nShipp, Thomas,\n\nburial site of,\n\nlynching of, ,\n\nlynching photograph, by Beitler, 202\u2013204,  (photo), , ,\n\nSibley, Henry H., 135\u2013136\n\nSigns and symbols, of hanging in colonial New York, 74\u201379\n\nSilkeborg Museum,\n\nSimmons, William Joseph, 205\u2013206\n\nSimone, Nina,\n\nSims, John, 248\u2013249\n\nSims, Taylor Alfred, ,\n\nSkelos, Dean, 256\u2013257\n\nSkyuka,\n\nSlaton, John,\n\nSlave rebellion,\n\nBradley on, 73\u201374\n\nBurton and, 64\u201366, , ,\n\nin Charleston, South Carolina, , , 101\u2013105\n\nColden and, 70\u201371\n\nin colonial New York, 58\u201359, 63\u201374\n\nexecutions during,\n\nHorsmanden on, 72\u201373\n\nKammen on,\n\nLinebaugh and Rediker on,\n\nMorgan on,\n\nof Prosser, 100\u2013101\n\npunishments for, 62\u201363\n\nTurner and,\n\nof Vesey, 101\u2013102\n\nSlavery,\n\nin Charleston, South Carolina,\n\nCivil War end of, 99\u2013125\n\nin colonial New York, 57\u201358\n\nin Polk County, North Carolina,\n\n\"Slavery! Slavery!,\"\n\nSlaves\n\nfreed, after Reconstruction,\n\npublic execution for discipline of, 100\u2013104\n\nSloan, Justin,\n\nSmith, Abram \"Abe,\" ,\n\nburial site of,\n\non capital punishment,\n\nhanging of,\n\nlynching photograph, by Beitler, 202\u2013204,  (photo), , ,\n\nSmith, F. H.,\n\nSmith, Gerrit,\n\nSmith, Perry, 221\u2013225,\n\nSocial order enforcement, hate crimes and,\n\nSong, Orpingalik on,\n\nSons of Confederate Veterans,\n\nSontag, Susan, 5\u20136\n\nSophocles,\n\nSouth\n\nlynchings, in Post\u2013Reconstruction, , 159\u2013182\n\npublic executions in, 99\u2013101\n\nSouth Carolina\n\nDark Corner in,\n\nLandrum railroad tracks,  (photo)\n\nlynching in,\n\nWofford lynching in, 159\u2013161\n\nSee also Charleston\n\nSouthern Poverty Law Center (SPLC),\n\non noose incidents, 2\u20133\n\nPotok of,\n\nSpartanburg Herald, ,\n\nSPLC. See Southern Poverty Law Center\n\nSt. Bartholomew's Day Massacres,\n\nStandard Brewing Company beer tray, on US-Dakota War,  (photo)\n\nStarry, Louis P.,\n\nStarvation, of Dakota tribe, 133\u2013134\n\nSteenburg, Nancy, 96\u201398\n\nStephenson, D. C., ,\n\nStono Rebellion (1739),\n\n\"Strange Fruit\" protest song, , 211\u2013212,\n\nStrangulation, , , , , , , , , ,\n\nStrother, David Hunter, , ,\n\nStroup, Earl,\n\nStuart, J. E. B.,\n\nStutler, Boyd B., 117\u2013118\n\nSuicide,\n\nin Bible, 43\u201344\n\nin Dakota tribe, 151\u2013152\n\nof Etherington's father,\n\nof Judas Iscariot, 45\u201346\n\nwomen, by hanging,\n\nSullivan, Lee R.,\n\nSupreme Court, on separate but equal,\n\nSuspencio Iudae, of Towneley Manuscript,\n\nTaliaferro, William,\n\nTalk of the Nation,\n\nTaney, Roger B.,\n\nTaoyateduta, Chief \"Little Crow,\" 134\u2013136,  (photo), , , 155\u2013156\n\nTarr, Blair, 234\u2013236\n\nTatemin \"Round Wind,\"\n\nTechnology\n\ncommunications, 252\u2013253\n\ncultural, , ,\n\nInternet,\n\nknots and,\n\nlynching documentation,\n\nonline videos of executions,\n\nTerry, Anthony, , 241\u2013242\n\nThayer, William Roscoe,\n\nThirty Years of Lynching in the United States (NAACP),\n\nThomas, Clarence,\n\nThoreau, Henry David, 118\u2013119\n\nal-Tikriti, Barzan Ibrahim,\n\nTill, Emmett,\n\nTillman, Ben \"Pitchfork,\"\n\nTollund Man,  (photo),\n\ndescription of,\n\nFischer on, 33\u201334\n\nGlob and,\n\nhanging evidence of, 31\u201332\n\nNielson on, , , 34\u201337\n\nnoose on,  (photo)\n\nX-Ray of,  (photo)\n\nTolnay, Steward E.,\n\nTompkins, Bernice \"Bee,\" 180\u2013182,\n\nTorture, 87\u201389,\n\nA Tour on the Prairies (Irving),\n\nTowneley Manuscript,\n\nTrapdoor drop, at hanging gallows,\n\nTryon, William,\n\nTuchman, Gary,\n\nTurks, Willie,\n\nTurner, Nat, ,\n\nTurning off, in hanging execution, 48\u201352\n\nTuskegee Institute, on lynchings, 4\u20135, 162\u2013163\n\nUnderhill, John,\n\nUnited States (US)\n\nDakota treaties with,\n\nlynching and capital punishment history in,\n\nwestward expansion, 130\u2013131\n\nSee also US-Dakota War\n\nUpper Sioux Agency,\n\nUpthegrove, Jason, , 255\u2013256,\n\nfamily threats, 242\u2013243\n\non Lima racial profiling, 240\u2013241\n\nnoose received by,\n\nnoose sent by Jones, D., , 244\u2013245\n\non noose significance,\n\ntargeting of, 242\u2013243\n\non Wilson, T., death, 240\u2013241\n\nUS. See United States\n\nUS Military table, for hanging executions,\n\nUS-Dakota War (1862)\n\nBattle at Wood Lake, Dakota defeat at,\n\nCaske hanging at end of, , ,\n\nColumbus and, 129\u2013130\n\nDakota surrender in, 136\u2013137\n\nDakota trial, Sibling on,\n\nhanging executions at end of, , 138\u2013142,  (photo)\n\nMHS artifacts of, 142\u2013147\n\nStandard Brewing Company beer tray on,  (photo)\n\nTaoyateduta, Chief \"Little Crow,\" 134\u2013136,  (photo), , , 155\u2013156\n\nVantilborough, Peter, 58\u201359\n\nVesey, Denmark\n\nhanging of, , ,\n\nslave rebellion of, 101\u2013102\n\nVictim-centered approach, to hate crimes,\n\nVigilante justice, , ,\n\nViolence\n\nagainst African Americans, after Reconstruction, 161\u2013162\n\nin colonial New York, 74\u201375\n\nhistory of, noose and,\n\nmob, lynching and, ,\n\nThe Vocabulary of Archbishop Alfric, on hanging executions, ,  (photo)\n\nde Voraigine, Jacobus, 46\u201347\n\nWakanozhanzhan \"Medicine Bottle,\"\n\nWakefield, Sarah,\n\nWalker, Kara,\n\nWalker, Lee,\n\nWalker, Matthew,\n\nWalters, Reed, 258\u2013259\n\nWar of Jenkins' Ear,\n\nWarren, Robert Penn,\n\nWashington, George,\n\nWashington D.C. KKK parade,  (photo),\n\nWeld, Theodore,\n\nWells, Orville,\n\nWells-Barnett, Ida B., , 170\u2013171, ,\n\nWest, Stephen A.,\n\nWest Virginia State Museum,\n\nWesterman, Gwen,\n\nWestern films,\n\nWeston, J. B., 127\u2013128, , ,\n\nWestward expansion, in US, 130\u2013131\n\nWheatley, Phillis, 91\u201392,\n\nWheeler, Wayne B., ,\n\nWhipping, as lynching,\n\nWhipple, Henry,\n\nWhite\n\nIndian System to benefit, 131\u2013132\n\nstudents' punishment, in Jena noose incident, 1\u20132,\n\nwomen, black rape of, , , , , , ,\n\nWhite, Bruce,\n\nWhite, Walter, ,\n\nWhite supremacy, noose as symbol of, 203\u2013204,\n\nWhitney Museum of Art's Biennial,\n\nWilders, Geert,\n\nWilkins, Roy, ,  (photo)\n\nWilson, Daniel, 60\u201361\n\nWilson, Tarika, 239\u2013241\n\nWinesburg, Ohio (Anderson),\n\nWing Biddlebaum (character), 186\u2013187\n\nWinthrop, John, ,\n\nWiping of the Tears ceremony, for Caske's noose,\n\nWirz, Henry,\n\nWisconsin Sikh Temple, killing in,\n\nWitchcraft,\n\nWithout Sanctuary (Allen and Littlefield),\n\nWithout Sanctuary exhibit, of lynching photographs and postcards, 5\u20136\n\nWofford, Dick, 159\u2013161, 166\u2013180\n\nhanging of,\n\nHenderson, E., alleged rape by, , , 172\u2013173\n\nlynching probable cause, 173\u2013177\n\nWolfchild, Sheldon,\n\nWoman's Christian Temperance Union,\n\nWomen\n\nhanging suicides,\n\nOdyssey on hanging of, 41\u201342\n\nwhite, black rape of, , , , , , ,\n\nWomen of the Klan, US,\n\nWorking Group on Human Asphyxia,\n\nWorld War II (WWII), lynchings and,\n\nWyatt-Brown, Bertram,\n\non hangings, as religious ritual,\n\nX-Ray, of Tollund Man,  (photo)\n\nYee, Leland,\n\nYork, George, ,\n\nYouTube\n\nhanging videos,\n\nknot demonstration,\n\npublic executions, in Iran,\n\nZimmerman, George,\n\nZwierzyna, John, ,\n\n* * *\n\nPhoto by Rachel Dobbelaer\n\nJack Shuler holds the John and Christine Warner Chair at Denison University, where he is an associate professor teaching American literature and Black Studies. He is the author of two books on the nexus of race and violence in America, Calling Out Liberty and Blood and Bone. Shuler's criticism, interviews, reviews, and poems have appeared in the Columbia Journal of American Studies, Journal of Southern History, South Carolina Review, Southern Studies, and Failbetter, among others. He lives in Ohio.\n\n","meta":{"redpajama_set_name":"RedPajamaBook"}}
+{"text":" \nDear Reader,\n\nDid you know there's a Magic Tree House\u00ae book for every kid? From those just starting to read chapter books to more experienced readers, Magic Tree House\u00ae has something for everyone, including science, sports, geography, wildlife, history...and always a bit of mystery and magic!\n\nHappy reading!\n\nWhen I write Magic Tree House\u00ae adventures, I love including facts about the times and places Jack and Annie visit. But when readers finish these adventures, I want them to learn even more. So that's why we write a series of nonfiction books that are companions to the fiction titles in the Magic Tree House\u00ae series. We call these books Fact Trackers because we love to track the facts! Whether we're researching dinosaurs, pyramids, Pilgrims, sea monsters, or cobras, we're always amazed at how wondrous and surprising the real world is. We want you to experience the same wonder we do\u2014so get out your pencils and notebooks and hit the trail with us. You can be a Magic Tree House\u00ae Fact Tracker, too!\n\n**Here's what kids, parents, and teachers have to say about the Magic Tree House \u00ae Fact Trackers: **\n\n\"They are so good. I can't wait for the next one. All I can say for now is prepare to be amazed!\" \u2014Alexander N.\n\n\"I have read every Magic Tree House book there is. The [Fact Trackers] are a thrilling way to get more information about the special events in the story.\" \u2014John R.\n\n\"These are fascinating nonfiction books that enhance the magical time-traveling adventures of Jack and Annie. I love these books, especially _American Revolution_. I was learning so much, and I didn't even know it!\" \u2014Tori Beth S.\n\n\"[They] are an excellent 'behind-the-scenes' look at what the [Magic Tree House fiction] has started in your imagination! You can't buy one without the other; they are such a complement to one another.\" \u2014Erika N., mom\n\n\"Magic Tree House [Fact Trackers] took my children on a journey from Frog Creek, Pennsylvania, to so many significant historical events! The detailed manuals are a remarkable addition to the classic fiction Magic Tree House books we adore!\" \u2014Jenny S., mom\n\n\"[They] are very useful tools in my classroom, as they allow for students to be part of the planning process. Together, we find facts in the [Fact Trackers] to extend the learning introduced in the fictional companions. Researching and planning classroom activities, such as our class Olympics based on facts found in _Ancient Greece and the Olympics_ , help create a genuine love for learning!\" \u2014Paula H., teacher\n\nText copyright \u00a9 2005 by Mary Pope Osborne and Natalie Pope Boyce\n\nInterior illustrations copyright \u00a9 2005 by Sal Murdocca\n\nCover photograph courtesy of Mark Hallett Paleoart\n\nAll rights reserved. Published in the United States by Random House Children's Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.\n\nOriginally published by Random House Children's Books, New York, in 2005.\n\nRandom House and the colophon are registered trademarks and A Stepping Stone Book and the colophon are trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC. Magic Tree House is a registered trademark of Mary Pope Osborne; used under license.\n\nThe Magic Tree House Fact Tracker series was formerly known as the Magic Tree House Research Guide series.\n\nVisit us on the Web!\n\nMagicTreeHouse.com\n\nrandomhousekids.com\n\nEducators and librarians, for a variety of teaching tools, visit us at RHTeachersLibrarians.com\n\n_Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data_\n\nOsborne, Mary Pope.\n\nSabertooths and the Ice Age : a nonfiction companion to Magic tree house #7, sunset of the sabertooth \/ by Mary Pope Osborne and Natalie Pope Boyce; illustrated by Sal Murdocca.\n\np. cm. \u2014 (Magic tree house fact tracker)\n\n\"A Stepping Stone book.\"\n\nISBN 978-0-375-82380-0 (trade) \u2014 ISBN 978-0-375-92380-7 (lib. bdg.) \u2014ISBN 978-0-307-97530-0 (ebook)\n\n1. Saber-toothed tigers\u2014Juvenile literature. 2. Ice Age\u2014Juvenile literature.\n\nI. Title.\n\nQE882.C15 O83 2011 569'.75\u2014dc22 2011009362\n\nEbook ISBN 9780307975300\n\nThis book has been officially leveled by using the F&P Text Level Gradient\u2122 Leveling System.\n\nRandom House Children's Books supports the First Amendment and celebrates the right to read.\n\nv4.1\n\na\n_For Bob and Mary Crowell_\nHistorical Consultant:\n\nDR. TOM ROTHWELL, Division of Paleontology, American Museum of Natural History, New York\n\nEducation Consultant:\n\nHEIDI JOHNSON, Earth Science and Paleontology, Lowell Junior High School, Bisbee, Arizona\n\nVery special thanks to Paul Coughlin for his great photographs; and to the wonderful collaborative team at Random House: Joanne Yates, Mallory Loehr, Diane Landolf, and, as always, our editor, Shana Corey, who once again encouraged and guided us every step of the way.\n\nCover\n\nMagic Tree House\u00ae Levels\n\nNote\n\nTitle Page\n\nCopyright\n\nDedication\n\nAcknowledgments\n\nIntroductory Note\n\n1. The Ice Age\n\n2. Early People of the Ice Age\n\n3. Life in the Ice Age\n\n4. Cave Art\n\n5. Saber-Toothed Cats in the Pits\n\n6. Mammoths in the Ice\n\n7. After the Ice Age\n\nDoing More Research\n\nCredits\n\nAbout the Authors\n\nDear Readers,\n\nWhen we finished our adventures in Sunset of the Sabertooth, we didn't want to leave the Ice Age. So we got out our pencils and paper to do some fact tracking.\n\nWe wanted to learn about the people of the Ice Age and the world of the saber-toothed cats. We started at the library. We searched the shelves for books we needed. Then we went to our computers to dig up more information. We found out so much about the lives of people thousands of years ago. Finally, we studied the big saber-toothed cats and other amazing animals. We even read about animals frozen in ice and studied by scientists today!\n\nSo grab your notebooks and put on your warm coats. It's going to be a cold trip. We're leading you back into the Ice Age! Brrr!\n\nA million years ago, the world was much colder than it is now. Large parts of North America lay under ice and snow. Ice covered parts of Europe, Asia, and South America. In places it was a mile deep! We call this time the \"Ice Age.\"\n\nThe Ice Age began long after the dinosaurs disappeared. It lasted thousands of years. It ended 10,000 years ago.\n\n>  \n> \n> During the Ice Age, the ocean froze between Britain and Greenland.\n\nThe Ice Age was not one long period. In fact, scientists believe there have been several ice ages. At times the weather got warmer...warmer even than today. Years would pass, sometimes thousands of years. Then the temperatures slowly began to drop again. The icy weather returned.\n\n>  \n> \n> Whew! Some scientists believe we are in a warm phase of an ice age today.\n\n**What Causes Ice Ages**\n\nScientists are not exactly sure why we have ice ages. But they do have an idea. They think Earth changes its orbit around the sun every 100,000 years.\n\n>  \n> \n> Orbit means \"the path one object takes around another.\"\n\nDuring the Ice Age, Earth's orbit moved farther from the sun. Summers became too cold to melt ice and snow.\n\nOver millions of years, the warmer _climate_ of the dinosaurs disappeared. The icy world of the saber-toothed cat took its place. Slowly the land itself began to change. Water froze into ice and was trapped on land. Ocean levels dropped.\n\n>  \n> \n> Climate means \"the weather in a place over a long period of time.\"\n\nAs the water levels went down, land was exposed. A land bridge formed between England and France. Another appeared between Siberia and Alaska. People and animals used the bridges to cross from one place to another.\n\n>  \n> \n> The Siberian land bridge was 55 miles long. In places it was 1,000 miles across.\n\n**Glaciers**\n\nMany changes were caused by glaciers (GLAY-shurz). Glaciers are massive sheets of ice.\n\nThey form after many years of falling snow. The snow piles up. It gets very heavy. Ice inside the piled-up snow melts. The melted snow freezes again. This time it forms into hard ice crystals.\n\n>  \n> \n> Some ice crystals in a glacier are football-size!\n\nGravity begins to pull on the glacier. Slowly it begins to expand forward and sideways. Some glaciers can expand up to 1,000 feet a year. Others expand only a few inches.\n\nIn the Ice Age, glaciers acted like giant scrapers. As they expanded, they slowly cut through the land. They carried dirt along with them. Tons of rocks and sand were left behind. Lakes and valleys formed.\n\nRivers changed their paths. As the glaciers scraped the soil away, only scrubby bushes and grasses grew where large plants had once thrived.\n\n>  \n> \n> Glaciers still exist today.\n\nCredit 1\n\n>  \n> \n> These boulders were left behind by a glacier in Alaska.\n\n> Ice Age\n> \n> Earth's orbit changes\n> \n> Temperatures drop\n> \n> Ice covers parts of world\n> \n> Ocean levels drop\n> \n> Land bridges exposed\n\n**People and Animals**\n\nThere were other changes in the Ice Age. The first ancestors of modern humans appeared. Some lived in caves and wore skins and furs.\n\n>  \n> \n> Ancestors are relatives who lived long ago.\n\nLarge animals that could survive the cold roamed the earth. Their bodies held in heat better than those of small animals.\n\nMany Ice Age animals were _mammals_ (MAM-ulz). Mammals have extra protection against harsh, freezing weather. They have hair for warmth. And they are warm-blooded. Their temperature doesn't change with the outside temperature. Mammals give birth to live babies. And mammal babies feed on their mothers' milk. Extra care by their mothers helps them survive.\n\n>  \n> \n> People are mammals too.\n\nWhat kinds of animals could live in this harsh world? And who were the people who lived in the caves of the Ice Age?\n\nToday glaciers cover about 10 percent of the earth. The largest glaciers are in the Canadian Arctic, Antarctica, Alaska, the Andes Mountains in South America, and the Himalayan Mountains in Asia.\n\n>  \n> \n> There is even a glacier in Africa...on Mount Kenya!\n\nThe smallest glaciers are the size of a sports field. They can also be more than 50 miles long! North America's longest glacier is in Alaska. It is called the Bering Glacier.\n\n>  \n> \n> The Bering Glacier is over 122 miles long. That's a two-hour drive in a car!\n\nGlaciers can take as long as 3,000 years to form. When they get to be about 65 feet high, they begin to expand. Glaciers hold much of the freshwater in the world. If all the glaciers melted, ocean levels would rise.\n\nCredit 2\n\nWhen a glacier reaches the ocean, part of it breaks off. Then it becomes an iceberg.\n\nCredit 3\n\nSome of the earliest Ice Age people were the _Neanderthals_ (nee-AN-dur-tallz). Their _fossils_ were first found in the Neander Valley in Germany. Neanderthals existed about 100,000 years ago. They lived in Europe, the Middle East, North Africa, and parts of Asia.\n\n>  \n> \n> Fossils are remains or traces of life from long ago.\n\nThe fossils tell us that Neanderthals were compact and muscular. They were about five feet six inches tall and had thick bones.\n\nTheir heads bulged slightly in the back. Their foreheads jutted out over their eyes.\n\n>  \n> \n> Neanderthals had wide noses to warm the icy air they breathed.\n\nNeanderthals lived in caves or tents made of skins. They may have been the first people to wear clothes.\n\nScientists have found Neanderthal tools at Le Moustier (MOOSE-tee-ay), France. It was home to Neanderthals for thousands of years. They camped in the entrances to caves. They also lived under overhanging rocks. The tools found at this site are called the \"Mousterian Tool Kit.\"\n\nThe Neanderthals carefully chipped flakes from flint or other stone. The flakes were shaped into blades, knives, and scrapers.\n\n>  \n> \n> Chipping flint is called \"flint napping.\"\n\nCredit 4\n\n>  \n> \n> Scientists discovered 60 different kinds of flaked tools and 20 different kinds of small hand axes at Le Moustier.\n\n**The Old Man of Shanidar**\n\nShanidar was home to a group of Neanderthals in Iraq. Scientists have discovered Neanderthal skeletons in a cave there. One skeleton has captured the scientists' imaginations. He is called the \"Old Man of Shanidar.\"\n\n>  \n> \n> Most Neanderthals died before they reached 35.\n\nActually, the \"old man\" was only 45 years old. That was very old in those days. He had lived a hard life. One arm was withered and useless. One of his eyes had been damaged. And he had head injuries.\n\nAnd yet he was buried with care. A ring of stones surrounded his body. Someone had placed a bear's skull nearby. Scientists think the skull was part of a burial ceremony.\n\nScientists found pollen in the cave. They tested the pollen to find what kind of flowers it produced. They discovered the same flowers growing near the cave today!\n\n>  \n> \n> The flowers were hollyhocks, bachelor's buttons, and grape hyacinths.\n\nWe don't know much about the Neanderthals. We don't know anything about their language. Some scientists are not even sure they had a language. Because we have found tools, we know they were skillful toolmakers. Their remains tell us they lived in family groups. We also know they cared for their sick and old. And we are positive some even buried their dead. Neanderthals died out about 35,000 years ago. No one is certain exactly why.\n\n**Homo Sapiens**\n\nAs time passed, other people slowly replaced the Neanderthals. They were called _Homo sapiens_ (HO-mo SAY-pee-unz). They are our early relatives. In fact, people today are still called \"Homo sapiens.\"\n\n>  \n> \n> Homo sapiens means \"thinking man\" in Latin.\n\nGradually these people spread out all over the world. Their remains have been found in Europe, Asia, Africa, and America.\n\nResearchers believe many walked over the land bridge from Asia to North America. Some scientists think they even used small boats to reach the North American coast.\n\n>  \n> \n> Homo sapiens began to cross over to North America about 13,000 years ago.\n\nWe have found tools and other remains at their campsites. These things tell us that Homo sapiens had more skills than Neanderthals. And they looked different. Their foreheads did not jut over their eyes. Their lower jaws did not push forward. Their faces were straighter. They had smaller noses and jaws. Their bones were lighter. They moved more freely.\n\nCredit 5\n\nBecause they were so skillful, Homo sapiens were able to survive in harsh conditions. They hunted and gathered food. They built shelters and made warm clothes. Many were able to live very long lives.\n\nCredit 6\n\n>  \n> \n> An adult Homo sapiens male was about five feet six inches tall...as tall as Neanderthals.\n\nScientists aren't sure when people first started using fire. They do know that its use was one of the most important discoveries ever made.\n\nEarly people knew about fires caused by lightning strikes. But they didn't know how to make their own fire. They ate their food raw. They shivered in icy weather. And there was no light during the dark nights.\n\nFinally, people figured out how to make fire. They rubbed two sticks together. The sticks grew warm. Soon a spark flew off. They found they could make sparks with stone as well. The sparks caught grass or wood on fire. When they made their own fires, they could stay warm.\n\nThey could watch the flickering flames at night and have light.\n\nLater they found out they could cook their food. (Maybe someone accidentally dropped some meat in the fire.) And best of all, fire scared away hungry animals that prowled in the night!\n\nRussian scientists recently made an exciting discovery. They found a 30,000-year-old campsite! It was 300 miles north of the Arctic Circle. They discovered stone tools and ivory weapons at the site. And they also found piles of animal bones.\n\n>  \n> \n> The first Cro-Magnon fossils were found in a cave called Cro-Magnon in France.\n\nThe campsite was used by a group of Homo sapiens called the _Cro-Magnon_ (cro-MAG-nun). Cro-Magnon people lived in Europe from 35,000 to 10,000 years ago. The Cro-Magnon looked a lot like we do. They were skillful toolmakers and hunters. They made their own clothes. They wove ropes, nets, and clothes from plant fibers. They even made musical instruments.\n\nCredit 7\n\n>  \n> \n> This Cro-Magnon flute was made from bird bone. It's 25,000 years old!\n\n**Houses**\n\nIn the winter, Cro-Magnon people didn't move around much. Everyone lived in huts or longhouses made from mammoth bones, branches, and hides. When summer arrived, they left to follow the herds. Then they lived in tents made of animal hides. These were easy to move and set up.\n\n**Hunting**\n\nIce Age campsites tell us Cro-Magnons were good hunters. They made weapons out of bone, ivory, antler, stone, and wood. They hunted with spears and knives. They also used bows and arrows.\n\nHunting could be difficult. Sometimes hunters tracked an animal for days. Sometimes they trapped animals in swamps. If an animal attacked, they had only simple weapons to defend themselves.\n\n>  \n> \n> Ice Age people's skeletons showed many injuries.\n\nCredit 8\n\nWhen the hunters returned, there was much to do. Nothing was wasted. Animals were not just for meat. Fur was peeled away from the hide. People used it for clothes or rugs to sleep and sit on. Hides were dried and stretched for clothes, tents, packs, and pouches.\n\nCro-Magnon people even saved the bones and the fat. Bones supported their tents or held up roofs. They used animal fat to burn in stone lamps. It gave them light on dark, cold nights.\n\n**Diet**\n\nCro-Magnon people ate meat or fish whenever they could. Scientists think that reindeer provided much of their meat. When they killed an animal, they ate almost every part. They even ate the brains and livers and tongues!\n\n>  \n> \n> Ice Age smoothie: For quick energy, people drank animal blood!\n\nCro-Magnons cooked over open fires. Meat was often roasted on spits. Sometimes it was boiled. The cooks put the meat into leather pouches. Then they heated water by dropping hot stones into pots.\n\nLater they dried the leftover meat. They preserved it by rubbing salt into it. If it was icy, the ice acted like a freezer.\n\nThey also gathered plants, berries, eggs, nuts, and seeds. They picked dandelions and all kinds of greens. They ate sunflower seeds and hazelnuts. They gathered plants or herbs like catnip for medicine.\n\nAfter they gathered the food, they carried it home in leather bags or pouches.\n\n>  \n> \n> Women and children usually did the gathering.\n\n**Clothing**\n\nPeople in the Ice Age needed warm clothes. In the winter, they wore clothes and shoes made of furs and animal skins. They also wore belts, cloaks, and warm hats. They sewed them together with needles made of bone or ivory.\n\nCredit 9\n\n>  \n> \n> This is a bone needle used for sewing.\n\nMany researchers think Cro-Magnon people wove clothes from plant fibers. They wore these lighter clothes during the summer.\n\n**Burial**\n\nCro-Magnons buried their dead in formal graves. Many skeletons have on beautiful bracelets and necklaces. They even have jewelry on their knees and elbows! The jewelry is made of shells, ivory, bone, and animal teeth.\n\nCredit 10\n\n>  \n> \n> This necklace was found in France. It had teeth from bears, lions, wolves, deer, and foxes.\n\nThree Cro-Magnon skeletons were found in Sungir, Russia. One was a 60-year-old man. The other two were a young boy and girl.\n\nThe man had about 3,000 ivory beads all over his body. He wore bracelets and a red necklace. The girl's and boy's bodies were each covered with about 5,000 beads! The boy wore a beaded cap decorated with fox teeth. He also wore a belt with 250 fox teeth. An ivory pin was at his throat.\n\nWhen people today tried to carve beads like these, each bead took over an hour!\n\n> Cro-Magnons\n> \n> Hunters and gatherers\n> \n> Lived in tents, huts, caves\n> \n> Good toolmakers\n> \n> Formal burials\n\nThe Sungir graves show that Cro-Magnons honored their dead. They decorated the bodies of their dead friends and family. They probably performed ceremonies at the grave. They were the first people to perform burials like this.\n\nRecently scientists were searching Hohle Fels (HO-luh FELZ) Cave in Germany. Three small ivory objects caught their eye. They were figures of a horse, a bird, and a creature that was half human, half lion. They were carved over 30,000 years ago.\n\nIce Age people often carved animals and people out of ivory, bone, stone, and antlers. They also created figures out of clay.\n\nCredit 11\n\n>  \n> \n> This waterbird carving was discovered at Hohle Fels Cave. It was carved from mammoth ivory.\n\nSometimes they painted wonderful pictures on cave walls. The artists walked deep into the pitch-black caves. Many caves were so narrow, they had to crawl on their stomachs. They lighted their way with torches of burning animal fat.\n\n>  \n> \n> In one cave, they painted on a 20-foot-high ceiling!\n\nEarly artists usually painted animals and hunters. Sometimes herds of animals decorated the walls. There were also human figures and handprints. Scientists do not believe the people actually lived in these caves. They think they were special caves for art.\n\nCredit 12\n\n**Paint**\n\nCave artists used minerals found in dirt as paint. The earliest paintings were mostly black. Later they added red to their paintings.\n\nThe red came from iron oxide buried in the ground. The artists dug up lumps of it and ground it into a paste. The red paint has lasted for thousands of years.\n\nArtists painted with twigs and horsehair brushes. They blended the paint with feathers. Sometimes they blew paint out of their mouths onto the walls! Sometimes they blew paint out of hollow animal horns.\n\n**The Cave of Lascaux**\n\nOne day in 1940, four French boys lost their puppy in the woods. They feared it had fallen down a deep hole. They lowered themselves down on ropes. To their surprise, they found themselves in a cave. What they saw there amazed them.\n\n>  \n> \n> The dog's name was Robot.\n\nThe cave walls were covered in drawings, paintings, and engravings. The boys saw herds of animals painted on the walls. There was a large bull and an upside-down horse.\n\n>  \n> \n> Scientists think people at Lascaux walked 25 miles to get iron oxide for painting.\n\nCredit 13\n\n>  \n> \n> This painting of a herd of horses lasted so long because the cave was dry and dark.\n\nThey had found the cave of Lascaux (lass-KOH), one of the most important Ice Age sites in the world! Scientists date the art back to over 16,000 years ago.\n\nPeople began to come from all over to see the incredible cave art. Experts worried that the paintings would be ruined.\n\nFinally, the French government closed the cave. But it created a second cave nearby. It looks like the real one. Today visitors can only visit the new cave. The wonderful art of Lascaux remains safe, deep in its dark and magic cave.\n\n**Altamira**\n\nAltamira is a cave in Spain. In 1879, a young girl told her father about some strange cave paintings she'd heard about there.\n\nHer father, Don Marcelino Sanz de Sautuola (mar-suh-LEE-no SAHNZ day sow-tu-OH-luh), had studied ancient cave art. He walked far back into the cave. What he saw startled him. The cave was covered in art. There were deer, wild boar, and bison. He was convinced the art was between 11,000 and 19,000 years old!\n\nCredit 14\n\n>  \n> \n> This bison is from the cave at Altamira.\n\nPeople flocked to the cave. Then trouble began. Experts questioned Don Marcelino's conclusions. Some even thought the paintings were fake. They claimed his friends painted the pictures. When Don Marcelino died, people still doubted his discovery.\n\n>  \n> \n> The king of Spain even visited.\n\nExperts continued to study the cave. Nearly 15 years after Don Marcelino's death, they all agreed he had been right.\n\nScientists found the remains of food in the cave. They also found tools and hearths for fire. Experts believe people actually lived there.\n\nPeople have been creating art for thousands of years. Some scientists think early people made art to give them luck on the hunt. They may have done it to tell stories or create magic. But there are many experts who think these early artists just wanted to create something beautiful.\n\n> Turn the page to see our favorite cave paintings.\n\nCave art often pictured animals of the hunt. Bison, horses, and bulls decorated many walls. Sometimes the artists painted hunters spearing game. They also showed hunters being injured. Some animal paintings were large. In Lascaux, there is a cow over five feet long, called the \"leaping cow.\"\n\nHere are some of our favorite cave paintings.\n\nCredit 15\n\nCredit 16\n\nCredit 17\n\nScientists don't just have clues about ancient humans. They have clues about animals too. Many animals of the Ice Age are extinct. _Extinct_ means that the animals do not exist today. We only know about them from fossils.\n\nOne of the most famous fossil sites is right in downtown Los Angeles! This site is called the La Brea Tar Pits. The pits aren't actually tar pits. They are asphalt (AS-fault) pits. Asphalt is sticky and tar-like.\n\n>  \n> \n> Bones from 34,000 large animals have been found in the pits.\n\nAsphalt comes from oil inside the earth. The oil leaks out to the surface. After many years, the oil turns into asphalt. And for 30,000 years, animals got stuck in it!\n\nThese animals got stuck in the asphalt by accident. Sometimes they were fleeing _predators_. When the predators spotted a struggling animal, they dashed in to get it. Then the predators also got stuck! Other times the animals mistook asphalt for water.\n\n>  \n> \n> Predators are animals that hunt and eat other animals.\n\nThe La Brea Tar Pits became a burial ground for millions of plants, birds, insects, and animals. At least 2,500 saber-toothed cats are buried there. The La Brea site is the best place to study these fierce animals.\n\n>  \n> \n> The La Brea pits hold 98 tons of fossils.\n\n**Saber-Toothed Cat**\n\nSometimes saber-toothed cats are called saber-toothed tigers. They are not actually tigers. They belong to the cat family.\n\nCredit 18\n\nBut you don't want a pet like this! Saber-toothed cats were some big, fierce cats! They get the name \"saber-toothed\" because their canine teeth were shaped like _sabers_.\n\n>  \n> \n> A saber is a sharp sword.\n\nThese teeth were about nine inches long. Their upper teeth were also very sharp. They used these teeth to bite their victims' necks and bellies.\n\nScientists call the most common saber-toothed cat Smilodon (SMY-luh-don).\n\nCredit 19\n\n>  \n> \n> Smilodon means \"knife tooth.\"\n\n**Saber-Toothed Cats on the Loose!**\n\nSaber-toothed cats were very dangerous. They were meat eaters. They attacked anything that looked like dinner!\n\nThese cats were built to hunt. They were about three feet tall at their shoulders. Most were over six feet long. (This didn't include their short tails.) They weighed over 600 pounds.\n\n>  \n> \n> Scientists think they roared very loudly.\n\nSaber-toothed cats could probably run very fast. But they could only run for short distances. They used their powerful legs to kick out at their prey. Then they would whip out their sharp claws. These claws could be pulled in and pushed out. When the claws were out, they were deadly.\n\n>  \n> \n> Claws that go in and out are \"retractable.\" This helps protect the claws.\n\nSaber-toothed cats also had strong, heavy bodies. Their neck and shoulder muscles were especially strong. They made it easy for the cats to pounce on an animal and hold it down.\n\n**Life in the Pack**\n\nThe La Brea Tar Pits contained saber-toothed cats of all ages. Scientists discovered some animals had serious injuries. Many had hurt themselves before falling in the pit. Some showed signs of healing. But how did these injured animals care for themselves?\n\nBones of saber-toothed cats are often found together. Scientists believe they lived in groups. They think that healthy saber-toothed cats let injured ones eat part of their kills. This gave the injured animals time to heal.\n\n> Saber-Toothed Cats\n> \n> Large canine teeth\n> \n> Strong bodies\n> \n> Pounced on victims\n> \n> Lived in groups\n\n**How Did They Eat?**\n\nHow did saber-toothed cats chew with those huge teeth? Researchers found the cats could open their jaws very wide...much wider than cats today.\n\n>  \n> \n> One wolf fossil had a piece of a saber-toothed cat's tooth stuck in its head!\n\nSome scientists think saber-toothed cats bit meat off from the sides of their mouth. They had sharp teeth in the back of their mouth. They used these to shred the meat.\n\nWe know saber-toothed cats prowled the earth millions of years ago. They became extinct about 11,000 years ago. Scientists don't know why this happened. Some think people hunted them too much. Others think they ran out of food when the climate changed.\n\nEven though these cats disappeared long ago, the sticky asphalt at La Brea holds great clues about their lives.\n\n_Archaeologists_ (ar-kee-OL-uh-jists) are scientists who study ancient people. When they find an ancient campsite, they look for lots of things...tools, pieces of pottery, weapons, and human remains like bones. They carefully dig up what they've found. All these things give them clues about people of the past.\n\n>  \n> \n> Archaeologists call the site they're working on a \"dig.\"\n\nCredit 20\n\n_Paleontologists_ (pay-lee-un-TOL-uh-jists) are scientists who study early plant and animal life. They like to study ancient fossils of animals, insects, and plants. These things tell them what the world was like long ago...even before people existed!\n\nCredit 21\n\nPaleontologists and archaeologists work a lot alike. They go to sites and carefully dig up clues. They make drawings and take photographs. Then they record their information. They're like history detectives!\n\nSiberia is a vast, cold part of Russia. In 1977, a man operating a bulldozer made a discovery. As he worked, he saw a dark shape in the ice. He looked closer. He was amazed! He thought he'd found a baby elephant buried in the ice!\n\nScientists rushed to examine his find. The elephant was actually an extinct Ice Age animal called a woolly mammoth! It was about six months old when it died. Its body had been buried for thousands of years.\n\nCredit 22\n\n>  \n> \n> This baby mammoth lived 10,000 years ago!\n\n**Woolly Mammoths**\n\nOver 4,500 frozen mammoths have been discovered in Siberia. Mammoths belong to the elephant family. Finding their frozen bodies has helped scientists learn much about their lives.\n\nWoolly mammoths lived in Siberia, Europe, and North America. The weather there was _frigid_.\n\n>  \n> \n> Frigid means \"really cold!\"\n\nAnimals couldn't survive in that ice-box without protection. Woolly mammoths were loaded with warm hair. It was long and shaggy...sometimes it was three feet long!\n\n>  \n> \n> One woolly mammoth hair is as thick as six human hairs.\n\nIn addition, they had a layer of fat under their skin. The fat stored heat. When there was no food, fat gave them energy.\n\nWoolly mammoths were usually about ten feet tall at the shoulder. They weighed over four tons. They had huge tusks. Males had longer tusks than females. Scientists have discovered tusks over 13 feet long. Mammoths used their tusks for defense against predators. Since they ate plants, they used their tusks to dig grasses and plants out of the snow.\n\nCredit 23\n\n>  \n> \n> These woolly mammoth tusks were found in Siberia.\n\n**Other Mammoths**\n\nWoolly mammoths were just one type of mammoth. Other types lived all over the world. Some were as tall as giraffes. Others were about as tall as a man.\n\nThe largest were the Columbian mammoths. They lived in North America. The males were over 13 feet tall at the shoulder and weighed over nine tons! The smallest were the pygmy mammoths. They were about six feet tall. They lived on islands off the coast of California.\n\nIn 1807, President Thomas Jefferson sent Captain William Clark on a mission. Clark was a great explorer. But this time his job was to bring back animal bones found in Kentucky. No one knew what kind of bones they were. The bones lay in a place called Big Bone Lick.\n\nJefferson and his friend Benjamin Franklin were puzzled. They decided the bones were elephant bones. Today we know they were mammoth bones. You can still see the bones in Jefferson's house in Virginia.\n\n>  \n> \n> **Mammoths like those at Big Bone Lick are called \"Jefferson's mammoths.\"**\n\n**Mammoth Families**\n\nMammoths lived in herds. Males were part of the herd, but they often roamed about on their own. The female mammoths had to stick together. It was their job to care for the babies. Most mammoths had from five to 15 babies in their lifetime. Like modern elephants, the females looked after each other's babies as well as their own.\n\n>  \n> \n> **Scientists think females were the bosses of the herd**.\n\n**Predators**\n\nMammoths often had to fight off predators like people or saber-toothed cats. If danger was near, a mammoth trumpeted a note of alarm. They all moved in close together. The baby mammoths hid behind their mothers.\n\nThe adults used their sharp tusks to fight off the intruders. They also used their huge legs to stomp on their enemies.\n\n**Hunting a Mammoth**\n\nRemains of a mammoth were found on a ranch in Naco, Arizona. Its skeleton had eight spear points stuck in it!\n\nArchaeologists think that humans killed mammoths in several different ways. One way was to attack them with spears.\n\n>  \n> \n> **Mammoth skin was thick and hard to stick with a spear**.\n\nAnother method was to set fires around the herds. The frightened animals raced off high cliffs trying to escape. They often died in the fall. If they didn't, the hunters killed them at the bottom of the cliff.\n\n>  \n> \n> **There are about eight sites that show evidence of mammoth hunting**.\n\nScientists have also found large holes with mammoth remains in them. They think the hunters dug holes. Then they covered them with branches. The mammoths fell into the holes. The hunters threw heavy stones down on the animals to kill them. Then they speared the ones left alive.\n\nScientists don't think hunting caused the mammoths to become totally extinct. But they think it played a big part.\n\n**Woolly Rhino**\n\nWoolly rhinos became extinct about 20,000 years ago. Their fossils have turned up from Britain to Siberia. Scientists have studied the actual body of a woolly rhino. They found it buried in mud in the Ukraine.\n\n>  \n> \n> In Britain, a woolly rhino was dug up with a plant stuck in its teeth.\n\nWoolly rhinos ate grass. They lived in herds. Their long, shaggy coats protected them from the cold. The rhinos measured about six feet tall at the shoulder. Many were over 11 feet long and weighed more than a car! They also had two large horns above their noses. The horns were made of thick, strong hair. They were useful for fighting. They were also good for digging up food like grasses and plants buried in the snow.\n\n**Giant Ground Sloth**\n\nGiant ground sloths lived in North and South America. They were very strange animals. These sloths were as big as elephants. They weighed three to four tons. And that's not all! Standing upright, they were as tall as a giraffe!\n\n>  \n> \n> Scientists think giant ground sloths sometimes walked upright.\n\nThe sloth had incredible claws. They were as big as a man's arm. Fortunately these gigantic animals didn't eat people. They ate plants and fruit. Like modern sloths, they moved very, very slowly. Giant ground sloths became extinct about 12,000 years ago.\n\n**Cave Lion**\n\nThere are cave paintings and fossils of huge lions. They lived in caves in Europe. These lions were over 11 feet long. That's much bigger than lions today. But like lions today, they were meat-eaters.\n\n>  \n> \n> Modern lions are a little over eight feet long.\n\nCarvings and cave paintings exist of creatures who were half man, half lion. Archaeologists think that early people thought these lions had magic power. Maybe the artists thought they could have the power of a lion. Cave lions lasted a long time. The last ones disappeared only 2,000 years ago.\n\n**Cave Bear**\n\nLike cave lions, cave bears made their homes in caves. Some caves have thousands of their skeletons. In a cave in France, there are huge bear footprints. In many caves, marks from bear claws are all over the walls.\n\nCave bears were about ten feet tall! One skin would make a whole tent! But these huge creatures didn't eat meat. They were vegetarians.\n\nArchaeologists think Ice Age people used cave bear skulls and teeth for ceremonies. One German cave had ten bear skulls on a ledge. In the same cave, scientists found 310 bear teeth.\n\n**Glyptodont**\n\nGlyptodonts (GLIP-tuh-donts) are like nothing you've ever seen! At first, scientists could not even figure out what they were.\n\nThese strange creatures lived in North America. They were almost five feet tall and over nine feet long. By looking at fossils, scientists have guessed that bony scales covered their bodies and foreheads. The scales acted like armor. There were little holes in the scales. Hairs sprouted out of the holes.\n\n>  \n> \n> Only part of the glyptodonts' faces and legs were not protected.\n\nGlyptodonts were vegetarians. They lived on grasslands or near water. Imagine seeing an animal the size of a car munching away on your front yard!\n\n**Giant Beaver**\n\nThere are ancient Indian stories about giant beavers. Fossils tell us these beavers actually existed. They lived near lakes and swamps in North America. They were the biggest _rodents_ that ever lived. Many weighed over 400 pounds. (A modern beaver weighs about 65 pounds.) And they were about eight feet tall when they stood up. That's the size of a black bear!\n\n>  \n> \n> Rodents are animals like rats and mice that have special teeth for gnawing.\n\nWe don't know exactly what the giant beavers looked like. Scientists guess they looked a lot like beavers today...only much bigger!\n\n**Dire Wolf**\n\nThe Ice Age dire wolves were larger than wolves today. They were about five feet long and weighed more than 110 pounds. They had strong legs and a wide head.\n\nThe dire wolves seemed to have hunted in packs. They had extremely large, powerful teeth. Scientists think they used them to crush the bones of their prey. Their teeth could also grip large animals and hang on tightly.\n\nMore than 3,600 dire wolves have been found in the La Brea Tar Pits. Many of their skulls show signs of injury. Scientists think they got these wounds from being kicked in the head by animals they were attacking.\n\n**Western Camel**\n\nWe usually think of camels living in deserts. Not these camels! They lived in the grasslands of North America 50 million years ago. They lived on into the Ice Age.\n\nWestern camels were about seven feet tall at the shoulder. Scientists think they had a single hump on their backs. They ate plants.\n\nScientists discovered camel bones with cut marks on them. The marks were made by early Native Americans. Experts wonder if the Native Americans ate camel burgers for dinner!\n\nHere's another interesting fact about Western camels. Along with horses and some other animals, they were among the few animals that traveled the land bridge from North America into Asia and Africa. Most animals traveled the opposite way.\n\nCredit 24\n\nThe Ice Age came to an end about 10,000 years ago. Earth's orbit moved closer to the sun. The world began to get warmer. Much of the ice began to melt. Ocean levels rose. The land bridges disappeared.\n\nMany animals became extinct. Scientists don't know why the animals disappeared.\n\nBut they do have several _theories_ (THEER-eez). Theories are ideas that haven't been proved.\n\nOne theory is that when the weather changed, some plants died off. Animals began to run out of food. Another idea is that a terrible disease wiped out the animals. A third idea is that too much hunting caused their extinction.\n\nScientists are still looking for clues. One thing they're doing is studying mammoth tusks. The tusks show if the animal was sick when it died. They also show what time of the year it died. This study may provide clues as to why mammoths became extinct.\n\nOther Ice Age animals exist today. By studying them, we can understand their ancient relatives. Moose still exist. Grizzly bears and bison survived. Another animal also may have survived. It is a type of Ice Age dog. These wild dogs live in the woods of South Carolina. Some researchers think they could be relatives of dogs from the Ice Age.\n\n>  \n> \n> People have kept dogs as pets for over 14,000 years!\n\nCredit 25\n\nCredit 26\n\nCredit 27\n\nThe climate change also affected the people of the Ice Age. As the climate warmed up, people stopped following the great herds. The warmer weather made it easier to plant crops. Villages sprang up around farms. Villages grew into cities.\n\nThe population also grew. At the end of the Ice Age, there were about five million people in the whole world. That's less than the population of New York City today!\n\n>  \n> \n> Population means \"the number of people that live in one place.\"\n\nOur Ice Age ancestors lived in a harsh world. Experts think they survived by helping one another. They hunted together. They shared food and cared for the sick and the old. And they did more than just survive. They created beautiful art that inspires us today.\n\nThe people and great animals of the Ice Age still fill us with awe. Imagine creeping into a cave 15,000 years ago. It is icy cold and snowing. You need to warm up. Suddenly something in the back of the cave moves. It is huge. Outside the wind is howling. Slowly and carefully you back out of the entrance. Inside the cave, a giant cave bear stirs. Then he sighs and turns over for a good winter's sleep.\n\nCredit 28\nDoing More Research\n\nThere's a lot more you can learn about sabertooths and the Ice Age. The fun of research is seeing how many different sources you can explore.\n\nBooks\n\nMost libraries and bookstores have books about sabertooths and the Ice Age.\n\nHere are some things to remember when you're using books for research:\n\n1. You don't have to read the whole book.\n\nCheck the table of contents and the index to find the topics you're interested in.\n\n2. Write down the name of the book.\n\nWhen you take notes, make sure you write down the name of the book in your notebook so you can find it again.\n\n3. Never copy exactly from a book.\n\nWhen you learn something new from a book, put it in your own words.\n\n4. Make sure the book is nonfiction.\n\nSome books tell make-believe stories about sabertooths and the Ice Age. Make-believe stories are called _fiction_. They're fun to read, but not good for research.\n\nResearch books have facts and tell true stories. They are called _nonfiction_. A librarian or teacher can help you make sure the books you use for research are nonfiction.\n\nHere are some good nonfiction books about sabertooths and the Ice Age:\n\n\u2022 _Cave Detectives: Unraveling the Mystery of an Ice Age Cave_ by David L. Harrison\n\n\u2022 _Early Humans_ , a DK Eyewitness Book\n\n\u2022 _Ice Age Mammals of North America: A Guide to the Big, the Hairy, and the Bizarre_ by Ian M. Lange\n\n\u2022 _Ice Age Sabertooth: The Most Ferocious Cat that Ever Lived_ by Barbara Hehner\n\n\u2022 _The Ice Age Tracker's Guide_ by Adrian Lister\n\n\u2022 _Mammoths and Mastodons: Titans of the Ice Age_ by Cheryl Bardoe\n\nMuseums\n\nMany museums have Ice Age exhibits. You can also visit some sites where fossils have been found! These places can help you learn more about sabertooths and the Ice Age.\n\nWhen you go to a museum:\n\n1. Be sure to take your notebook!\n\nWrite down anything that catches your interest. Draw pictures, too!\n\n2. Ask questions.\n\nThere are almost always people at museums who can help you find what you're looking for.\n\n3. Check the calendar.\n\nMany museums have special events and activities just for kids!\n\nHere are some museums with exhibits about the Ice Age:\n\n\u2022 American Museum of Natural History (New York)\n\n\u2022 Big Bone Lick State Park (Union, Kentucky)\n\n\u2022 Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture (Seattle)\n\n\u2022 Denver Museum of Nature and Science\n\n\u2022 The Mammoth Site (Hot Springs, South Dakota)\n\n\u2022 Page Museum at the La Brea Tar Pits (Los Angeles)\n\nDVDs\n\nThere are some great nonfiction DVDs about the Ice Age. As with books, make sure the DVDs you watch for research are nonfiction!\n\nCheck your library or video store for these and other nonfiction titles about the Ice Age:\n\n\u2022 _Baby Mammoth_ from Discovery Channel\n\n\u2022 _Glaciers_ from Ambrose Video\n\n\u2022 _Mammoth Mystery_ from National Geographic\n\n\u2022 _Prehistoric Predators: Sabertooth_ from National Geographic\n\nThe Internet\n\nMany websites have facts about the Ice Age. Some also have games and activities that can help make learning about the Ice Age even more fun.\n\nAsk your teacher or your parents to help you find more websites like these:\n\n\u2022 bbc.co.uk\/nature\/life\/\u200bMammal\/by\/prehistoric\n\n\u2022 crystalinks.com\/woollyrhino.html\n\n\u2022 dmns.org\/main\/minisites\/\u200biceage\/index.html\n\n\u2022 enchantedlearning.com\/subjects\/\u200bmammals\/Iceagemammals.shtml\n\n\u2022 kids.nationalgeographic.com\/kids\/\u200banimals\/\u200bcreaturefeature\/mammoths\n\nGood luck!\n\n_Photographs courtesy of:_\n\n**The Ancient Art & Architecture Collection Ltd**. (). **AP\/WIDE WORLD PHOTOS** (). \u00a9 **Art Resource, NY** (, , ). \u00a9 **Bettmann\/CORBIS** (). \u00a9 **Jonathan Blair\/CORBIS** (). **Sisse Brimberg\/National Geographic Image Collection** (). \u00a9 **B.S.P.I.\/CORBIS** (). \u00a9 **Dean Conger\/CORBIS** (). **Kenneth Garrett\/National Geographic Image Collection** (). **George C. Page Museum** (, , , ). **The Granger Collection, New York** (). \u00a9 **Charles & Josette Lenars\/CORBIS** (). \u00a9 **Erich Lessing\/Art Resource, NY** (). **Logan Museum of Anthropology, Beloit College** (). \u00a9 **The Natural History Museum, London** (, , ). \u00a9 **Pat O'Hara\/CORBIS** (). \u00a9 **Photolink\/Photodisc\/PictureQuest** (, ). \u00a9 **Reuters\/CORBIS** (). \u00a9 **Royalty-Free\/CORBIS** (, ).\n\nVIRGINIA BERBRICH\n\nMary Pope Osborne and Natalie Pope Boyce are sisters who grew up on army posts all over the world. They are working on more Magic Tree House\u00ae Fact Tracker books to give readers information about the places, time periods, and animals that Jack and Annie discover in their Magic Tree House adventures.\n\nMary lives in northwest Connecticut. Natalie makes her home nearby in the Berkshire Hills of Massachusetts. Mary is the author of all the Magic Tree House\u00ae fiction titles, as well as many more books for kids.\n\n# _What's next on  \nyour reading list?_\n\n[Discover your next  \ngreat read!](http:\/\/links.penguinrandomhouse.com\/type\/prhebooklanding\/isbn\/9780307975300\/display\/1)\n\n* * *\n\nGet personalized book picks and up-to-date news about this author.\n\nSign up now.\n\n## Contents\n\n  1. Cover\n  2. Magic Tree House\u00ae Levels\n  3. Note\n  4. Title Page\n  5. Copyright\n  6. Dedication\n  7. Acknowledgments\n  8. Contents\n  9. Introductory Note\n  10. 1. The Ice Age\n  11. 2. Early People of the Ice Age\n  12. 3. Life in the Ice Age\n  13. 4. Cave Art\n  14. 5. Saber-Toothed Cats in the Pits\n  15. 6. Mammoths in the Ice\n  16. 7. After the Ice Age\n  17. Doing More Research\n  18. Credits\n  19. About the Authors\n\n  1. \n  2. \n  3. \n  4. \n  5. \n  6. \n  7. \n  8. \n  9. \n  10. \n  11. \n  12. \n  13. \n  14. \n  15. \n  16. \n  17. \n  18. \n  19. \n  20. \n  21. \n  22. \n  23. \n  24. \n  25. \n  26. \n  27. \n  28. \n  29. \n  30. \n  31. \n  32. \n  33. \n  34. \n  35. \n  36. \n  37. \n  38. \n  39. \n  40. \n  41. \n  42. \n  43. \n  44. \n  45. \n  46. \n  47. \n  48. \n  49. \n  50. \n  51. \n  52. \n  53. \n  54. \n  55. \n  56. \n  57. \n  58. \n  59. \n  60. \n  61. \n  62. \n  63. \n  64. \n  65. \n  66. \n  67. \n  68. \n  69. \n  70. \n  71. \n  72. \n  73. \n  74. \n  75. \n  76. \n  77. \n  78. \n  79. \n  80. \n  81. \n  82. \n  83. \n  84. \n  85. \n  86. \n  87. \n  88. \n  89. \n  90. \n  91. \n  92. \n  93. \n  94. \n  95. \n  96. \n  97. \n  98. \n  99. \n  100. \n  101. \n  102. \n  103. \n  104. \n  105. \n  106. \n  107. \n  108. \n  109. \n  110. \n  111. \n  112.\n\n  1. Cover\n  2. Cover\n  3. Title Page\n  4. Table of Contents\n  5. Start\n\n","meta":{"redpajama_set_name":"RedPajamaBook"}}
+{"text":" \nCaffeine Nights Publishing\n\n#\n\n# White Lilies\n\n# RC Bridgestock\n\nFiction aimed at the heart and the head...\nPublished by Caffeine Nights Publishing 2013\n\nCopyright \u00a9 RC Bridgestock 2013\n\nRC Bridgestock has asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1998 to be identified as the author of this work\n\nCONDITIONS OF SALE\n\nAll rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, scanning, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher\n\nThis book has been sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.\n\nAll characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead is purely coincidental\n\nPublished in Great Britain by Caffeine Nights Publishing\n\nwww. caffeine-nights com\n\nBritish Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.\n\nA CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library\n\nISBN: 978-1-907565-34-2\n\nCover design by\n\nMark (Wills) Williams\n\nEverything else by\n\nDefault, Luck and Accident\nAcknowledgements\n\nThank you to Emily & Maisy Murphy and to Kate Young & Matthew for your kind contributions to Jen's pregnancy story line and the subsequent birth storyline of Maisy Dylan.\n\nAlso to our publisher Darren Laws and Literary Agent Monika Luukkonen for their continued hard work, dedication and their belief in the Dylan series. Not forgetting Mark (Wills) Williams for once again producing the most excellent art work for the 'White Lilies' cover.\n\nAnd last but not least for the support of our family & friends, the Wight Fair Writers Circle, the other authors in the stable at Caffeine Nights Publishing and Betty Jordan (Carol's Mum) for the tea, cakes, Sunday dinners and doing the odd load of ironing \u2013 we couldn't have done it without you. \nDedication\n\nWe dedicate this book to all our readers with our love, appreciation, and thanks for allowing us to be part of your lives. We hope that you will get to know a little more about one Senior Investigative Officer's real thoughts and feelings through reading the DI Dylan series of fictional tales.\n\nAnd with love to our grandchildren Axel Maldini, Hermione Vegas Bridgestock and latest addition, Annabelle Rene Beckwith.\nThe D.I. Dylan Books\n\nDeadly Focus\n\nConsequences\n\nWhite Lilies\n\n## Chapter 1\n\nToday was one of mixed emotions for Grace Harvey as she sipped the Earl Grey from her china cup and admired the beautiful white lilies that sat on the corner of the dining table, where she'd left them after the florist's delivery a few moments earlier. Dancing above the floral arrangement was a helium balloon attached to a silver coloured ribbon. '80 Today', it read.\n\nShe wiped her hands upon her crisp linen napkin briskly before reaching for the small hand-written envelope nestling within the flowers. She opened it, placed the card on the table before her breakfast plate and put her glasses on the end of her nose to read the small writing thereon. 'From Brian', it said.\n\nStaring beyond the card onto the front lawn, Grace swallowed the lump in her throat and sighed. With tears in her eyes, she put the card back in its envelope and her glasses on the linen tablecloth beside the condiments. When was she going to learn? Why did she let herself carry on hoping that one day her only child would remember such an important milestone? He was out of the country the last time they'd spoken and as usual he'd asked her for money. In fact between them, Donald and Brian were going through her savings like a dose of salts, as Alfred, her late husband, would have said.\n\n'Well, I can't take it with me now can I?' she said out loud. 'One day it'll all be his anyway \u2013 and who knows, perhaps the money will make him happy for a while.' Brian, her friend and financial advisor, regularly said so, when he advised her to buy or top up her investment funds.\n\n'Donald might ring later,' she said to Winston, her King Charles spaniel, who placed his head on her knee, knowingly. She smiled down at him. The arthritis in her spine wouldn't allow her to bend so easily to stroke his head, so she blew him a kiss. Seeing the acknowledgement of her action on his cute little face made her feel a bit brighter. The old dog cocked his head, looked at her lovingly, then closed his big brown eyes.\n\n'What would I do without you?' she whispered.\n\nAlfred had brought Winston home unexpectedly from his nightly constitutional, just before he died.\n\n'What was I supposed to do, leave him tied to the tree?' she remembered him saying when she'd met him with a scowl. Alfred's baby blue eyes, framed with grey brows that flew out like wings, had been close to tears as he handed her a note that confirmed the puppy had been abandoned. He adored animals. She had always been unsure about having a dog, but Grace shuddered at the thought of her life without Winston now. Winston moaned contentedly and settled comfortingly on her foot.\n\n'We miss them both don't we?' she said as she brushed away a tear that had fallen from the corner of her aged eye and onto her rosy weather-worn cheek.\n\nGrace had lived in the same house in the quiet hamlet of Merton all her life. Yorkshire stone-built houses, just like hers, surrounded the village green, which was the centrepiece of this tranquil village community.\n\nThe Westminster clock that had been presented to Alfred on his retirement struck ten o'clock. She turned and read the inscription on the brass plaque that bore his name, pulled a hanky from her sleeve, leaned forward and gently dusted the metal until it shone brightly.\n\n'Time for our walk,' she groaned, easing herself up from the chair. Winston instantly jumped at her words and, yapping persistently, he ran to the front door. She stood for a moment with her hand on the corner of the table until she felt a little steadier and put her hanky in her cardigan pocket.\n\nGrace picked up her lipstick from the Welsh dresser in the hallway as she passed. Leaning forward on tiptoes to see her reflection in the mirror, she ran the pink gloss expertly around her lips. Smoothing her white wavy hair with the palm of her hand, she picked up her hat and popped it on her head. She collected her coat from behind the door, bent down for her smart black patent court shoes under the umbrella stand and picked up her gloves.\n\nWinston's lead and the bag of bread she'd prepared earlier for the ducks were hanging on the door handle. Although it was summer there was a cool breeze she had noticed this morning whilst she'd stepped out to take the eggs from the milkman.\n\n'Right little man, are we ready for off?' she said to Winston with gusto as she reached for the catch on the door. He didn't need asking twice as he darted ahead down the pathway, sat obediently at the wrought iron garden gate and waited patiently with a flurry of his wagging tail.\n\nThe locals had been known to say that you could set your watch by Grace and Winston's constitutional. Theirs was a slow stroll around the green, incorporating the mandatory stop at the pond before calling at the village shop for the daily paper. Grace did so look forward to doing the crossword with her elevenses. For her birthday present, Brian had booked a table for them both at a restaurant in the nearby town of Harrowfield.\n\n'We'll give the ducks a bit extra bread today Winston, since it's a special day,' Grace said, chuckling as she struggled to break the bread with her bent and swollen fingers. Winston wagged his tail as he looked on from the grass banking at the side of the pond trying his best to intercept the bread between his owner's hand and the duck's beak. She laughed at his antics. He'd never caught a piece yet, but still he tried, bless him.\n\n'Now,' she said putting the bread wrapper in the bin, 'it's time to visit Mr and Mrs Taylor at the store. I think I'll bake a cake,' she said as they stopped at the roadside. Grace looked right then left. Winston sat at her feet and waited patiently for her command. Grace tugged at his lead.\n\n'Come on Winston,' she demanded as she stepped onto the road but he refused. 'What's up little man?' she asked. 'Don't be stubborn.' Grace plucked him up from the kerb and tucked him safely under her arm with a little effort. 'If you want some cake we'll have to get the ingredients,' she scolded, tapping his nose as she crossed the road.\n\nSuddenly she heard music. She froze. The speeding vehicle didn't slow or swerve to avoid them. Grace and Winston were catapulted into the air and tossed into the gutter. The car disappeared as quickly as it had arrived. The noise that had spewed from it became inaudible in seconds.\n\nTime seemed to stand still as Grace and Winston's crumpled bodies lay motionless on the tarmac. An eerie silence swelled across the green like a creeping mist. Villagers slowly started to emerge from their dwellings to see what the commotion had been. On seeing the bodies, some people ran to Grace's side. Others were too stunned, but there was nothing anyone could do. Mr Taylor shouted at his wife to bring blankets and call 999 as he bent over the bodies.\n\n'Road Closed,' were the signs the young police constable and his mentor PC Tim Whitworth took from the boot of their marked police car.\n\nPC Whitworth could see the villagers congregated in groups, watching. Some were being comforted by others. All had shock written across their faces.\n\n'How could the car driver not have seen them?' he heard them say. 'The road's straight. There're warning signs in the village to Reduce Speed \u2013 Twenty's plenty.'\n\n'Scenes of Crime Officers are on their way,' the younger officer said, hearing the whispers as he started the painstaking task of putting out traffic cones and the police incident tape to protect the scene.\n\nBut what could the witnesses tell the police? Very little; some heard music, others a thud. All of them heard the silence.\n\n'A fatal road accident. Driver failed to stop. Sadly an everyday occurrence,' PC Whitworth told Mr Taylor, who brought the officer a hot, sweet drink.\n\n'You don't happen to have a biscuit do you?' PC Whitworth asked as he took the mug from Mr Taylor.\n\n'Err, I'm sure I can find one,' he said.\n\n'Chocolate are my favourite,' the officer called to the retreating shopkeeper, as he stood slurping his tea and perusing the scene. The officer had already decided how this fatal accident was to be written up on the accident report and subsequently for the inquest.\n\nOLD LADY STEPS INTO ROAD IN FRONT OF ONCOMING VEHICLE. DRIVER UNABLE TO AVOID COLLISION.\n\nIn his experience of traffic accidents, he would expect the driver to contact the police after a press appeal.\n\nPC Tim Whitworth walked over to a bench and sat down. Scanning the village green with an expert eye, he'd just started to write up the scene notes in his pocket book when he heard footsteps approaching him and looked up.\n\n'Ah, chocolate Hobnobs, my favourites,' the officer said, as Mr Taylor opened the packet.\n\n'Would you care for one?' Mr Taylor said, offering him a biscuit.\n\n'Too true,' PC Whitworth said with a grin as he took the packet. He removed one from the top, stuck it in his mouth and placed the rest in his overcoat pocket. Mr Taylor stood with his mouth open.\n\n'Well, if I can be of any further assistance, I'll be in the shop,' he said huffily, and turned to leave the officer to his work.\n\n'Just a minute.'\n\n'Yes.'\n\n'Another brew wouldn't go amiss,' said PC Whitworth as he drained his mug.\n\nMr Taylor grabbed the drinking vessel from the Officer's outstretched arm and, shaking his head, he walked at a pace back to the store. His old friend Grace and her dog Winston still lay in the road covered with nothing but a flimsy piece of plastic and PC Whitworth was acting as if he was on a picnic. What was the world coming to?\n\nDetective Inspector Jack Dylan was sitting in his office unable to concentrate on his work. This was a rare occasion when Dylan pushed his work to the back of his mind as he thought about the future. He couldn't believe that he, of all people, was to become a member of the exclusive club of parenthood, although it hadn't been planned.\n\nDylan had promised Jen that her antenatal appointments were dates that work would definitely not interfere with. So far so good, but experience of life with Dylan told Jen not to hold her breath. Jen had never known when she said goodbye to him in the morning if she would see him again that day or even that week.\n\nThere was no reason for her to believe that being pregnant would change Dylan's attitude and dedication to the job he'd lived for, for the past twenty years. He'd spent long adrenalin-fuelled hours at incidents, some unforeseen, others pre-planned. Neither could he ascertain how long the enquiries to the incidents would take. Luckily for him, she understood that he was doing an important job, investigating serious crime and putting dangerous criminals behind bars. His job meant total commitment and she accepted that, because not only did she love him and it made him happy, but other people's lives depended on him.\n\nHowever, she still got angry and lonely sometimes. After all, she was only human. She worried how she would feel when the baby came along.\n\nJen worked in the admin department at the police station, which is where they'd met. Being in situ she would hear when a job came in and Dylan would call into the office with regular updates, but once junior was on the scene she would be at home, away from it all, and alone. She missed her mum, but Jen had to be practical. Her mum and dad would have been on the Isle of Wight, three hundred and sixty miles, away even if her mum hadn't been killed last year.\n\nShe realised now that when you lost your mum, you joined a band of people that no one wants to belong to. Her mum would never see her grandchild and the baby would never know what it was like to have her granny's love. Jen ran her hand over her stomach and she felt a rhythmic twitch in her uterus. She giggled as tears pricked her eyes. Their baby had hiccupped.\n\nJen's phone bleeped and it brought her out of her reverie but she took a moment to remember how happy her mum would have wanted her to be and it stopped her tears flowing.\n\nMissing you x, Dylan had texted.\n\nMiss you more, she texted back.\n\nJen smiled broadly at DS Vicky Hardacre who was sat opposite her at the duty clerk's desk checking the CID rota. 'You look like the cat that's got the cream.'\n\n'About as pleased as you when you found out you'd got the overtime to get your implants done,' she said with a chuckle.\n\nVicky grinned. 'Good God, that happy?' said the blonde haired detective who worked with Dylan.\n\n'I had to go to Mothercare on my way to work to get a larger size bra today,' Jen whispered. 'My boobs have grown a cup size already. Look at the size of this.' Jen said throwing a plastic bag over the desk to Vicky.\n\n'Oh, wow.' she said, pulling the nursing bra from within.\n\n'Look, I can fit me whole face in one of the cups.'\n\nThe pair laughed out loud.\n\n'Well, it's official. I'm getting fat,' Jen sighed.\n\n'At least maternity gear now isn't frumpy. Middle-aged rags they used to be,' said Vicky. 'I'd even wear some of it. You gonna try hide your bump?'\n\n'Bit late for that isn't it?' Jen said, looking down at her prominent bulge.\n\nThe Divisional Administrator's office door opened and Avril Summerfield-Preston stepped out.\n\nJen's laughter faded as she grabbed the bra and the bag and stuffed it under her desk.\n\nAvril Summerfield-Preston was nicknamed 'Beaky' because of the size of her nose. She was an extremely prickly and unpredictable character with an alarming reputation, a caustic manner and looks that could sometimes curdle milk. Her partner was the Divisional Commander, Dylan's boss Hugo Watkins, which suited her perfectly. He was self-loving, vain and egotistic and the bane of Dylan's life. Having but a few years in the job, he thought he should be Chief Constable.\n\n'Meeting of the Health and Safety Committee in ten minutes Jennifer and I want you to take the notes,' she ordered before tottering back into her office in her ill-fitting high-heeled shoes. 'We can't all be swanning off for the afternoon.'\n\nVicky burst out laughing.\n\n'I'm sure she's a bloody witch,' she said, sticking her tongue out at the closing door.\n\n'Shush... she'll hear you and then she won't let me go,' Jen said, grimacing at her friend.\n\n'She's so far up her backside she'll get stuck one of these days if she's not careful,' Vicky said loudly.\n\nJen sniggered. 'Shhh.'\n\n'Where you off to anyway?'\n\n'The hospital for a check-up.'\n\n'Sounds like fun, or not,' Vicky said, screwing up her nose.\n\n'Last time we went the baby was a right little imp, it wouldn't move so the sonographer couldn't get his measurements. No amount of prodding, poking, moving around, emptying my bladder or eating sugary foods would get him to shift.'\n\n'Lazy, must be a boy.'\n\n'That's what we think,' Jen smiled contentedly.\n\n'Is Dylan going with you?'\n\n'He says so, work permitting but since last time the appointment took an hour instead of twenty minutes, it might have put him off,' Jen said, tutting as she raised her eyebrows at Avril's door opening once again.\n\n'Jennifer...' she called.\n\n## Chapter 2\n\n'She shouldn't be allowed out alone at her age. If it hadn't been for her we would have done the ton through Merton today,' Danny Denton yelled, throwing the full force of his six foot, lanky frame behind the kick to his front tyre.\n\n'Look what she's fucking done.' he shrieked, rubbing his grimy hands over his skinhead. 'I'm going to have to get a new light casing now,' he said with a groan.\n\n'Stupid bitch.'\n\nBilly Greenwood, Danny's mate, passed him his roll-up. 'Have a drag. We'd better wash that shit off,' he said pointing to the blood on the wing.\n\n'I thought the silly cow were gonna come through the bastard windscreen,' Danny said before drawing deeply on the cigarette. 'Good job she didn't, I'd have fucking killed her.'\n\nBilly sniggered. 'You fucking moron. You probably did.'\n\n'Oh yeah,' Danny said with a snort.\n\n'Did you see her fly through the air, Danny?' Billy said in awe of their elderly victim's flexibility.\n\n'Yeah,' he said with a swagger. 'We'd better get down the scrappers tonight though before the plods come sniffing round.' Danny added, clipping the back of Billy's head and handing him back his cigarette.\n\nDanny fitted the light casing they'd acquired from the scrap yard next morning as Billy polished the car. Danny leaned in to turn on the radio. The news was on and instantly there was an appeal for witnesses to the fatal accident in Merton. He shouted Billy as he lunged forward to turn up the volume. 'Fuck,' he cried.\n\n'How old?' Billy asked.\n\n'Eighty, told you she shouldn't have been out on her own.'\n\nBilly laughed so much his mop of blonde curly hair fell onto his face. He pushed it back with his tattoo-covered hand.\n\nTheir wheels back to normal; Danny drove the red Ford Fiesta with its sports tyres out of the garage and into the sunshine.\n\n'Hey Danny, why don't we put a line on the wing like pilots used to do on their planes when they shot down the enemy?' Billy said eagerly, his eyes bright, dimples evident on his cheeky, fresh face.\n\nDanny showed his yellow, nicotine-stained teeth in a grin. 'Let's make it two. We got the dog as well,' he laughed.\n\nBilly picked up the tape from the bench and threw it to Danny. With his tongue between his teeth he concentrated hard as he applied it. Satisfied his masterpiece was well and truly stuck, they jumped into the car.\n\n'Time for cruising Billy Boy,' Danny shouted as the turn of the car key brought the engine to life with a roar.\n\n'Harrowfield High here we come,' shouted Billy above the rev of the engine.\n\nMusic thumped out into the afternoon sky as Danny steered the car up to the traffic lights. Pulling their hoods up to hide their identities, they laughed raucously. The pavement seemed to vibrate beneath the shop assistant's feet as she stood arranging flowers in buckets outside her shop. She looked over her glasses and stared at the car's occupants.\n\n'Bloody lunatics,' was the mumblings of a young man wearing a wool hat, who grabbed a bunch out of her hand and ran off.\n\n'Hey,' she called out, looking around for someone to help but the only thing in sight was the car, poised like a wild tiger about to pounce as the engine struggled to wait for a green light. Suddenly its tyres screeched and the smell of burning rubber filled the air. What was the world coming to? she thought as the smoke hit the back of her throat and she hurried back inside her shop with her hand over her mouth, coughing.\n\nDanny drove a car as if he was playing a computer game, with no regard to safety. Their vehicle was legal, taxed and insured and although the police regularly stopped them, the boys were always confident they couldn't be touched. The local police knew their Modus Operandi was for thieving. They had been caught siphoning fuel from the villagers' cars, reported and charged for robbing houses, screwing garden sheds and selling the proceeds to car booters to raise quick cash. That and their hand-outs from the government was how they survived. Their young, free and single existence held no regard for man nor beast.\n\nOn school days they could usually be found hovering around the gates of the high school, like vultures. Today was no different. They would get some un-streetwise girl or impressionable boy to buy them chips from the van or con them out of cash for beer and cigarettes.\n\nThe young girls seemed to find them attractive and the boys thought they were exciting. To the youngsters, the pair seemed to have it all with their souped-up wheels. Forbidden fruit in this case was every parent's worst nightmare.\n\n## Chapter 3\n\n'Welcome to the office and congratulations on making Detective Sergeant,' Dylan said as he realised his new DS was standing at his door. He had forgotten it was today she was starting work in the office.\n\n'I'm so pleased I got sent to work with you,' she smiled flirtatiously at Dylan.\n\nTaylor Spiers was a single 29-year-old woman who had been in the Police for nine years \u2013 and a Detective for four of them in a neighbouring town. She was doing well in comparison with some of her colleagues who continually threw their hat in the ring at the promotion boards.\n\nJack Dylan hadn't a great deal of knowledge about his new DS but he had heard she was a capable cop who loved the job. He'd heard rumours about her, but how much of that was true or pure fantasy by the men on the shift Dylan could only speculate. Looking at her now, he could see Taylor was definitely a stunner and he was in no doubt she would certainly brighten up the office.\n\nJack remembered telling Jen she was joining his team.\n\n'Oh, Taylor Spiers, she'll eat you alive,' she'd chuckled, but wouldn't give any further explanation. Dylan was intrigued. He really should start listening to the girls' gossip instead of turning a deaf ear.\n\n'I've got your first job here Taylor,' Dylan told her. 'If you fancy a run out, we'll give it the detective's overview together. What do you say?'\n\n'Sounds good to me,' she replied with a smile.\n\n'It's a hit and run fatal at Merton, happened yesterday. It'll give us chance to have chat about the office and the detectives on your team.'\n\n'Great,' she said picking up her coat and designer bag. 'A measly hit and run?' she mumbled to herself, pulling a face as she walked away.\n\n'Ten minutes, if you want to cast your eye over the police officer's report,' he called.\n\nWithin the hour they were walking by the side of Merton village green. Flowers and messages had been laid at the roadside at the spot where Grace and Winston had died.\n\n'The accident investigators found some glass at the scene, but whether that was to do with the accident remains to be seen. Hopefully, we may get a make and model of the type of car involved; if so it would be a start,' said Dylan, as he crouched down to read some of the tributes.\n\n'Do you want me to do an intelligence sheet for any stolen cars found abandoned with similar damage, or burnt out?' asked Taylor.\n\n'Yeah, that'd be a good start \u2013 and let's put an early warning around local garages and scrapyards, should someone enquire about repairing a headlight or be looking to purchase a similar item.'\n\nThey strolled across to the little village grocery store where Dylan, like the gentleman he was, held the door open into the caf\u00e9 for Taylor. Dylan was impressed that she had dressed to make an impression on her first day but looking her up and down he noticed how impractical her high-heeled shoes were as he followed her to the counter.\n\nIt reminded him of when he'd been a new Detective Inspector and been taken by his boss to view a body. It had been raining. The body had been found on moorland and he had been wearing his new light grey suit, which he could ill afford. Bought on credit; it had ended up ruined and so had his leather shoes. Returning to the office covered in mud, his boss had handed him a pair of Wellingtons with some advice.\n\n'Always be prepared lad, unless you want to look stupid,' he'd said, smugly.\n\nThe bosses had been bastards in those days, Dylan thought smiling to himself. But it was a lesson he never forgot. As for his suit, thankfully it dry-cleaned okay.\n\n'My golden rule Taylor; always visit the scene. See it for yourself, no matter how well you think you know the area.'\n\nDS Spiers hung on his every word, nodding in agreement. Taking notes when appropriate.\n\n'If the scene is outside, visit it at the same time of day that the incident occurred if you can, that way you'll get a better feel for it and see what usually happens at the time the incident took place.'\n\n'I won't let you down boss,' she said eagerly.\n\n'I know you won't Taylor. I'll make sure of that,' he said smiling at her young, sombre face.\n\n'A bit more advice,' he continued.\n\n'Yes boss,' she said, sitting up straight and leaning towards him with a serious expression on her face.\n\n'Buy a practical pair of shoes to keep in the boot of your car,' he said looking down at her strappy high heels.\n\n'Yes, sir,' she said with a blush spreading across her face as she uncrossed her bare legs and tucked them neatly under the table. The two waited for their drinks order to be brought to the table while Dylan went through the necessary lines of enquiry for the road death.\n\nThey looked over at the village green. 'What can the accident investigators tell us?' Then he stopped himself. 'Sorry, I'm teaching you how to suck eggs,' he smiled. 'But somebody was responsible for Grace's death and something I despise is when the perpetrator gets away or shows no remorse,' he sighed. 'But, Sarge, I'm sure you're quite capable of sorting this one.' Dylan said, leaning back in his chair.\n\nTaylor grinned. She liked being called Sarge, but this case was hardly the gory, high-profile murder she hoped for. She looked at Dylan thoughtfully as they drove back in the direction of the nick and wondered if he fancied her. He was a bit old she thought but he wasn't that bad for his age.\n\n'Right let's get back to it; you've a crime to detect and, who knows, it could be a murder.' Dylan said, turning to face her with his smiling eyes.\n\nYeah, he definitely liked her, she decided.\n\n'I suppose so,' she replied sitting on her hands as she grinned up at him. 'But this one's a bit boring isn't it?' she said, screwing up her face.\n\n'Boring,' screeched Dylan. 'Some poor old dear has been killed and you think the investigation is boring?'\n\n'Well yeah, but who'd want to murder a little old lady and her dog?'\n\n'If you investigate it properly who knows, maybe you'll find out.' he shook his head.\n\n'Never assume anything, my girl. Always look for what the evidence tells you. Then, and only then, can you make an informed decision.'\n\nTaylor sat pondering his words in silence for the rest of the journey. Was she going to like working under Dylan after all if he thought this was a meaty case? \n\n## Chapter 4\n\nPam Forrester was just thirteen, but like most of the girls her age she had the figure of a sixteen-year-old. Her mum, Stephanie, had been a model in her younger days, long before she'd married Pam's Dad, Bill, a dentist and she had to take on a more stable career of a florist. She would like nothing more than for her daughter to follow in her footsteps, which is why she worked so hard. 'The Flowerpot Emporium' would hopefully one day fund that dream.\n\nPam was the apple of her dad's eye. Like most daughters, she had the ability and the know-how to get what she wanted \u2013 and boy, did she milk it. Saying that, Pam was a good student, keen at most sports and loved horse riding. Her parents were rightly proud of her.\n\nHowever, lately they had noticed that boys were becoming increasingly interesting to her and one boy in particular stood out from the crowd for Pam: his name was Danny Denton. Her crush on him was the first secret she'd ever kept from her mum.\n\nPam knew instinctively that her parents wouldn't approve. Daily she watched Danny pull up outside the school gates in his car and each time she saw him her heart would miss a beat, she'd become breathless and her legs would turn to jelly. Was that a sign of being in love, she wondered?\n\nPam saw older girls run out of school and climb into the back of his car and all she could do was watch and envy them. As far as she knew, Danny didn't know she was alive; but then why would he? She was just a kid.\n\nPam had thought long and hard of a plan to get herself noticed by him and started to put her ideas into action. She rolled up the waistband on her school skirt, which allowed everyone to see the shapely long legs that she confirmed to herself using the mirror in the girl's changing rooms. She decided to borrow her mum's expensive mascara and lip gloss from her make-up case. This didn't appear to be working, so, in desperation, she stepped out in front of his car. That got her noticed. Slamming on his brakes didn't appear to upset Danny and instead of screaming abuse at her like any 'normal' road rage driver, he simply smiled at her and waved her to the pavement.\n\nHe had a nice smile, she thought dreamily as she'd walked home that day. But Pam was impatient and wasn't content with a smile, she wanted more. She'd been an observer for far too long. Some of the students called the girls that got into Danny's car 'slags', but she knew they were only jealous.\n\nPam walked home sometimes with Leanne Gray. Leanne was in the sixth form and Pam only knew her because she worked at the flower shop for her mum on a Saturday. She hung around with a group of girls who talked to Danny and his friend and she couldn't miss the opportunity of discovering more about him. Whatever it took to get to know him she'd decided she would do, even if Leanne wasn't really her type.\n\nDanny and his friend Billy screeched up alongside them one day causing a dust cloud. Pam's heart pounded and her head was in a spin. What would she say to him if he spoke to her?\n\n'Ignore them,' Leanne said as she quickened her pace. She blanked Danny and Billy as the car crawled along beside them. Pam was transfixed as she trailed behind her companion. Danny leaned across the front of Billy and shouted through the open window. 'Legs, d'you want a ride?'\n\nGod, was he speaking to her? Well she wasn't being awful but there was no way they could say that to Leanne... Yes, he had noticed her. Before she knew it, Danny had stopped the car some yards ahead. Billy had got out and was holding the door open inviting her to get in.\n\n'Come on, don't take any notice,' Leanne told her as she walked on. 'They're nothing but trouble.'\n\nBut Pam didn't listen; in fact she couldn't believe her luck. Am I dreaming? She thought as she clambered into the backseat of the car in a trance like state?\n\n'They're bad news,' Leanne shouted. She desperately banged on the window. Danny put his foot on the accelerator. Leanne's words were drowned by the noise and all Pam could see as she looked out of the car window was Leanne's wide-open mouth. She looked to be calling her name.\n\nPam had been waiting for this moment for so long. She smiled and a warm rush of adrenalin shot through her body. The only downside was there didn't appear to be a crowd watching; no one to envy her. She could feel her cheeks burning as Danny held her gaze in the rear view mirror. Her heart was hammering in her chest. This was what she dreamt of.\n\nDanny steered the car expertly around tight bends as they drove at speed into the countryside. It caused her to roll from side to side on the backseat and she laughed out loud. It was like being on a waltzer at the funfair. She had no idea where they were going, but who cared? Nothing else mattered at this moment in time except she was in Danny's car having fun.\n\n'What's your name, Legs?' said Billy, turning to look at her over his headrest.\n\n'Pamela, err... Pam,' she stuttered.\n\n'How old are you?' Billy said, as Danny held her gaze for a few moments in the mirror.\n\n'Sixteen,' she said not taking her eyes off Danny's. Her heart thumped in her chest. She held her breath.\n\n'Thought you must be, with legs like them,' Danny quipped, turning to wink at his friend.\n\nPam could feel herself growing redder and redder. He believed her. Billy rolled a cigarette and lit it. There was a pungent smell.\n\n'Want a drag?' he said, passing it back to her.\n\n'Sure' she said, with a confidence she didn't feel. Never having smoked before, she puffed on the spliff, coughed and quickly handed it back. Its aroma made her feel nauseous. Suddenly she felt the car swerve and Danny pulled off the road and into a car park. The tyres crushed the layer of thick gravel and slowed the car down.\n\nThe car came to a halt and Pam looked at her surroundings. As far as the eye could see, there was nothing but moorland. No people, no cars, no houses. Danny switched off the engine and then the music. The silence rang in her ears. Why had he brought her here, she wondered?\n\n'Isn't it lovely up here, eh Pam?' said Danny, staring out of the window as he tapped the steering wheel.\n\nPam nodded, not knowing what to say.\n\n'It's really quiet... nobody bothers you up here, do they Billy?' he said seriously.\n\n'No,' said Billy, taking a drag of the spliff and handing it to Danny who did the same.\n\n'It's our favourite spot, isn't it Billy?' Danny said turning to his mate, who nodded. He turned his head further round to look at Pam and she smiled at him nervously.\n\nBilly turned to look at her too. 'It can be hours before you see anybody up here,' he said, his voice deep and his breathing heavy. His eyes had a fixed stare. Pam fumbled with the hem of her skirt and, tugging at it, she made a useless attempt to try to cover the top of her legs that Billy's eyes were glued to. She looked at Danny for support. Billy was scaring her. Danny stared at her with a silly lopsided smile on his face.\n\nThe reality of her situation began to sink in.\n\n## Chapter 5\n\n'Grace Harvey might have been a nice old lady, boss, but her son sounds like a right tosser.' Taylor Spiers told Dylan as she walked into his office.\n\n'What makes you say that?' he said, as he looked up from his computer screen. He relaxed back in his chair and with a sweep of his arm, invited Taylor to sit down.\n\n'Donald arrived in Merton yesterday in readiness for her funeral,' she explained. 'And he's already making allegations that his mother's been fleeced. He's told us that he's come across documents that say the house doesn't belong to her any more and he knew nothing of her signing it over and he should have as he's the benefactor in her will. He's also suggesting that his mum's death wasn't an accident. I'm just off to see him.'\n\n'I take it he was expecting to be a beneficiary to an inheritance he ain't gonna get?'\n\n'Yep appears so. I'll see what proof he's got, if he stops shouting long enough to talk to me properly,' she said, grimacing.\n\n'There weren't any problems at the opening of the inquest were there?'\n\n'No, PC Tim Whitworth's evidence was pretty straightforward for a hit and run. He had hoped an appeal in the press might lead to tracing the offending vehicle and its driver but no one came forward admitting responsibility or providing any more information. There was very little evidence left at the scene, but Mr Harvey didn't attend.'\n\n'Keep me updated,' Dylan said, picking up his pen thoughtfully and scribbling a few notes on his blotter.\n\n'Winston will be buried with Grace, the Coroner's officer told me. Don't you think that's sweet?'\n\n'Stop being soft and find out who mowed them down and why,' Dylan grunted as he turned his attention back to his computer screen.\n\nTaylor shrugged her shoulders and left the office.\n\nDylan picked up his mobile phone when he heard the door close behind her. Fancy meeting up for dinner? x, he texted Jen.\n\nLovely,   she texted back, with a smile on her face.\n\nWill you get the food? My office at 12? X\n\nI have to get the food as well?\n\n'Have they found the driver or the car yet?' Jen asked Dylan as she popped a cherry tomato in her mouth. Dylan, with his mouth full, could only shake his head. He took a sip of his coffee.\n\n'How could anyone leave a person to die like that?' Jen said, taking a bite of her sandwich.\n\n'You shouldn't judge people by your own standards,' he said. 'Whoever did it most likely would have panicked. They might be disqualified driver, a drink driver or drugged up to high heaven. We'll only know that when we trace him or her.'\n\n'Talking of panic I'd better go,' she said, collecting the dirty plates. 'I only get 45 minutes, not like you. Some of us have to clock in and out, otherwise Beaky will have my guts for garters and I can't bear the thought of one of her moods this afternoon,' she said pulling a face.\n\n'Okay love I'll see you later,' he said turning back to his computer screen as Jen stood to leave. He looked up at her. 'What about my kiss?' he asked. Jen leaned over the desk to kiss him.\n\n'You'll get me the sack,' Dylan said with a groan.\n\n'Good then we'll be able to spend all the time together,' she giggled.\n\nHe watched her walk to the door.\n\n'Nice bum,' he growled.\n\nShe stopped at the doorway, turned and gave him a knowing smile.\n\n'Get back to your work Mr and catch those criminals, otherwise we won't have any pennies to spend on the things we need for junior,' she said patting her stomach. Dylan smiled.\n\nThe death of a family member creates all sorts of upset. There are guilt trips. Should I have visited more often? Could I have done something for them? Dylan thought. Jen had coped extremely well since her mum's sudden death but every time there was a fatal accident such as Grace Harvey's he knew it brought it all back. Dylan would love nothing more than to be able to protect Jen from her thoughts but he knew it was impossible. He had to let her work through the grieving process like everyone else.\n\nVicky put her head around the office door. 'Ah. Nice to see you all loved-up boss,' she grinned at him.\n\n'You don't get round me that easy, lady, what're you after?'\n\n'Nothing, honest I'm just pleased I'm not on the new DS's team.'\n\n'And what's wrong with Taylor Spiers?'\n\nShe pulled a face. 'Don't know but there's just sommat about her. Call it women's intuition, whatever, but I can't seem to bring myself to take to her,' she said thoughtfully.\n\n'That's not like you Vicky,' Dylan said to his normally bubbly, friendly DC. 'Anyway, if you concentrated on passing your exams instead of working all hours to save up for your boob jobs, then it could have been you that was my new Sarge.'\n\n'I might shock you one day boss,' she said grinning.\n\n'You do now, regularly,' he laughed.\n\n'Just watch your back, eh,' she said with a wink and nod.\n\nDylan's phone rang and his telephone manner suggested to Vicky that she should leave him be.\n\n'Okay. I'll be there in about twenty minutes,' she heard him say. 'Keep things sterile, I don't want anything or anybody to cross the line. And when I say no one, I mean no one; do you hear?'\n\n## Chapter 6\n\nPam rummaged around inside her bag and grabbed her ringing phone just before it went onto the answer machine. She looked up into the big, round, staring eyes of a salivating Billy.\n\n'Hi mum, no, no I hadn't forgotten. Yes, at your shop. Bye,' she said through teeth that chattered uncontrollably, she didn't quite know why. It wasn't cold \u2013 fear? 'Sorry, I've gotta go. I've got a riding lesson,' she said looking at Danny and then at her watch, 'like in the next fifteen minutes. I'm really sorry,' she grimaced.\n\nDanny turned and started the car engine in silence.\n\nNow he'd be mad with her and there was no chance she would ever be invited again, she conceded.\n\n'Lucky horse,' sniggered Billy as he looked sideways at Danny.\n\n'Where d'you want dropping?' asked Danny, his voice flat and expressionless.\n\n'In the High Street, please.'\n\n'What sort of shop's your mum got?' Danny said as he dragged the car's wheels round in the gravel.\n\n'Flower shop,' she said, quietly.\n\nThey travelled in silence and Danny brought his car to a sudden halt in town. Billy appeared to be asleep.\n\n'Thanks,' she said, lurching forward.\n\n'No prob,' he said with a smile. 'I'll see you soon kid.'\n\nPam saw her mum emerge from the shop and look at her watch. Seeing her, Pam ducked down behind Billy's seat. Billy jumped. 'What,' he shouted as his friend poked him in the ribs.\n\nDanny pointed towards Stephanie. 'Pam's mum,' he drawled.\n\n'So that's where you get your looks from, eh?' said Billy, whistling long and low.\n\nPam felt her face turn red.\n\n'What's your dad do?' asked Danny.\n\n'He's got a dentist's down the road,' she said her head still tucked behind the seat.\n\n'No way. Dentists freak me out.'\n\n'She gone yet?'\n\n'Yeah, coast clear. You can come out now.'\n\n'Thanks,' she said. 'I've had a nice time.'\n\nBilly stumbled out of the car and pulled the front seat forward for her to alight. He leaned heavily on the open door.\n\n'Like I said, no prob,' Danny told her. 'We're a bit low on petrol; you don't happen to have any cash on you do you?' he said, as she put her foot forward to go.\n\n'I've got a tenner if that's any good?' said Pam flopping unceremoniously back in her seat.\n\n'That'd be good yeah,' he said smiling. 'I wouldn't normally ask but... I'll give it you back next time.'\n\n'Next time?' asked Pam, her heart pumping.\n\n'Yeah, we must do it again some time,' he said holding out his hand. She hesitated as she reached into her schoolbag. Handing Danny the ten-pound note meant their fingers touched, her heart skipped a beat at what felt like an electric current running from his hand to hers. She looked at his face but his eyes were on the money. She wondered if he'd felt it too, he pulled his hand back quickly, taking the ten pound note from her, and leaned forward. Was he going to kiss her? She closed her eyes briefly and leaned towards him.\n\n'You getting out or what?' he said, as he stuffed the note into his pocket. How stupid she was. She got out of the car in a fluster.\n\n'What's your mobile number?' Billy asked. Pam took out a pen and tore a piece of paper from a school book and wrote it down. She handed it to Danny.\n\n'Come on, places to go people to see,' Danny said, tapping his foot slightly on the accelerator, which made the engine purr.\n\nPam stood back as Billy jumped in the car and Danny pulled away from the kerb with a screech. With a long, loud sounding of the car's horn they sped away, leaving her standing on the kerb watching them till they turned the corner out of her sight.\n\n'No alarm,' Billy muttered.\n\n'What?'\n\n'There was no alarm on the shop.'\n\n'Wonder how much float she keeps in the till, there's not much else to nick in there is there?' Danny said. 'Bet there's more in her dad's gaff.'\n\n'Let's do a drive past,' Billy said, his eyes now wide and bright as he looked admiringly at his mate.\n\n'I think we might have just found ourselves a little meal ticket there,' Danny said, as he turned to his friend. They both let out a squeal of delight.\n\n'She's fit too,' Billy said, wiping his runny nose on his sleeve. 'I wouldn't mind giving her one.'\n\n'Patience, Billy,' Danny laughed.\n\n'It's you she likes,' Billy said, with a snivel. 'She fancies you summat rotten, I can tell.'\n\n'Don't worry 'me old son, we share everything don't we?' Danny said, his grin widening as he noticed his friends downbeat look.\n\n'Shall I text her? Find out where she lives?' Billy said, eagerly.\n\n'Yeah, go on then.'\n\nPam replied immediately.\n\nDanny laughed as his friend read out the address. 'How naive can you get?' he shook his head.\n\nI were sad wen u ad to go but u cud sends me a pic l8ter to cheer me up. Billy spoke as he texted.\n\nMy hair looks such a mess when I've been out riding. She texted back. Billy read it out to his friend.\n\n'Silly cow, as if we'd be looking at her face,' Billy roared.\n\n'Ask her to meet us tomorrow at the same place,' Danny said. Billy concentrated hard to spell out the text.\n\nPam's phone beeped, loudly.\n\n'Who's got their phone on?' shouted the riding instructor. 'Give it to me now, Pamela. You can have it back at the end of the lesson,' she said, taking the phone and putting it into her riding jacket pocket.\n\nPam put her foot in the stirrups and climbed up onto her horse, reluctantly.\n\n## Chapter 7\n\nGrace Harvey's thatched cottage was just like a picture on the front of a chocolate box, Taylor thought, as she strolled along the country garden pathway that divided the magnificent display of flora. The wild flowers looked delicate to the touch but their scent was intoxicating.\n\nTaylor knocked at the big, heavy wooden door. As she waited for an answer, she turned and surveyed the garden from her raised platform of the doorstop. Her gaze fell upon a lavender bush nearby and she leant across and squeezed the top of a pointed flower head. She put her fingertips to her nose and breathed in the scent, which was both soothing and calming. She closed her eyes and took a deep breath.\n\nTaylor could smell chamomile and vanilla too, what a lovely combination. The fragrances were having a sobering effect on her until the creaking of the church like door opening jolted her back to the present with a start.\n\nThe giant of a man that stood before her wore gym shorts, a once white T-shirt and Wallabies without laces. His hair was wild and his beard straggly. If she had seen him on the street she would have presumed him homeless but his clothes weren't stained enough for a vagrant.\n\n'Donald Harvey,' he announced with an unexpected gentleman-like voice and a white toothed smile as he offered her his hand.\n\n'DS Taylor Spiers,' she said flashing her warrant card at him. Donald stepped aside and gallantly waved her into the house before him.\n\nWith a dramatic sweep of his arm, he cleared the dining room table of the papers. He took an old, battered suitcase off a chair, brushed the seat down and offered it for her to sit upon.\n\n'I'm so glad you've come, Ma'am. I think my Mom has been taken for one hell of a ride,' he said picking up a handful of documents from the floor and shaking them before her eyes. 'I should have been here,' he said putting his free hand up to his brow as he leaned heavily on his elbow. 'Then, this would never have happened,' he sighed. Harvey's eyes looked up at Taylor as if emotionally wounded.\n\n'The man is a vulture,' he suddenly cried. Taylor jumped. 'Mom cashed in the equity of this house but I can't trace a penny of money that she released,' he said with tears now visible in his eyes and a lump in his throat. 'I've rang him. But he tells me that everything he's done was her wish and all above board,' he swallowed hard. 'According to these papers it looks like she was about to lose the roof over her bloody head too Ma'am.'\n\nDS Spiers raised her hand. 'Now let's take this slowly eh? Firstly, it's Taylor or Detective Sergeant Spiers. You don't need to call me Ma'am \u2013 you make me sound like Miss Marple,' she said, aghast.\n\n'Whatever. I don't care, I just want you to find out what he's done with the money he's stolen. I want you to arrest him. '\n\n'Mr Harvey, please, tell me precisely who you want me to arrest and for what reason? I can't detain anyone without evidence.'\n\nDonald Harvey looked pale and tired and it was obvious to Taylor that his predicament had done nothing for his attitude. He sighed again. His breath stank of stale alcohol.\n\n'My Mom, Grace Harvey, it appears has signed over her house to an equity release company,' he said pointing at a document on the table. 'Arranged by her financial advisor Brian Stevenson, and I can't trace any of the money that according to these papers has been released. Is that clear enough for you?' Donald said, picking up an old Harrowfield Building Society book that lay among the paperwork and throwing it in Taylor's direction. It landed on the table with a slap, but she didn't flinch.\n\n'It's just not like her. She's always been so careful with her money. She's not stupid... was not stupid,' he said, coughing into the palm of his hand.\n\nDS Spiers took out her pocket book and started making notes.\n\n'Do you know this Brian Stevenson?' Taylor asked.\n\n'No, do you?' said Donald. DS Spiers shook her head, holding his gaze.\n\n'All I know about Brian Stevenson is that he was a friend of Dad's,' said Donald.\n\nDS Spiers nodded and allowed him to continue.\n\n'They worked together at one time and became friends. When Dad died, Mom relied on Brian to take care of her finances, probably because I wasn't around... I suppose she trusted him because he was Dad's friend. I've found some old pictures, look,' Donald said showing her a snap of a young guy with his arm round an older gentleman at a presentation ceremony. The older man was spitting image of the man sat in front of her but his hair was grey.\n\nDonald appeared a little calmer now.\n\n'Mom told me ages ago all about Brian Stevenson investing money for her, which I understood because she said it gave her a reasonable living,' he said. 'But from what I can see of her bank balance since Dad died, Mom has drawn money out and put nothing back. The receipts that she kept from Brian Stevenson show she was giving money to him on a regular basis, God knows what for, but it has made her almost destitute \u2013 which is why she obviously needed to draw upon the equity of this place.'\n\nDS Spiers listened and took notes.\n\n'I understood from Mom that he took her shopping, out for lunch, for hospital appointments. Look these flowers are from him for her birthday,' he said, pointing out the lilies on the dresser that were still in their wrapping. 'I thought he was looking after her, being a friend, a companion. A son she didn't have in me... I should have known that he wouldn't do all that for nothing. I should have come home sooner.'\n\n'Mr Harvey, all I can do is promise I will look into your concerns. It would be very helpful if I could take away those documents,' she said, standing up. Donald gathered the paperwork into a pile and ungraciously stuffed it into the old battered case before fastening it and handing it to her. 'Well they're no good to me are they?' he said, looking defeated. 'But keep them safe won't you? The evidence against Brian Stevenson is in there, I can assure you.'\n\nSaying her farewells at the gate, she noticed the car parked outside had recent damage to the front nearside wing. He sensed her interest in it.\n\n'Damn deer bounded straight out in front of me on my way here,' he said, coming out of the gate after her. 'And it's a hire car.' He ran his hand over the paintwork. 'It shook me up, I can tell you,' he said, laughing half-heartedly.\n\n'Have you reported it?'\n\n'No, not yet, I didn't see the point. The bloody animal got up and legged it. Should I?' he said with a sigh at the look on her face.\n\nDS Taylor Spiers eyed Donald Harvey with renewed interest as she watched him turn and walk back up the path with his hands in his pockets and his head down. She unlocked her car and got in. Sitting in the driving seat, she rang the police station and spoke with PC Tim Whitworth.\n\n'DS Taylor Spiers, I've been tasked with looking into the hit and run in Merton village and I understand from the accident report that you dealt with it?'\n\n'Y-e-s,' Tim said, in a drawl.\n\n'Just a quick question; how sure are we that the glass found at the scene of the accident is from the offending vehicle and are we best-guessing what the vehicle's make is or was there sufficient debris to ensure there is no doubt?' she asked.\n\n'Dunno yet.'\n\n'Ah, it's just that I've just been with Grace Harvey's son and his car has recent damage to the front, near side light casing and wing. He says he hit a deer.'\n\n'Not an old dear I hope,' he chortled.\n\n'Not funny,' she sighed. 'Look into it for me will you. I need to know for certain,' she said, ending the call and throwing her mobile onto the passenger seat before starting the engine. Her mobile rang instantly. She sighed, leant over and picked it up.\n\n'Taylor? Dylan, I'm on my way to a suspicious death at number eleven, Causeway Cottages. Can you meet me there?'\n\n'Sure,' she said, with a renewed energy. 'But, you'll have to give me directions.'\n\n'Row of houses on your left just up past the entrance of Harrowfield hospital, do you know it?'\n\n'I'll find you.'\n\nDylan hung up.\n\nA body. Now that was more like it, she thought, grinding her teeth together as she felt adrenalin starting to pump furiously around her body. She turned the radio on, clicked her seat belt, tossed her hair over her shoulder, looked in her rear view mirror and put her foot down hard on the accelerator.\n\nTen minutes later she arrived outside the house, which was easily identified on the street by the two uniformed officers guarding the scene. As she left her vehicle she could see Dylan in his scene suit, blowing air into his plastic gloves. She briefly wondered why that action made them go on the hand easier. As she walked towards him she could see he was deep in conversation with a smaller figure dressed like him, whom she presumed was the scenes of crime officer. Neither of them looked in her direction.\n\nShe noted that Dylan hadn't finished suiting up which she knew meant that they hadn't yet been inside the house. Good, she thought, as she approached them. She didn't want to miss a single moment at the scene of her first suspicious dead as a Detective Sergeant. Murder? She hoped so.\n\n'DS Taylor Spiers,' Dylan introduced her to Jasmine, who eyed the high heeled, short-skirted beauty up and down with interest.\n\n'Uniform got a call from a worried neighbour, to say that they hadn't seen the elderly lady that lives here for a few weeks and they'd become increasingly concerned.' Dylan told her.\n\n'They thought at first she might've gone away or been admitted to hospital but when a vast amount of flies caught their attention at the upstairs window they knew something wasn't right,' he continued, pointing to the window in question. Taylor looked up. The glass was completely blacked out with the blowflies.\n\n'Not only that, but as you probably noticed even from where we're standing there's a foul smell in the air. '\n\nDylan took the lead and walked towards the front door. DS Spiers followed him cautiously. Her nose tingled at the pungent aroma and she gagged involuntarily. She nipped her nose and covered her mouth to try and mask the stench.\n\n'The house was secure. The uniformed officers had to force entry,' Dylan said, turning to her. 'We were lucky it was only on a Yale latch.\n\n'You okay?' he asked as he noticed her pallor. She nodded. 'Horrendous isn't it, which is why I told them to leave the door open,' he grimaced. 'A quick look around by uniform brought to light a badly decomposed body on the main bedroom floor, which they believe is the body of the lady of the house, but since it's almost skeletal we'll have to wait for the post-mortem,' Dylan said as he stood at the front door.\n\nDS Spiers eagerness had subsided like a thermometer put into ice. She looked up the stairs and remained standing close to her boss. This wasn't like it was supposed to be. Her stomach clenched.\n\n'Get suited up quickly and get your mask on before we go in to see what delights await us,' Dylan instructed as Jasmine handed Taylor a scenes of crime suit to put over her clothing. DS Taylor Spiers, ever conscious of her appearance, looked at the suit with disdain. Dylan smiled at Jasmine whose eyes danced with delight.\n\n'You want me to wear that?' she shrieked. 'I'll look like one of them Teletubbies off children's TV,' she said holding the suit at arm's length as Jasmine handed her the paper boots.\n\nSuited and booted, Dylan led the women into the house. 'We'll go upstairs first since we know that's where the body is; get a few photographs in situ,' Dylan spoke his thoughts aloud and he could hear Jasmine behind him snap the cover from her camera lens.\n\nHe heard Taylor retch as they reached the landing of the upstairs and he turned. She nodded to him. Senses heightened the noise of the flies was surreal, the buzzing was irritatingly loud. They turned the corner of the bedroom door and Taylor trailed behind Dylan and Jasmine tentatively looking in at the scene around them. She could only describe it as something out of a horror movie. The blowflies blanketed everything in the room. The tiny decomposed body lay before them, feet towards the doorway.\n\n'She's been here some weeks,' Dylan observed, as he bent down and looked at the skull of the body. The noise from the insects seemed to increase with his intrusion.\n\n'Here look, there're maggots in her eye sockets Jasmine,' he pointed out.\n\nTaylor's shoulders rose and fell as she breathed deeply. 'I need some air,' she gasped as she ran from the room, down the stairs and out into the garden where, leaning against the wall of the house, she threw up into a bush. 'Oh, my God,' she gulped, before throwing up again. This was not the impression she wanted to give Dylan.\n\n'You okay?' Dylan called out after her while his eyes continued to scan the dead body.\n\n'F-i-n-e,' she said in between swallowing hard to stop the bile rise in her throat again. She collapsed onto her knees. She just needed a minute, she thought, as she wiped the vomit from her mouth with her hand and took a few deep breaths.\n\nDylan turned to Jasmine, 'Nothing obvious. Just take a quick photo of her in situ will you, then we'll get her removed to the mortuary and see if we can find out what happened to her.'\n\nJasmine nodded and in silence did as she had been instructed without any fuss. Dylan reached up to open the bedroom window. Taylor looked up at the noise from above and she watched the swarm of insects being released from their breeding ground.\n\nDylan pushed the window wide open to try to clear the room. With the expertise of the man who had been to this sort of scene a hundred times before, he walked quickly around the rest of the house. His hands were firmly in his pockets, like he'd been shown as a young detective, so that he wasn't tempted to touch anything. Nothing else appeared untoward.\n\nStepping over the threshold of the front door he pulled his mask off and inhaled a lung full of clean air. Seeing Taylor sat on the grass leaning against the house wall, her head tilted towards sky he walked over.\n\n'You okay?' he said.\n\n'Yeah, I'm sorry \u2013 that smell .'\n\n'Certainly not a pretty sight either is it? It won't be much better at the mortuary. Which we'll have to endure either tomorrow or the day after,' he said almost apologetically.\n\nShe took a huge intake of breath through her nose, counted to six and breathed out slowly between pouted lips to the count of six.\n\n'One thing I detest is blow flies,' Dylan said flaying his arms at one that dared to come near his perspiration-covered forehead. He looked at his DS's pale face. 'It could have been worse,' he smiled, kindly.\n\n'How come?'\n\n'If you'd tried to stick it out you might have fainted on the body,' he chuckled.\n\n'And is that supposed to make me feel better?' she said, leaning forward and burping loudly. 'Sorry,' she said, putting her head between her knees.\n\n'Well you wouldn't have been the first and no doubt you'd wouldn't have been the last either,' said Dylan philosophically as he knelt down next to her and rubbed her back.\n\nShe turned to look up at him. 'Thanks,' she said with tears in her eyes.\n\nJasmine completed the task that Dylan had requested of her. He arranged for the body to be removed to the mortuary and he also told the uniformed officers present to have the house secured, before holding his hand out for DS Spiers to help her to her feet.\n\n'Time to go, Ma'am,' he said, smiling at her.\n\n'Not you an'all,' she said.\n\n'Pardon?'\n\n'Oh, nothing,' she replied. Dylan shrugged his shoulders.\n\n'What do you think \u2013 natural causes?'\n\n'I don't know,' she said nonchalantly. 'Probably.'\n\n'Well, maybe not,' Dylan said. 'Can you get some detectives over here to start making house to house enquiries into her background, when she was last seen, who was the last person to see her alive, her doctor's name, next of kin, etcetera?'\n\n'Yeah sure, I'll get straight on it,' she said weakly.\n\n'I'm sure you will,' he smiled, knowing that by giving her a task it would give her a focus. Something to think about other than the smell and the sight she had just witnessed.\n\n'We'll also need a recent picture of her if they can find one,' he said. 'A bit of advice Taylor, I always carry extra strong mints in my pocket,' he said, offering her one as they walked back to their cars. 'My way of coping with things is I try to concentrate on the job in hand,' he said. 'So, the name we've been given for the lady is a Mildred Sykes who we think is more than likely to be in her late seventies, eighty? Look, I've got to be elsewhere but you've got a good start and there are a lot of things to arrange, so I'll speak to you back at the nick later, eh?'\n\n'Okay,' she replied. She wondered if he would tell them back at the office about what had happened to her.\n\nDylan had other things on his mind. Dawn Farren, his work colleague and long-standing Detective Sergeant, had been off work to have her baby and was suffering badly from postnatal depression. Dawn had become like a sister to Dylan over the years and he missed her jovial nature, their comfortable repartee, her larger than life figure and her loyalty. She was his safe pair of hands and he knew it.\n\nHe stopped en route to pick up some flowers and Jaffa cakes, her favourite biscuits, and before leaving the petrol station he sat and texted Jen, Just been to see the smelliest body ever. I promised myself I'd get to see Dawn today so sorry if I'm late but coming straight home after for supper. Love you x\n\nDawn and Ralph's home and restaurant 'Mawingo,' stood in three acres of parkland in the verdant valley of Sibden with the River Heddle meandering through it. It was a spectacular neo-gothic house, worlds apart from the hustle and bustle of modern-day life. Darkness was drawing in and Ralph was closing the curtains in their lounge when he saw Dylan's car approach and by the time Dylan reached the door Ralph was there to meet him.\n\n'Come on in Jack,' Ralph said, holding out his hand.\n\nDylan took the hand he offered and shook it warmly, holding his gaze for a moment or two. He noticed Ralph's smile didn't quite reach his eyes.\n\n'Dawn might be pleased to see you at least,' he said, raising his eyebrows. Ralph's voice sounded unusually flat and downcast to Dylan's ears. His normally ruddy complexion was pale and his face pinched.\n\n'That bad?'\n\nRalph nodded his head and his eyes closed.\n\nDawn was sat by the window in semi-darkness. Violet lay contented in a crib beside her.\n\n'Hiya,' he said in a whisper as he bent down to hand her flowers and biscuits as he kissed the cheek she offered. You look tired,' he said.\n\nDylan stood over the sleeping baby and touched her soft, peachy cheek. She stirred.\n\n'She's gorgeous,' he cooed as he took a step back and sat in a chair opposite Dawn.\n\n'That's very kind, isn't it love?' Ralph said, taking the flowers from Dawn who stared blankly at Dylan. 'I'll pop them in some water and put the kettle on, shall I?' he said nodding at the biscuits.\n\nDawn sat in silence as if she hadn't heard. She dropped her gaze to her hands in her lap with a nervousness he had never seen her display before. He hoped desperately that his face didn't show his shock at her appearance and he smiled the fixed smile of the professional police officer. Dawn had always been the life and soul of his enquiries. Her bright and bubbly character had been the comic to his scorn. The larger-than-life Dawn French lookalike that he had grown to love was wasting away before his very eyes.\n\n'How're you coping?' Dylan asked and swallowed hard. He could feel his heart weighing heavy in his stomach as he scanned his friend's dishevelled hair and frumpy attire.\n\n'Oh, you know,' she sighed, shrugging. Her eyes full of unshed tears as she looked directly into his eyes for the first time. He tried to speak but uncharacteristically found he didn't know what to say. He reached out for her hand and held it in his.\n\n'Come on girl, I want you back, no I'll re-phrase that \u2013 I NEED you. Harrowfield nick needs you,' he said dramatically, and for the first time he saw a flicker of a faint smile flash across her face. 'Look, I've even bought you some Jaffas.'\n\n'Oh God, it is bad,' he said, when she didn't take the bait of food.\n\n'I'm trying,' she said with a little effort. 'And everybody's being so bloody nice, but I can't seem to...' She shook her head as if to clear the confusion within. 'It's like it crept over me after the birth, like black ink seeping over the scenery of my world. I'm in a black hole Dylan, looking up and I can't get out,' she added. Dylan listened. 'And the pills they give me make me feel so 'cloudy' and well, like a flaming zombie most of the time,' she said, pointing to the packets and bottles of tablets on the table beside her that was also littered with half empty glasses of water, cups of half drunk tea and the baby's bottle. 'Never mind walking through mud, I feel like I'm sometimes being sucked into a bog. How can I expect anyone to understand? It's so bloody self-indulgent when I've got so much,' she sobbed.\n\nRalph stood at the door with the drinks. Dawn was talking at last. He stepped backwards, watched and listened.\n\nDylan squeezed Dawn's hand gently. 'Don't beat yourself up. You're just an emotionally sensitive person who strives for perfection, and I should know. Right now you're not in control but you'll get there. Just give yourself time. You can't keep a good Detective down, eh?' he smiled.\n\nRalph brought in the drinks but she didn't acknowledge him.\n\nHer shoulders rose and then fell with a big sigh. 'I hear you've got a good-looking replacement,' she said, wiping away a tear that had escaped and run down her cheek. She looked at him, searching his face for a sign of his acknowledgement at her accusation.\n\n'Not a replacement Dawn, cover \u2013 and believe me, she's not a patch.'\n\n'Oh, yeah,' she said. Violet stirred and Dawn reached out for the little bundle of clothing. The effort seemed too much for her and Dylan stepped forward to take the now crying baby from her bed. He looked into Violet's little elfin face and smiled adoringly at her.\n\n'She looks like you,' he said softly.\n\n'Poor little sod. Look at the state of me,' Dawn quipped as she shuffled to a more comfortable position in her chair.\n\n'You'll come through it love. How can you not when you look at this little one?' he said stroking Violet's soft mop of dark, poker straight hair.\n\n'Why did my other babies die? What did I do wrong then? I feel so guilty,' she sobbed. 'I didn't see them. They haven't got a gravestone. No one understands how I feel.'\n\n'Anyone who hasn't suffered like you have can't. But you've got to believe you did nothing wrong. The others weren't strong enough to live. You know that deep down. But, Violet is, and she needs her mum now,' he said handing the now screaming Violet over. 'I think someone needs changing,' he said, screwing up his nose.\n\nDawn smiled. 'Why are you always right. You're so bloody annoying, sometimes,' she snapped.\n\n'No I'm not. You know me, I'm just a good bullshitter,' he said with a laugh. 'Look, if it helps buy a statue for the garden in remembrance. Somewhere close you can go and talk to them or think about them if you need to.' He saw Dawn's tears falling on Violet's head as she kissed her and held her tight. 'You look all in but I'll tell Jen to call in sometime soon, eh? And what about if I get you some help from Welfare?'\n\n'Yeah,' she sighed. 'That would be a start wouldn't it? I hope I don't scare Jen to death though when she sees me like this with your little one on the way,' she laughed through her tears.\n\n'Never,' he said, taking a last look over his shoulder at the nursing mother and baby as he left the lounge.\n\nRalph stood in the hallway, the tray still in his hands. 'I wasn't eavesdropping I just didn't want to disturb you.'\n\n'She'll be okay, Ralph. She's very lucky to have you. Let me know if I can do anything to help, won't you?'\n\n'Thank you,' he said, nodding his head.\n\nDriving home, Dylan couldn't stop thinking about how Dawn had been changed by her pregnancy and the birth of Violet. Would Jen change too?\n\nMost people who worked with Dylan thought him tough but fair. Little did they know how he covered his true emotions with the professional mask of the hard-faced detective.\n\nJen watched him closely as he left the supper table, silently, that night; she knew by his demeanour that he had things on his mind. He stopped briefly at her chair to lay his hands on her shoulders and kiss the top of her head. Max, their golden retriever followed his master into the lounge.\n\nShe boiled the kettle and took him a drink. He was fast asleep. Max lay over his slippered feet. Dylan had been visibly upset as he told her about Dawn's battle with her post-natal depression over dinner, and not for the first time she wondered how he coped with other people's sadness and the horrors he saw on a daily basis. She loved him for his tenacity but also for his sensitivity. Perhaps seeing the worst of man's inhumanity to man made him appreciate the good things in life more than most.\n\nShe placed his warm drink on the coffee table beside him and sat at his side. He didn't stir. She leaned over to plant a kiss on his cheek. He lifted his arm so she could snuggle beneath it and he smiled with a satisfying groan as she did so but he didn't open his eyes. The harsh reality of what life had thrown at Dawn and Ralph when they had waited so long to have a baby had made Dylan even surer that he wanted to spend as much time as he could with Jen and theirs.\n\n'Perhaps I could go out walking with Dawn?' Jen said, thoughtfully. 'They say that physical activity lifts your mood better than anything else.'\n\n'Mmm... that's kind love,' he said raising his heavy eyelids for a second to look down at her. 'I'm sure she'd appreciate it and it might do you some good too,' he said pulling himself up from his slouched position. He patted her stomach and his hand lingered on hers, resting there. All of a sudden Jen felt the baby through her stomach for the first time \u2013 it was amazing to feel the hard lump that was an elbow or a heel perhaps, but a little freaky too.\n\n'Did you feel that?' said Dylan, startled.\n\n'Mmm... it makes it all seem rather real, doesn't it?' she laughed. 'I wonder if Dawn has thought of trying herbal teas?' she asked.\n\n'It's worth suggesting,' he said leaning forward to pick up his drink. He took a gulp. 'I'm going to enquire about getting her counselling. It might just unravel some of her issues and help her deal with what's going on in her mind,' he said lying back on the sofa and pulling Jen towards him.\n\n'Can I do that for you?' she asked.\n\n'Thanks,' he mumbled as he drifted back off to sleep, his head on her bump. Jen knew these were the moments that needed to be cherished and would be few and far between once the baby blessed them with his presence.\n\n## Chapter 8\n\nPam laid in her bed, wondering when she would hear from Danny. She stretched out lazily and yawned loudly. The sound of doors slamming had woken her. Slipping out from under her duvet, she tiptoed across to the bedroom window and pulled back the curtains. Her bedroom overlooked the driveway and, seeing both her mum and dad's cars gone, Pam ran on tiptoes into her mum's room and sat at her dressing table. She opened her make-up case and took out her lipstick and mascara. slipping them carefully into her dressing gown pocket.\n\nA final check of her school apparel in the full-length mirror of her mum's wardrobe, half an hour later made her smile. She wondered if she needed a coat and walked to the bedroom window that overlooked the main road to check. 'Is that Danny's car?' she said, aghast. Her heart skipped a beat. It couldn't be, could it?\n\nShe ran onto the landing, grabbed hold of the banister and flew down the stairs. Picking up her satchel from the floor, she hurried out of the door, hearing it slam loudly behind her as she raced down the path. Standing at the bus stop, she stood on tiptoes as she scanned the road in both directions, desperate in her search to spot Danny's car heading her way.\n\nPam stood back quietly and let one bus go. She waited for the next. Oh, how she could just imagine the other girl's faces, green with envy if Danny Denton gave her a lift into school. She waited, giggling at her thoughts. The next bus drew up alongside her and although she was at the front of the queue she let the other passengers go ahead of her as she took one last glance. Pam looked at her watch. Disappointingly it told her in no uncertain terms that she'd better jump on board if she didn't want to be late for registration. She slouched next to the window and took her mobile phone out of her pocket. The bus was noisy. She willed the phone to ring. Thoughtfully, she requested the alert setting, selected vibrate, and slipped it back into her pocket. The last thing she wanted was to miss a call or text.\n\nDS Taylor Spiers was on her way into the office. Her first job today was to look into the focus of Donald Harvey's complaint against Brian Stevenson to see if there was any weight behind Grace's son's allegations. Tomorrow was Grace's funeral, and although the event would be sad she would rather go there and avoid Mildred Sykes' post-mortem if she had the choice. Perhaps she could persuade Dylan that her presence at the funeral was more important than at the mortuary.\n\n'Morning boss, can I get you a coffee?' said Taylor as she hung up her coat on the stand just outside Dylan's office door. 'You're in early today,' she called.\n\n'White, half a sugar,' Dylan shouted back. She tilted her head trying to decipher by his tone if he was in a good mood as he chatted on the phone. No, she conceded she didn't know him well enough yet but she was confident she could wrap him round her little finger as she did with all men. It was only a matter of time until he succumbed to her charms.\n\n'I thought I'd go see the financial advisor today to see what he has to say about Grace's finances,' she said, as she walked into his office.\n\nDylan nodded but didn't look up from his work.\n\n'Her son was raging about him and his antics,' she added, standing in front of his desk, steaming mug of coffee cupped in her beautifully manicured hands. Dylan's head turned to his computer screen.\n\nShe walked round his desk and leaned over his shoulder to set the cup carefully in front of him, purposely brushing up against him as she did so and he turned as if in slow motion to watch her walk away from him and settle herself on the corner of his desk. He saw her cross her beautiful, long legs in front of him so that he could see her long brown pins in her new high-heeled black patent shoes.\n\nTo all intent and purpose she looked as if she was about to go on a night out in the town, he thought. The bright orange, low cut top clung to her voluptuous bosom as she leaned across him to pick up the printout of the Chief's Log, a resume of the major events in the Force area in the past twenty-four hours.\n\nDylan's eyes never faltered as they caught the twinkle of her long, dangly earrings.\n\n'Yeah, who knows Taylor? People might take advantage of an old lady living on her own,' he said taking the mug by the handle and putting it to his lips. He studied a sheet on his desk.\n\n'Don't forget, Mildred Sykes' post-mortem tomorrow,' he said.\n\nPutting the Chief's Log back down, Taylor slid off his desk and headed for the door without speaking. She stopped and turned, leaning heavily on the frame. He could sense her waiting for him to look at her.\n\n'Yes,' he drawled.\n\n'Oh, tomorrow. Grace Harvey's funeral? I think I should go, don't you, to see who turns up? But, of course if you need me at the Mildred Sykes' PM?'\n\n'Blast. I definitely need you at the funeral,' he said, thoughtfully.\n\nTaylor quietly closed his office door behind her. 'Mission accomplished,' she whispered, smiling to herself as she sunk back into the chair at her desk and started to type Brian Stevenson's details into the intelligence systems.\n\n'I wouldn't speak too soon,' said Dennis, who sat quietly at his desk.\n\n'What would you know?' she said, casting a sly smile at the police officer who was on light duties with a hand injury.\n\nShe hadn't been at her workstation long when the phone rang.\n\n'Taylor, Dylan.'\n\n'Yes, sir,' she cooed, a broad smile crossing her lovely face as she tinkered with her earrings and lifted her head above her computer screen to see him through his office doorway as he talked to her.\n\n'I've got them to put back Mildred's PM back to three o'clock, so it won't be a problem for you to attend both,' he said matter-of-factly and promptly hung up.\n\nDennis sniggered. Dylan was nobody's fool. Everybody tried to avoid post-mortems but thinking about what she'd said he deemed it was necessary that she attended.\n\n'Er... great,' she said, her voice sounding flat even to her own ears as she flopped back down into her seat. She put the phone back on its cradle and laid her head in her hands on the desk, groaning.\n\nThe CID office door slammed signalling someone's arrival and she sat up quickly. Tomorrow was another day, she sighed, smiling sweetly at Karen the young, quiet, HOLMES indexer who had just clocked in to start her day. Taylor knew she had plenty of time to come up with something to avoid going to the mortuary. She didn't want her hair or her clothes smelling like rotting cabbage. What on earth would people think? After all she was a Sergeant now; she had the power to instruct other people to do the dirty work for her.\n\nTry as she might, Taylor could find nothing on any of the intelligence systems for a Brian Stevenson but, having found a telephone number for him under financial services in the telephone directory, she made a call to see if he was available to speak to her \u2013 and within the hour was sat in a plush office having fresh coffee and oatmeal biscuits served to her by him.\n\nHe was tall and painfully thin with a hunched back, which made him look older than his years. His neck was long; reminding her of a swan's. However he had the smartest of haircuts, was clean-shaven and dressed in an expensive suit and silk tie. Most of all, he appeared polite and attentive.\n\n'I've called to see you about Grace Harvey, Mr Stevenson,' she said, smiling.\n\n'Call me Brian dear, please.'\n\nTaylor nodded. 'Thank you,' she said.\n\n'Ah, poor Grace. What an absolute shock it was to hear the news. She was a lovely lady and a dear friend of mine. Do you know the person responsible?'\n\n'No not yet,' she said, catching a mischievous glint in his eye.\n\n'I suppose you'll be checking cars for damage?'\n\n'Well, yes,' she said taken aback by his question.\n\n'The old Porsche is in the garage at the moment \u2013 had a collision with a bollard. The bollard won unfortunately,' he laughed, half-heartedly. 'Ah, well such is life,' he shrugged. 'Donald Harvey is concerned about his mother's finances I understand?' he continued. 'But believe me dear that's nothing unusual,' he said. 'Grace always needed to release capital to support his lifestyle.'\n\n'And what lifestyle would that be Mr Stevenson?'\n\n'He's taken to the fratty, vagrant way of life, as I understand it from Grace, after spending time in an American University. I believe he also has a yuppie lifestyle to match as well as doing a little gambling of late, Ms Spiers,' he replied, in a hushed tone.\n\n'Is that why she had to release the equity in her home?'\n\n'Yes. Oh, I advised her against it,' he said shaking his head.\n\n'And?'\n\n'I wasn't family Ms Spiers, just her friend and her financial advisor. Blood's thicker than water, so they say, and when it came to money she made that quite clear. Even though I protested quite emphatically, Grace instructed me to release monies as soon as possible.'\n\n'And did you?'\n\n'Of course.'\n\n'What sort of amounts are we talking about?'\n\n'One hundred thousand pounds,' he said.\n\nTaylor pouted her lips and drew in a breath.\n\n'Indeed. So now you can see why I was concerned.'\n\n'That's one hell of a lot of money. When did this take place and what happened to the money?'\n\n'Her finances have been slowly dwindling away for some time, but the equity release money was only finalised a few weeks ago. Then Donald has the audacity to ring me to threaten me about it.'\n\n'Did you report the threat to the police?'\n\n'No, I appreciate that he was upset about his mother's death and I expect he thought he would inherit more than he will now.'\n\nDS Taylor Spiers had a conundrum. Who was telling her the truth? Within thirty minutes of talking with Brian Stevenson she found herself travelling through Harrowfield town centre.\n\nShe wondered about what Brian Stevenson had told her. No wonder Donald's appearance didn't appear to be 'normal' to her. He dressed intentionally like a vagrant, but a clean one. How bizarre. Was Donald Harvey disguising a gambling habit too? That did make sense. Grace sent him money and basically funded her grow-up son's chosen lifestyle. But, what didn't make sense was why Donald would then threaten Brian if Donald had had the money already.\n\nDylan was right about one thing; you never knew what you'd find out once you start asking questions. The hit and run incident was looking and sounding more appealing by the hour. Who the hell was telling the truth, she thought, as she stopped in a line of traffic in the high street and looked at herself in her rear view mirror. Rubbing her lips together she considered her main priority, which at the moment was getting out of the impending post-mortem. She liked the media side of her new posting. Her name and picture would be in the papers soon. Journalists would want to quote her.\n\nShe would work on Dylan to let her get involved with that side of things more. Who knows, she might get on TV? She smiled at her reflection in the mirror, licked her lips and considered seriously what she might wear for TV interviews. Perhaps she should go shopping for a new outfit while she was in town to that new little Italian designer shop, just in case. \n\n## Chapter 9\n\nThe school day was drawing to a close. Pam was downhearted. She hadn't heard from Danny all day, she must have blown it. Looking at her phone, she silently begged it to bleep a message arriving, as she walked along the long driveway leading from the school to the main road. Head down, she dragged her feet lethargically.\n\nSuddenly she heard the distant, booming sound of loud music, but try as she might to see through the gaggle of pupils, staff and an array of backpacks in front of her, she couldn't see the car. A broad grin of anticipation grew on her face. She could hear the dull, repetitive thud from car speakers.\n\nPam turned to face the direction of the noise. Her pace quickened and her heart started to pump wildly. She stood on her tiptoes, eyes scouring the road above a sea of heads at the school gates. Friends shouted their goodbyes to her but she dismissed them with a wave of her hand.\n\nThe beat of the music was increasing in volume and then suddenly it was there, the red Ford Fiesta drew up on the opposite side of the road in front of her. Almost immediately a group of girls swarmed the car. Some bent down to the opening window and started chatting and laughing with the car's occupants. Pam stormed across the road, but as she neared, the girls started walking away, laughing raucously and her feelings of jealousy had subsided by the time she had reached it.\n\n'Hi gorgeous, thought we'd come to give you a lift home?' Danny said leaning out of the car window. 'Jump in.'\n\n'Did you come past our house this morning?' she said with a brilliant smile that showed her pearly white teeth. Billy stepped out of the car to let her in the back seat, as she walked around to the passenger door.\n\n'We did. We were looking for you,' Danny said, his eyes glued to hers in the mirror. He smiled. Pam blushed.\n\n'Don't worry. I'll be discreet,' Danny laughed. 'I won't drop you off outside. I know parents can be such a bore,'\n\n'Oh, that's okay,' she said, confidently. 'My mum and dad work twenty-four seven, they won't be home for ages yet.'\n\nThe speed of the car pulling away from the kerb caused Pam to jolt backwards and roll over on the back seat.\n\n'I think your legs get longer,' Billy said with a smirk as he put his head through the middle of the front seats and stared at them unashamedly.\n\nDanny turned to see what Billy was looking at. There was a screech of brakes.\n\n'Fucking idiot,' he screamed at the driver of the car that to swerve to avoid a collision. 'Fucking wanker,' he shouted at the top of his voice as he turned and made a one-fingered gesture. 'Just cos' he's got a fucking Porsche he thinks he owns the fucking road,' he raged. Danny rammed the car into first gear and yanked off the handbrake; revving the engine he swung the car around to follow the Porsche. The car had vanished.\n\n'I think I know that guy. He lives there,' Pam said, pointing in the direction of a huge white house that stood in its own grounds at the bottom of the road where she lived.\n\n'Number 42,' Danny remarked, nodding to Billy.\n\n'He must be fucking loaded,' Billy said, giving a long low whistle.\n\n'Whoever he is, he doesn't cut us up like that and get away with it,' Danny muttered.\n\nMoments later they were outside Pam's home and Danny revved the engine once again. Pam stared out of the window at the neighbouring houses to see if she could see anyone watching. 'What're ya doing at weekend?' Danny asked.\n\nShe thought hard for something interesting to say. 'Nothing. I don't think,' she said instead.\n\n'Good, I'll text you,' he said.\n\nPam got out of the car and stood on the pavement as Danny did a three-point turn. Without a glance from Danny she watched his car crawl down the street and stop outside number 42. She turned and ran up the path to her house. Pam unlocked the front door behind her and dropped her bag at the foot of the stairs.\n\n'Yes!' she yelled at the top of her voice. Punching the air, anyone watching would have thought she'd just scored the winning goal at Wembley. She'd got her first real date.\n\nShe took the stairs two at a time and launched herself into her bedroom, flinging open her wardrobe door. What on earth was she going to wear, she thought as she picked out her clothes one by one and discarded them on the bed? Tops, skirts, jumpers flew out of her drawers. She could feel panic rising. There were only a few days to decide. She stood at the foot of the bed and flopped backwards, sighing. Dreaming of Danny, she thought she'd burst with joy as she pulled her teddy off her pillow and hugged him tight. 'Teds,' she said. 'This is it. I'm all grown up now and I don't need you any more.' Teds flew up in the air and landed in the rubbish bin.\n\n'We need to get Pam to invite us into her house,' Billy said.\n\n'Not yet, we're gonna do that twat over that cut us up first,' said Danny, gazing at Number 42. He drummed his fingers on the steering wheel and Billy knew his friend was working out a plan of action. When Danny had his mind set, nothing Billy could say or do would change it.\n\n'Whatever,' Billy said nodding his head to the beat of the music.\n\n## Chapter 10\n\nThe coffin bore a solitary arrangement of white lilies. Inside were the remains of Grace Harvey and Winston. Donald Harvey and her close friends inched their way up the slope towards All Saints Church, Merton which stood on a hill in the heart of the village, just a short walk away from the river Heddle itself and next to the village green.\n\nWaiting for them at the top of the hill was a tight circle of Grace's neighbours and villagers. Taylor stood outside the entrance of the church and watched the tear-drenched face of a little girl break out in a nervous giggle as she walked the path between the gravestones. Overcome presumably by the stress of the funeral, she raised her trembling face, framed with a black Alice band, to an older lady at her side, as if in search of reassurance.\n\n'So I won't weep any more, because you are now in a better place than you were before,' said the vicar with much heartfelt regret and resignation at his beloved parishioner's awful fate.\n\nAt the rear of the congregation Taylor stood looking up at the stained glass window designed by William Morris, the card next to her on a small lectern informed her. According to legend, said a mounted plaque above, the original foundations for the church were laid in a flat, easily accessible site but every morning were found transferred to the hill where the church exists today. Eventually the builders gave up building it in the planned flat location and built it on the hill.\n\nThe congregation stood in sombre fashion at the graveside. The sun was hot, there wasn't a breath of air, birds sang and the atmosphere was tranquil. There was no traffic noise and it seemed to Taylor that the whole of mankind had stopped for that moment in time as she stood on the periphery of the mourners, looking in.\n\nIt was her duty at the funeral to see what she could glean from people who attended. Already she had noticed that Donald Harvey didn't appear distressed, just agitated. He kept looking around him as though searching for someone in the crowd. Interestingly, there had been no words of anger from him or bitterness towards the party that did this to his mother. Only towards the man who he believed took her money. She needed to speak to him regarding her conversation with Brian Stevenson and she would when she could get him alone.\n\nHowever, no sooner had Grace been lowered into the ground than she watched Donald Harvey sprint across the graveyard towards a solitary dark figure standing beneath a large oak tree. To the amazement of the mourners, within seconds he was raining blows on the man who he had firstly knocked to the ground.\n\nTaylor hitched up her tight skirt and ran best she could across the grass in her stilettos, until her heel caught in the earth and she toppled face first to the ground. Picking herself up as fast and graciously as she could, she discarded her footwear and continued in bare feet.\n\n'Pack it in! Have you no respect?' she yelled at the top of her voice.\n\nThe man lying flat on his back had blood covering his face and running profusely from his nose, along his cheek and down the side of his neck by the time she reached Donald Harvey's side. To her astonishment, it was Brian Stevenson who attempted to raise his head from the ground and wipe his face with the back of his hand. In between coughing he spat blood to the ground. Taylor knelt at his side.\n\n'Are you okay?' she said.\n\nDonald Harvey panted heavily. 'It's you who should be six foot in the under, you robbing bastard,' he said, spitting to the ground.\n\n'Last warning Mr Harvey, otherwise I'll arrest you for assault,' Taylor warned.\n\n'You're a dead man, Stevenson. You're a fucking dead man,' Donald Harvey called over his shoulder as he turned and walked away. Taylor offered her hand to help Mr Stevenson to his feet.\n\n'I'm fine, fine... I didn't mean to cause trouble I just wanted to show my respects,' he said. 'I've known Grace a long time. I thought a lot about her even if her inheriting son doesn't think so,' he said, as he attempted to tidy himself up. He took a clean, neatly pressed handkerchief from his trouser pocket and sneezed before he could open it. Blood sprayed across the front of Taylor's white shirt and she jumped back with a squeal. She looked down at her new Jacques Vert jacket with horror.\n\n'Sorry,' he said, sheepishly wiping his face.\n\n'Do you want to make a complaint?' she asked with more composure than she felt. 'If you do, I'll go and arrest him.'\n\n'No, I appreciate his emotions will be running high, which has to be understood,' he said. 'And, let's face it, he's got to blame somebody, so it might as well be me. I'll live,' he said gallantly.\n\nTaylor attempted to blot the blood off her jacket with a tissue, only to find her fingers covered. 'The lack of closure is frustrating for some,' she said, impressed with his compassion.\n\n'Please, let me pay for the cleaning.' Brian Stevenson said, reaching out to try wipe her jacket. Taylor jumped back.\n\n'We'll see,' she snapped. 'If you're alright, I'll go after me laddo and let him know just how lucky he is that he isn't heading back to the police station with me in a pair of handcuffs.'\n\nTaylor walked precariously around the gravestones on the grass to Grace Harvey's burial spot where Donald Harvey stood morosely looking in. She picked up her shoes along the way, only to find one of the heels hanging precariously by a thread. As she passed a bin she tossed them in, glancing back to the old oak tree; as she did so she saw that Brian Stevenson had disappeared. Donald Harvey looked across at her as she approached him. When she didn't speak he turned and walked away. She followed.\n\n'Are you going to tell me what the hell that was all about?' she demanded, her face like thunder.\n\nDonald's pace quickened down the hill towards the car park but he remained silent. She ran barefoot to keep up to his long, purposeful strides.\n\n'You're very fortunate, you know, that Mr Stevenson doesn't want to press charges,' she said, hobbling behind him down the hill path. 'Shit,' she said under her breath as she trod on a sharp stone. Donald Harvey turned and saw her trying to balance on one leg as she as she rubbed her bleeding foot.\n\n'Why're you shouting at me? It should be him you're reading the riot act to,' he said stepping forward and offering his hand to help her gain her balance. She took it gratefully and stared directly at his suited chest before looking up into his distraught face.\n\n'This isn't over,' he said quietly. 'He's just lucky you were about, this time.'\n\nTaylor looked into his deep-set, brown, hooded eyes and held his gaze for a moment or two. Unblinking, he turned and walked off to his car. She stood still and ran her dried blood-coated fingers through her hair in exasperation. 'What a bloody mess', she whispered.\n\n'I don't understand,' she shouted after him. 'He says he only did what your mum wanted him to do so she could fund your lifestyle.'\n\nHe stopped in his tracks and turned. 'What?' he asked walking back towards her. 'What did you say? I didn't need her money,' he yelled, through gritted teeth. Taylor pulled herself up to stand as tall as she could.\n\n'He says she took the equity out of her home for you.'\n\n'Where's the money then? I certainly haven't seen it,' he said. 'And that pariah hasn't seen the last of me either,' he growled.\n\n'Look, I'm the detective, not you. I'll get to the bottom of this. You stay away from him. Do you hear?' she called after Donald Harvey as he got into his car.\n\nHe slammed the car door shut. He drove towards her and, pulling alongside her, he opened his window.\n\n'I need you to sign some authorities so that I can check into your mum's bank accounts,' she said.\n\nYou know where I am,' he replied. 'And tell Mr Stevenson if you see him he'd better keep looking over his shoulder because one day I'll catch up with him.'\n\nAs she saw Donald Harvey's car vanish through the village she could feel goosebumps rise on her arms and she shivered. 'Who was she to believe?' she thought as she stepped from the shade of the trees that lined the path to the church and into the warmth of the sun. She looked at her watch, there was no time to worry about that now, she needed to head for the mortuary to see what secrets Mildred Sykes post-mortem would reveal about her death. First though she must buy some 'practical' shoes, as Dylan would have said, on her way and drop her jacket off at the cleaners \u2013 her skirt and top would just have to do for the mortuary.\n\n## Chapter 11\n\n'What a day,' said Taylor as she ran across the car park to the mortuary. It was obvious to her that the tarmac had just been laid and in the midday heat she could feel the heels of her new shoes sinking in. She dragged her brush through her hair briefly, glanced at herself in her hand mirror and ran a covering of gloss around her lips.\n\nThere was no time to fret further about her appearance she thought, kicking the door wide open; she'd have to do. She zipped up her bag, put it under her arm, tossed her hair over her shoulder and smoothed her skirt down with sweaty palms, as she stopped for a moment at the top of the steps.\n\nTaylor took a deep breath before she entered the mortuary's office. This was the moment she had been dreading since she had seen the body of Mildred Sykes laying dead on the floor of her insect ridden bedroom. Watching some pathologist butcher any body was not her idea of fun, never mind a decomposed one. However, like Dylan said it was a necessary process she had to witness for the good of the investigation. She just hoped the pathologist wasn't Professor Bernard Stow, who thought he was a comedian. She opened the door and walked in. Professor Stow stood in the adjoining room. Her heart sank and she groaned.\n\n'Good timing Taylor, do you want coffee or tea?' asked Dylan who was stood at the vending machine, waiting for his cup to be filled.\n\n'Tea, strong and sweet please, preferably with a shot of brandy,' she replied sitting down with a thud on the only seat available in the mortuary attendant's office, which just happened to be the most uncomfortable old wooden ladder-backed chair with a flat piece of red material posing as a cushion.\n\n'You remember Jasmine from SOCO who was at the scene don't you?' Dylan said ignoring her manner. Taylor nodded at the petite, pretty, dark haired, composed-looking young woman, who smiled at her from across the room as she tucked into a large bacon bap.\n\n'I think you and I will stay in the police observation office area for this one, so we don't have to suffer the smell,' said Dylan.\n\n'Thank you,' Taylor said, smiling briefly before looking heavenward with a sharp intake of breath. There was a God after all.\n\n'Lucky you.' Jasmine drawled as she wiped her greasy hands on a napkin, put the remainder of her sandwich on a plate and picked up her camera to check its settings.\n\n'Well at least the pathologist will be a laugh Jasmine, it's Professor Stow,' said Dylan.\n\nTaylor closed her eyes briefly. 'Oh, joy...' she mumbled.\n\nDylan passed her a cup of tea and she reached out for it.\n\n'Thanks.'\n\n'You took my advice,' he said nodding at her sensible black pumps that had the smallest pointed heel.' She smiled, sarcastically. 'That's a nasty mark,' he said, pointing to her blouse. 'You been in a scrap?'\n\n'Blood from this morning,' she said, standing up to show him the full extent of the damage to her clothing before she went on to explain the eventful morning she'd had.\n\n'So who do you think's telling the truth?' Dylan asked.\n\nTaylor shrugged her shoulders and tentatively took a sip of her drink. Looking down into her polystyrene cup, she noticed the blood and dirt that still clung to her fingernails. She grimaced and walked over to the sink to scrub her hands.\n\n'Decisions Taylor, the jobs all about the consequences of the decisions you make,' Dylan said, beaming. 'And when you're a boss remember they're always the right ones 'coz there ain't no one above you to tell you you're wrong. Any luck in locating the hit and run vehicle yet?'\n\n'No, and believe it or not, either one of the men could be involved yet too.'\n\nDylan raised his eyebrows.\n\n'Both Donald Harvey and Brian Stevenson have recent damage to their cars by their own admission. I need the accident investigation branch to let me know that they are a hundred and ten per cent positive of the make of the car that we're looking for before I take it further.'\n\nThe door dramatically swung open and in walked the robust figure of Professor Stow.\n\n'Good afternoon everyone. Cheer up,' Professor Stow trumpeted with a theatrical wave of his chubby hand in front of their solemn faces. 'Anyone would think someone has... Ooops, they have,' he roared. 'Back in five minutes,' he said, talking very fast. His big fat red cheeks wobbled as he laughed. 'The old ones are always the best,' he chuckled as he took his coveralls from the peg. 'Got to smile once in a while' he continued, struggling to tie the green disposal plastic apron around his cumbersome frame.\n\n'Well Dylan what have you got for me today?' he panted. 'Hello there Jasmine, Taylor isn't it?' he said, not waiting for either to answer before enthusiastically pulling plastic gloves out of a Kleenex style tissue box and shaking off the excess talcum powder. He commenced to blow them up like a balloon.\n\n'Yes,' said Taylor bemused. She cringed as he slowly let the air out of the glove and it made a farting sound. He chuckled, shook each glove and fought to get them onto his huge hands. This accomplished, he rubbed his hands together and grinned, showing off crooked, yellow teeth.\n\n'Thought so, never forget a good body,' he chortled eyeing her up and down. Her face was a picture. Dylan and Jasmine smiled knowingly at each other.\n\n'Only joking,' he said looking seriously over his half rimmed glasses at her, 'so what have we got?' he said, turning to Dylan. Professor Stow's face mask hung round his neck waiting to be strung behind his ears as he entered the mortuary. He stood with hands on his hips as Dylan outlined in detail the discovery of Mildred Sykes' badly decomposed body.\n\n'A bit of a rotter then?' quipped Professor Stow as he launched at the mortuary door elbows first to keep his gloves sterile. Jasmine managed to carry her equipment into the room behind him before the doors swung shut.\n\nDylan knew from experience that Professor Stow's post-mortems were quick and thorough. Insensitivity and bad jokes aside, he knew they wouldn't have to suffer him for long. Taylor was grateful to Dylan for allowing them to use the observation room. It was about time one of the bosses was concerned about people who had to attend mortuaries for post-mortems.\n\n'A mint, Taylor?' said Dylan, offering her the sweets that said Extra Strong on its packaging.\n\n'Tea and now mints, thank you sir,' said Taylor as she dragged an old battered grey, plastic chair from the pile situated in the corner of the room and positioned it as far away from the mortuary observation window as possible.\n\n'What does a 75-year-old woman have between her breasts that a 25-year-old doesn't?' Professor Stow asked Jasmine. Jasmine shook her head. 'Her navel,' he laughed.\n\nAlthough in a nauseous state and her heart leaping every so often into her mouth, Taylor found she couldn't take her eyes off the examination, gruesome as it was. At first she dare only look through her fingers as she had done as a child at horror movies but eventually the need to know what information the post-mortem could give them overrode her fear. Before long, she felt brave enough to stand behind Dylan and peer over his shoulder as he stood at the window, to see what was happening in the next room.\n\n'She's got maggots big enough for my fishing box in here,' Professor Stow said, picking one up with a pair of tweezers and holding it up for all to see before dropping it unceremoniously in a plastic bowl on the trolley next to him. He continued to relay his thoughts and findings into his Dictaphone as he examined Mildred's body.\n\n'Okay,' he said, at last with a big sigh. I reckon good old Mildred here's been dead for some...' he pondered, 'six weeks or thereabouts. There's some bruising to both her wrists, possibly as a result of being held and she has suffered a serious skull fracture, which I'll confirm shortly. Can opener please,' he said holding out his gloved right hand to his assistant.\n\nThe top of the skull, referred to as the 'cap', was removed. 'Yes, there is no doubt about it, it's a severe fracture to the skull,' he said looking up at Dylan over the mask. 'I know it's not what you wanted to hear and it's not consistent with falling either \u2013 much too severe. She was struck with a blunt instrument and with some force,' he said. 'Poor old dear,' he sighed. 'But it'd have been instant death, if that's any consolation.'\n\nAll the necessary samples were taken along with photographs and two hours later it was all over, much to Taylor's relief.\n\nProfessor Stow had nothing more to tell them in his debrief.\n\n'Your first murder as a DS and a deputy SIO,' said Dylan to Taylor who walked down the steps with him.\n\n'Yes boss,' she said with a smile.\n\n'All you need to do now is find who did it,' he grinned. Her heart sunk. Where did she start? she thought as she looked at Dylan expectantly.\n\n'Let's get Forensic to Mildred's house, the incident room up and running and do a press release,' Dylan said as if reading her thoughts as they walked towards the door. He stopped as the sun found his face and he took a large gulp of clean air into his lungs.\n\n'Isn't it good to be alive, Taylor?' he said.\n\nTaylor stood for a moment smiling. 'The Press' was all she'd heard him say after that everything else faded to oblivion. Taylor's excitement knew no bounds as the reality of what he had just said sunk in. There was going to be a press conference, which she was going to be part of. \n\n## Chapter 12\n\nPam couldn't wait for the weekend to come. What should she wear? Nothing in her wardrobe seemed to look grown up enough, she thought as she looked despairingly at the pile of discarded clothing on her bed and the empty wardrobe. Why did no one but Danny realise she was a young woman?\n\nMeanwhile, Danny and Bill were planning their next move. Danny suggested he'd keep Pam occupied, ask about her family and gather information about their movements.\n\n'Billy I want you to look in her bag and her pockets, in fact anywhere you think she might keep her keys. But before that you do remember that we have some unfinished business with the occupier of that house,' he said. The two observed the solitary property in its own grounds with a walled garden.\n\n'It doesn't look like there's an alarm,' said Billy.\n\n'No, and we can drive around the back of the house out of sight, by the looks of it,' Danny said as he peered in his rear view mirror, then spun the car around and drove through the open gates. Quickly they gained access via the rear patio doors by forcing them off the rails.\n\n'Nice pad,' said Billy, as he strolled around the lounge.\n\n'Look for cash and jewellery and then we'll think about the electrical stuff.' Danny called as he took the stairs two at a time. He peered over the banisters from the gallery landing. 'Don't forget before you touch anything to put ya socks on yer hands so you don't leave prints.'\n\n'Yeah, yeah, yeah,' Billy said, sitting down on the tiger skin rug to take off his footwear and re site his socks. Dried mud fell from his trainers onto the cream carpet and he nonchalantly rubbed it into the deep pile.\n\n'Five minutes, then we're out of here,' Danny said. Billy jumped to his feet and started pulling drawers out of the dresser, but disappointingly there was nothing to pocket. He flopped down on the sofa and opened the footstool. He eyes couldn't believe what they saw.\n\n'Jackpot.' he screamed. 'I've found money \u2013 and lots of it.'\n\nDanny hurtled down the stairs and grabbed the cash-filled holdall. 'Fucking hell, there must be a few grand here. Let's get out, we don't need ought else.' Danny said running towards the patio doors. He turned and stared at his friend who was struggling with a widescreen TV.\n\n'Please Danny,' Billy begged. 'For the flat?'\n\n'Come on, we've got to go. Go. Go.'\n\nBilly staggered to the doors and, resting the TV on the kitchen worktop, he picked up a clock studded with gems that sparkled in the sunlight and stuffed it into his pocket.\n\nDanny took one look at him.\n\n'For fuck's sake Billy.' he said.\n\n'I like it,' he said with a cheeky grin.\n\n'You're soft in the bleedin' head,' Danny said to his mate as he opened the hatchback to put in their ill-gotten gains. The two opened their car doors in unison, casually took one last look around and jumped in. Danny turned the key in the ignition and as if they had just been a visitor to the house he steered the car carefully and calmly out of the drive and into the road.\n\nDanny tipped the holdall upside down and the money rained down on their living room floor.\n\n'Thirty-five grand.' Danny said, as he put the last fifty pound note on a pile.\n\n'We're fucking rich.' Billy said, throwing the notes in the air. 'Let's go to\n\nMcDonald's and celebrate.'\n\n'This is just the start. Nothing's going to stop us now,' Danny said, belching loudly, much to the disgust of a two young women with children at the next table. Danny smiled at them and, opening his mouth, he showed them his un-swallowed food. The children giggled. The women turned their heads, rose from the table and hurriedly prepared their children to leave.\n\nDo you fancy going out? Billy texted Pam. 'If we get her house keys we might be able to double our money,' Danny scoffed. 'We could get a new car.'\n\n'I'd be quite happy to just give her one,' he said grinning.\n\n'Patience Billy, you've gotta have patience mate,' Danny said. The phone bleeped.\n\nSounds fab x\n\n'Honestly Billy, they let kids have their mobiles on in school these days,' he said, shaking his head. 'What's the world coming to?' he sighed. 'Roll on the weekend \u2013 and in the meantime, let's have some fun,' he shouted as they headed for the car.\n\n'Danny, blue and white to the right,' shouted Billy as they cruised the streets of Harrowfield.\n\n'Showtime,' Danny yelled, excitement in his tone as he spun the steering wheel with the palm of his hand. Foot down, the wheels screeched and, as anticipated, it immediately attracted the police officer's attention. The blue lights and sirens of the police car were immediately behind them. The cat and mouse chase was on.\n\n'Tenner says they don't catch us,' hollered Danny.\n\n'You tight git.' yelled Billy, turning up the music. The police car was on their tail.\n\n'Railway crossing ahead Billy, let's see who's chicken,' Danny shouted. Billy closed his eyes. The red lights were flashing. A train was due. The barrier jerked into action.\n\n'It's coming down Billy, yee ha.' Danny shouted, as he pulled the car out past the stationary cars waiting at the level crossing. Billy felt the bumps of the railway lines beneath the car tyres as they were lifted from the tarmac and thrown through the air at speed. The barrier missed them by a cat's whisker and they avoided the vehicles at the other side by a hair's breadth. Even then, Danny continued to hold his foot down flat on the accelerator, excitement pumping feverishly through his veins. They would be long gone before the Police got across the level crossing, and he knew it.\n\n'I think we better get rid of this as soon as,' Danny said, banging the steering wheel. 'We're gonna be the cops most wanted.'\n\n'Can we afford it?' Billy asked seriously. Danny roared with laughter.\n\n'Remember that black Subaru Impreza we saw in the garage in Tandem Bridge? We could afford that cash, mate.'\n\n'No,' his friend said in awe. 'Come on then what're we waiting for?'\n\n'Because we're gonna fire this on the moors, report it stolen and claim on the insurance too,' Danny rapped. 'Shake on it, mate,' he said, spitting into his hand and leaning over to shake Billy's.\n\nTandem Bridge Garage staff had moved the Impreza to a prime site at the front of the forecourt on a display turntable. Danny pulled alongside it for a closer look then, parking their car off the main road, they got out and walked admiringly around the prized vehicle. Pausing, they caressed the deep front and rear spoilers. Danny put his hand on the car door handle and instantly a burly salesman appeared from what seemed like fresh air.\n\n'What can I do for you two?' he asked.\n\n'Can we have a go? We might want to buy it, might'nt we?' said Danny, stuffing his hands into his pockets and cocking his head to one side.\n\n'What with?'\n\n'Dosh, what do you think mate?' Billy said.\n\n'Cash, straight up?' he asked dubiously.\n\n'Straight up, sir,' said Danny.\n\n'I'll get the keys,' said the car salesman with a grin and a wink that said he didn't believe them. What harm would it do to give the kids a look though, he thought.\n\nMinutes later, Danny sat in the driver's side, reaching for the large multifunctional display in front of him and fingering the touch panels on the steering wheel. The car smelt of adhesives and sealers. Billy turned on the radio. The salesman stood at the door, his frame stopping them from closing it and his hands in close proximity to the ignition key. There was no way these two scrotes were going to drive off in it without paying, that would be his wages gone for the rest of his life.\n\n'How about a test drive?' Danny asked as he looked up from the racing seat.\n\n'You're pushing it a bit now lads, anyway I can't at the moment,' said the salesman.\n\n'But if you get out I'll start her up and give you a look under the bonnet.\n\nDanny and Billy nodded at each other.\n\n'Discount for cash?' asked Danny.\n\n'No, we don't do discount. People who can afford these don't need discount or to ask the price in my experience,' he chortled. This was going nowhere.\n\n'Car mats?' Billy enquired.\n\nThe salesman shook his head. 'They're extra.'\n\n'Can I have one of the brollies with the Subaru logo on it?' Billy said as he pointed to a bunch of them in a stand.\n\n'Yeah, if you like,' said the salesman, bemused.\n\n'Deal, we'll be in for it tomorrow,' said Billy. Danny shook his head at his friend.\n\n'Yeah, whatever mate,' said the salesman locking the car with the immobiliser fob.\n\n'What are you going to do with a fucking golf umbrella?' Danny asked when they got back to their car.\n\n'I dunno, but it's better than nought innit?' Billy said, grinning.\n\n'I could have got some cash off of it if we'd haggled,' said Danny.\n\n'Don't be tight. I've always wanted one of them big brollies,' Billy said, his smile falling into a frown.\n\n'You're a fucking loony, do you know that?' Danny said to his friend. He sighed.\n\n'Never mind we've got a new motor, courtesy of Mr Porsche,' Danny grinned. 'Now where we gonna to fire this baby, Billy?'\n\n'Not too far away from the flat, I don't want to have to walk,' Billy said, yawning.\n\n'How about we get a taxi to the garage tomorrow to pick it up?' said Danny.\n\n'Can we?'\n\n'No, we can't, you idle bastard.'\n\n'I've never been in a taxi before, unless I nicked it,' said Billy.\n\nThey had travelled a few hundred yards from the garage when they heard the sound of a siren and Danny saw that blue lights were on their tail, in his rear view mirror.\n\n'Shit. The sneaky bastards. I didn't see them sneaking up on us. Hold tight Billy, here we go again,' Danny said, slamming his foot to the floor.\n\n'We're shagged Danny there's a red light ahead.'\n\n'What red light? Fuck that. You think that's gonna stop me? Let's see how much bottle they've got.'\n\nWith the two cars in front braking and the cops almost on their bumper, Danny slowed down. He watched both policemen alight from their vehicle in his rear view mirror and immediately put his foot down hard on the accelerator. Yanking the steering wheel to the left, the car lurched up onto the pavement, past the stationary cars and into the bus lane towards the red lights at speed. A woman with a child in a pram was stepping onto the zebra crossing. It was instant, no time to swerve or brake, the mother and her child's pram were hit head on and catapulted over the bonnet.\n\nBilly screamed.\n\n'Fucking idiot,' Danny yelled. His foot was still to the floor as he headed for the moors, they needed to burn the car out as quickly as possible now.\n\nDanny was visibly shaking but he didn't take his eyes off the road as the car gathered speed down 'Snake Pass' that led onto the moors. 'You okay Billy?' he said.\n\n'Yeah, I'm fine,' he said.\n\n'There was nothing I could do Billy. You know that don't you?'\n\n'I know. Thank God we weren't in our new car,' he said swallowing hard.\n\nThey looked at each other and cracked up laughing. Fifteen minutes later Billy jammed a screwdriver into the ignition. Danny expertly siphoned petrol from it., poured the flammable liquid over the car and threw a match in the open window. Flames licked around on the inside and in no time at all it burst into an inferno.\n\nThe two stared at the billowing flames momentarily before running hell for leather down the hillside of coarse grasses and bracken. Danny and Billy thought their lungs were going to burst when they stopped for breath behind a stone wall and stared back across the heathland. Dropping to the ground on their knees, they laughed in between gasps. Tears ran down their grubby faces as they watched the black smoke heading skywards. The smell of burning rubber blew its way on the wind and filled their nostrils. They coughed and spluttered.\n\nThere was an explosion and they looked over the wall. The car was a fireball. The pair covered their heads as the debris flew and small particles rained down on them.\n\n'It won't be long before the cops see that and come sniffing,' Danny said.\n\n'You know what?'\n\n'What?'\n\n'The new car's wing'll have to have four stripes now,' Billy squealed before getting up and continuing to run.\n\n'Better ring the cops and tell them the car's gone missing,' Danny shouted to his friend, as they stumbled together across the moor, sometimes hitting their shins on sharp stones, sometimes sinking to the tops of their trainers in swampy places.\n\nFrom the safety of their flat, washed and discarded clothing in a plastic carrier bag ready for a neighbour's bin, Danny rang to report their Fiesta stolen. Must have happened overnight, he said.\n\n'You'll have to come into the police station with your documents I'm afraid, Mr Denton and make the report in person,' said the lady on the switchboard.\n\nThe two set off walking.\n\n'The tart didn't say it had been found. They'll want to know why we've waited to report it missing. We'll tell them that we've only just realised it has gone and thought it might be some toe rag on the estate who'd borrowed it. So we asked about first.'\n\n'Yeah, there're some proper bastards around here, right Danny?' said Billy, laughing as they strolled into the police station.\n\n## Chapter 13\n\nBridey Tate, just twenty-one, was on a life support machine fighting for her life, as was her eight-week-old son, Toby. Mother and baby had been going out to spend the gift vouchers that her and her husband had received when Toby was born.\n\nThe buggy which the baby had been in now lay overturned on the pavement. Police and ambulances had arrived at the scene and, within minutes, others attended in numbers to seal off the area. The registered number of the offending vehicle had been circulated to all working police personnel by the officers in the car that had been in the traffic queue at the traffic lights. An independent police complaints commission investigation was started.\n\nIt wasn't long before a lorry driver reported that a car was on fire on the moors. The patrol car, which had been dispatched to the scene of the burning vehicle confirmed that it was the car probably responsible for what could prove to be a fatal accident and was expected to be the victim of an arson attack. Although the vehicle wasn't totally destroyed when the fire engines reached it, it wasn't far off being a blackened shell by the time they'd managed to put out the fire.\n\nMeanwhile, Danny Denton and Billy Greenwood stood as bold as brass at the help desk counter of Harrowfield Police Station, on CCTV and in full view of all police personnel that were on duty. They smiled sweetly up into the camera in the foyer as if butter wouldn't melt in their mouths.\n\n'Would you mind not leaning on the counter,' said the help desk assistant whose face was puffy, flushed and tight-lipped. 'We've got a major incident unfolding. What do you want?'\n\n'I've just come to report my car stolen,' Danny said, sprawling his arms across the counter; the help-desk assistant tutted loudly. Billy stood behind Danny making rude gestures.\n\n'Really?' said the hefty, white haired desk sergeant who rose from his chair at the back of the office.\n\n'Yeah,' Billy replied, stepping forward to back up his friend.\n\nThe sergeant dismissed the help-desk assistant and took the relevant forms out of his grey metal filing cabinet drawer. With great care he took down details for the crime report.\n\n'Sit down,' he ordered, pointing to a bench that was screwed to both the floor and the wall. The two did as they were told.\n\n'No one's gonna nick this are they?' Billy laughed, touching the thick nut and bolt securing the piece of wood that emulated a seat.\n\n'PC Whitworth'll be out to see you in a minute,' the sergeant called.\n\nInspector Jack Dylan walked through the foyer, glancing in their direction.\n\n'What've you two been up to?' he asked the boys.\n\n'Nothing sir, somebody nicked our car,' said Billy sheepishly.\n\nDylan laughed heartily. 'So now you know what it's like to have summat stolen don't you?'\n\nDanny put one finger up behind Dylan's back as they watched him key in the security numbers to allow him to enter the station's offices.\n\n'What're they playing at?' Danny whispered impatiently to his friend just as two police officers walked through the same door.\n\n'I understand you've come to report your car stolen?' said the taller of the two.\n\n'Yeah' said Danny, rising from the bench.\n\n'That's convenient.' he said, looking straight into Danny's eyes.\n\n'No, it ain't, we had to walk here,' Billy responded. The two officers looked at each other with furrowed brows.\n\n'Who's the owner?' asked the smaller, fresh faced young officer who could have been the same age as them.\n\n'Me, and before you ask, it's legit and I've got all the documents to prove it here,' Danny said, waving paperwork in front of his face.\n\n'And who are you then?' the older officer said to Billy.\n\n'I'm his best mate.'\n\nThe young officer pointed to a door.\n\n'In there,' he said to Billy.\n\n'And you come with me,' said the older of the two as he picked up the crime report from the desk sergeant and waved a finger at Danny that indicated he should follow him.\n\n'So, Mr Denton, I'm PC Tim Whitworth. Now, when was this car of yours stolen then?' he said, pulling the chair out from beneath a small square melamine desk.\n\n'We noticed it were gone from outside the flat this morning.'\n\n'So let's get this straight. You're telling me you've walked round since this morning looking for your car, but since you've have no luck you've decided to report it to us, is that right?' The police officer said, staring deep into Danny's eyes.\n\nDanny nodded.\n\n'We believe your car has just knocked down a young mother and her child on a zebra crossing, both are on the critical list. If I find out you're lying to me I'll personally string you up and by God you'll wish you were dead,' he said leaning across the desk and grabbing Danny by the chin with a wrench-like grip.\n\n'Argh,' said Danny, swallowing hard. 'It's wasn't me. I haven't done ought. Look, I brought my keys and my documents like I were told to on the phone. It weren't me. Come on, if I'd have done ought like that d'ya think I'd have been stupid enough to come anywhere near you? Let go of me,' he demanded through clenched teeth.\n\nThe officer squeezed harder then pushing Danny's head backwards he let go. 'God, if my daughter, our Sara, ever brought a lout like you home...' he started to say with a great in-drawing of breath. 'Stay here, I'll be back,' he said as he marched out of the door.\n\nDanny sat looking around. The room was only about eight feet square. It had no windows and one door and it was unbearably warm. The walls were newly painted grey; he could still smell the solvents. Danny could hear the mumble of two officer's voices outside the door of the interview room. It was strangely soothing. A camera was focused on him from the top right hand corner of the room and a strip of metal ran around the walls. He knew that was an alarm bell that the officer could use to summon his colleagues in case he was under attack. He smiled, he only knew that because they had had to use it when he had punched a copper in an interview room once.\n\nPC Tim Whitworth threw the door back in a sudden, sharp movement, which made Danny jump as it slammed against the wall behind him.\n\n'Your stories check out, so before I can think of something else to keep you in for, get out of my sight,' he spat, holding the door ajar.\n\n'I need the crime number for the insurance, mate?' Danny said. He could feel the officer's anger and reluctantly PC Whitworth walked back into the room, leaned on the desk and wrote the number down on a piece of paper, and then threw it at him.\n\n'Cheers,' Danny said, with a smile as he turned and reached out for the officer's hand. PC Whitworth grabbed his collar and standing up, he pinned Denton to the wall. 'Keep looking over your shoulder, mate,' he said, bringing his knee up into his crutch before throwing him out into the foyer.\n\n'Hey you can't do that,' Billy shouted as he rose from the bench he'd been sitting on, loud enough for the desk sergeant to hear. The desk sergeant raised his eyebrows and craned his neck to look over the counter to see what the commotion was about and then carried on with what he was doing.\n\nPC Whitworth glared at Billy. 'Fuck off,' he mouthed. Danny walked up to Billy and putting a hand on his shoulder turned him round to face the exit and pushed him towards it.\n\n'He thinks he's hard in that uniform,' he whispered. 'But I know his name. We won't forget him,' he grimaced, rubbing in between his legs.\n\n'Too true we won't, the bastard,' Billy said. PC Tim Whitworth stood at the exit of the police station and watched the two until they had walked under the subway tunnel towards the town and out of sight.\n\n'We'd better ring the insurance company when we get home,' said Danny. 'And we need to give Pam that tenner back she lent us when we see her.'\n\n'Why would we want to do that Danny?' asked Billy.\n\n'Well, we wouldn't want her to think we're only after her for her money now would we?' he said with a grin.\n\n'Oh, yeah,' Billy said.\n\n'I'll text her.'\n\n'Good plan.'\n\nIt wouldn't be long before news of Bridey Tate's fate and that of her son spread quickly.\n\nThe hospital and police were frantically trying to get hold of Bridey's husband and family.\n\nThe road remained closed and the police were interviewing the shocked witnesses. The mangled wreck of the pram remained in situ, battered and wretched and next to the police cordon was a growing memorial; a wall of flowers and soft toys.\n\nCID was now at the scene.\n\nThis was an evil crime, a deliberate act. Why did the car need to get away from the police so badly?\n\nPC Tim Whitworth took the call on his radio at the scene. 'The chassis number's been checked and the car is confirmed as belonging to a Danny Denton,' said the police officer from the control room.\n\n## Chapter 14\n\n'I'm gonna be late tonight love. It looks like the old lady was murdered,' Dylan told Jen's answering machine. 'Catch up with you as soon as I can.' He put the phone down in haste and called out to anyone in the CID office within earshot.\n\n'I need to get the incident room up and running, house to house enquiries urgently completed and forensic officers to the deceased's home please.'\n\nThe scene needed to be searched and the next of kin identified. Initial enquiries had suggested that Ms Sykes had no family.\n\n'Who was the last person to see her alive, Taylor?' Dylan asked DS Taylor Spiers as he handed her a list of people to contact. She shrugged her shoulders, wide-eyed.\n\n'Get the team together for a briefing as soon as possible will you, this bloody murderer has had one hell of a head start on us.'\n\nHe picked up the phone to ring the press office and give Liz a brief statement.\n\n'A murder enquiry is under way after the decomposed body of an elderly lady was found at her home address,' he said. 'Number 11, Causeway Cottages. A post-mortem has shown that she died from a non-accidental head injury, which possibly occurred some six weeks ago. Police hope to name the lady later today but are appealing for witnesses.' I know they'll want more, but I need to get things up and running and obtain more background information on the victim before I can give them anything,' he said to Liz at the press office.\n\nNo sooner had he put the phone down than it rang again and Dylan picked up straight away.\n\n'Boss, John Benjamin, has anyone told you about the young mother and her son who've been mowed down on a zebra crossing by an alleged stolen car?' he said. Dylan leaned back in his chair.\n\n'Go on, first I've heard of it,' he said, disgruntled.\n\n'Twenty-one-year-old mum and her eight-week-old son are both on life support at Harrowfield hospital, it's looking like there is nothing that can be done \u2013 they've both got massive head injuries. I'm at the scene and we're urgently trying to trace next of kin.'\n\n'What do we know about the car, John?'\n\n'Been confirmed as a red Ford Fiesta that's owned by a local scrote; him and his mate apparently reported it stolen today.'\n\n'I'll see you at the scene as soon as. By the way the PM on Mildred Sykes shows she was murdered by a fatal blow to the head. I'm trying to get that one up and running with Taylor.'\n\n'No probs, see you soon.'\n\nHow accurate the saying is that it never rains but it pours, thought Dylan.\n\nQuickly briefing Taylor of what he wanted her to do next, he excused himself to head towards the scene of the accident to ensure that no corners were cut and everything was done properly.\n\n'My God, what sort of place have I come to work in?' Taylor said to Dennis. 'It's like that Midsomer Murders.'\n\n'Arrange the debrief for five, Dennis, and in the meantime a photograph from the house of Ms Sykes would be helpful if you can arrange for someone to pick one up for me. Remember Taylor, I want SOCO and forensic at her address; I don't want anything leaving to chance. I'll give the team the update on this latest hit and run at the briefing and you can do the update on Grace Harvey's fatal so that they're all fully aware of what's going on.'\n\nTaylor nodded.\n\n'Right, I'll be back as soon as I can \u2013 and in the meantime I'm on the mobile, so ring me if you need to speak to me', he said as he picked up his coat and briefcase and flew out of the door.\n\nDylan could see DS John Benjamin's large frame stood in the doorway to Mothercare speaking to a uniformed officer. He managed to drive to where the road was cordoned off then had to walk to where Bridey and Toby had been struck. John raised his hand in acknowledgement of his boss's presence.\n\nPeople were already passing bouquets to the uniformed officers guarding the scene, who were in turn laying them neatly along the pavement's edge. The upturned pram was a stark reminder to Dylan of what had taken place. Local press were gathering in droves with their cameras. Vans with television station emblems were parked up with their masts aloft, their occupants frantically setting up filming equipment at the cordon. Tomorrow, the doom and gloom would be spread across the country in the national newspapers.\n\nDylan scanned the scene. He noticed the absence of skid marks on the dry road surface. There had been no attempt to avoid the pedestrians, so why such desperation by the driver?\n\n'What's the story so far John?' asked Dylan.\n\n'Earlier today police were in pursuit of a red Ford Fiesta which nearly caused an accident by going through a closing railway barrier towards Tandem in the chase and according to witnesses the train only missed the car by a split second. The police car had to stop and the car got away.\n\n'Its details were circulated over the police radio and a short time later it was spotted on the high street, two up. A police car pulled up behind it and put its sirens and blue lights on to alert the Fiesta's driver to stop. Since it was stationary due to the traffic lights ahead changing to red, the police officers got out of the car and ran towards the Fiesta. Its occupants, presumably seeing them in pursuit, set off at speed, mounting the pavement to pass stationary cars and mowing down the young mum with her son who were just stepping onto the zebra crossing.\n\n'It didn't stop, carried on at speed and was later found burnt out on the moors. The owner, along with his mate, reported the car stolen at the nick some time later \u2013 which undeniably stinks. The police officers have talked to them and the lads are singing from the same hymn sheet so they've had to let them go.\n\n'It looks like the enquiry will have to be overseen by the independent complaints commission because of the police pursuit and that's about it in a nutshell,' concluded John.\n\n'Thanks. Phew. Control have told me that professional standards are on their way, although by the sound of it I don't think it got as involved as a pursuit by the police, did it? We need to gather all the information from the scene and descriptions from witnesses of the occupants of the Fiesta. Even if they can only give us an indication as to what clothing they were wearing. And we also need to tie the burnt-out car to the scene to show it was the offending vehicle. Do we know if it's a total burn out?'\n\n'Not completely, boss, so I'm told so we may be lucky.'\n\n'Let's get it collected from the moors on a low-loader. We might have some impact debris on the part of the vehicle. Ave we checked near the car for footprints or anything that might have been discarded?'\n\n'We're on with it, boss.'\n\n'Just thinking aloud, we'll have to start a policy book. What's the update on the family?'\n\n'I understand they're still trying to locate her parents. Graham, her husband is a brickie and he's out on a site. His boss has been made aware and was going over to collect him and take him to Harrowfield Hospital.\n\n'I've arranged for a Family Liaison Officer to be turned out and I'm waiting for control to let me know who that is.'\n\n'Good lad.' said Dylan.\n\n'It's not looking good, I'm told, for either of the casualities.'\n\n'The bastards eh?' Dylan said with venom.\n\n'Yeah, exactly.'\n\n'Look, I've got a briefing back at Harrowfield for the murder of the old lady from Causeway Cottages but I'll meet up with you afterwards at the nick and we'll speak more. I take it we don't think the car was stolen and the report was made after the incident?'\n\n'PC Tim Whitworth and his partner say there was no proof to detain. I think it's an odd one but the only thing that concerns me is that there was a screwdriver stuck in the ignition according to our lads at the scene and the owner of the vehicle turned up at the nick with the keys. Would they have had time or the nous to think about staging it do you think?' John said, lines furrowing his brow.\n\n'Let's just get all the information together before we make any assumptions. Never mind dangerous driving. Cars are weapons just like guns. They can and do kill. Make sure we get all the CCTV in the areas concerned \u2013 and that includes the information from the speed cameras if possible. See if we can nail 'em. Treat it as a murder. Oh, and if you...'\n\n'Need to speak to you you're on your mobile,' John said. Dylan smiled.\n\nLeaving John standing on the pavement by the scene, Dylan texted Jen.\n\nI think the world's gone mad x.\n\nAnd don't tell me. You're the only one who can put it right X, she texted back.\n\nLOL Don't wait up. Love you X\n\nLove you too X. Jen sighed. She had a sinking feeling that another meal for one beckoned her from the freezer.\n\nDylan felt bad as he drove back to the nick. He would never understand how Jen put up with him but he was grateful she did. She was his 'normal' and he loved her for it.\n\nDylan walked through the foyer of the police station eating a banana that Jen had packed in his briefcase earlier that morning. He wondered about the two lads he'd seen in there earlier. Was one of them the owner of the car that had been involved in the hit and run? Nah, if they were the owners of a stolen car, he pondered, they were far too calm. He tried desperately to put names to their faces but was distracted by the noise coming from the incident room as he walked along the corridor. He was late.\n\n'Boss, the team are all ready for you. Shall I sit up front?' asked the pouting Taylor Spiers.\n\n'Why not, I'll just pay a call and grab a coffee then I'll be with you.'\n\n'Your coffee has been ordered, sir,' Taylor said, fluttering her long eyelashes at him.\n\nDS Spiers sat facing the door when he walked in the briefing room, Dylan's coffee cup protectively held in her hands. She uncrossed her legs and stood up to greet him. The room fell silent at his entrance and he sat at her side, taking the cup from her.\n\n'Good afternoon ladies and gentlemen. For those of you who haven't worked with me before I'm Detective Inspector Jack Dylan and I will be in charge of this murder investigation. My deputy will be Detective Sergeant Taylor Spiers.' Dylan said indicating the woman who sat facing him.\n\nTaylor smiled and sat up straight with her head erect and looked straight at him. Her long black dangly earrings rested on shoulders tightly pressed against the back of the chair. Involuntarily her bust thrust forward and from where he was sat he could see straight down her cleavage.\n\nHer black shift dress with long flowing sleeves clung to her slender frame. The long black ridiculously high thigh length black boots she was so fond of wearing with black fishnet tights, were crossed at the ankle and stretched out in front of her, she reminded him of a spider.\n\nHe looked at the eyes of the young men in the audience who were openly admiring her and smiled to himself. God, he wished Dawn was with him on this one. Better the devil you knew.\n\n'Sir?'\n\n'Yes, Vicky,' said Dylan.\n\n'I've just heard Graham Tate has been collected and is en-route.'\n\n'Thank you.'\n\nDylan couldn't help notice Vicky smiling sweetly at Taylor.\n\n'Mildred Sykes,' he said with a cough. 'Excuse me, we now know was 78 years old and lived alone at number 11, Causeway Cottages. She hadn't been seen for some time and after neighbours raised concerns with the police, officers attended and decided to force entry. They found her fully clothed badly decomposed body in the front bedroom. From the post-mortem examination it looks like she has been dead for around six weeks.\n\n'It is quite clear that the cause of death was a massive blow to the rear of her skull \u2013 that has been confirmed and could not have been caused by a fall. She has bruises to her wrists where she may have been held or bound. Why was this elderly lady brutally murdered? What was the motive? Only time will tell.\n\n'At the moment we know very little about her and we will need to create a timeline to find out what she'd been up to in the last few days of her life. Who were her visitors? Who did she telephone? Who telephoned her? Is there anything missing from her home? So far we have failed to locate living relatives, so we're reliant on neighbours at the moment.\n\n'It's not an easy one and the murderer or murderers have had approximately six weeks start on us, but I'm confident we'll catch up. Let's not forget, ninety per cent of the time a victim will have had contact or known their killer or killers. So let's find who did it. Any questions?'\n\n'Do we know when she last cashed her pension boss? If we did, then it might give us some start on a timescale,' Vicky said.\n\n'I don't think we do know at the moment do we Taylor?' Dylan said turning to his right hand woman.\n\n'Er no, not yet,' Taylor answered as she glared at Vicky, Dylan noticed.\n\n'Good point Vicky,' Dylan said. 'And just on that Taylor, see what dates are on the unopened post will you? Okay everyone, you'll get to know who you're working with and the enquiries that I want you to make will be allocated by the HOLMES team to the individuals as soon as possible. Ten o'clock finish tonight then briefing back here at eight am tomorrow.\n\n'But before we close the briefing I just want to let you know about a hit and run today that because of the injuries sustained is likely to prove to be a double fatal. It maybe whilst you're out and about talking to people you hear something that's relevant. Bridey Tate and her baby son Toby were run over outside Mothercare. The car was a red Ford Fiesta and it has been found on the moors burnt out. The owner has reported it stolen.\n\n'Bridey and her son are on life support. The hospital, we are told, can do nothing for them due to the severity of the head injuries. Sadly, it looks like we will have a double fatal on our hands when the machines are turned off. It is believed there were two people in the offending car according to a witness. Feelings are understandingly running high and as you heard DC Hardacre say, Bridey's husband is on his way to the hospital,' he said morosely.\n\nHe left the room while Taylor briefed the team regarding the Grace Harvey fatal.\n\n## Chapter 15\n\nGraham Tate's heart pounded like a drum. He could feel the blood rushing through his veins and he felt sick to his stomach. In his heavy heart, he knew that after this his life would never be the same.\n\nHe tried to comprehend the sight before him. There wasn't a mark on his beautiful wife's pale grey, lifeless looking face as she lay upon the hospital bed. There were tubes everywhere and beeping monitors. A starched white sheet covered her. Graham tentatively stroked the soft, smooth fingers of her uncovered hand.\n\nHis eyes prickled and then tears sprung forth. His vision blurred and the floodgates opened letting them bubble over and flow silently down his cheeks. A river of his tears now dripped unashamedly upon the front of his coat. He tried to brush them away with the back of his hand. 'Why? Why? Why?' he whispered, looking heavenward as he caught his breath and sobbed.\n\nHearing someone enter the room, he let go of Bridey's hand, took a deep breath, put his chin to his chest and bit his lip to try control his display of emotion. Although he couldn't see who it was, he heard the distinct patter of footsteps on the hospital floor. He sat on the chair next to the trolley and gripped his head in his hands tightly, trying to make the pain go away.\n\nA hand was laid on his arm. 'Can I get you anything? A drink perhaps?' the nurse asked soothingly. He shook his head, he didn't look at her; he couldn't speak for the knot in his throat which felt like it was about to choke him. If he tried to utter a word, he knew it would release the beast within him, which he was afraid he would not be able to control. Instead, he concentrated on his rough, shovel-like hands and he gently picked up Bridey's long dainty fingers in his once more.\n\n'If you need anything, anything at all, I'm just outside at the desk,' the nurse said before she turned and walked quietly away. He wanted nothing, nothing but for this to be a bad dream.\n\n'Wait,' he said. She stopped. He didn't turn to face her. 'Where's Toby?' he said. Closing his eyes and holding his breath, he waited for an answer.\n\n'I'm sure the doctors will come and see you in a moment,' she said softly. 'Is there anyone else...?'\n\n'No, no thank you,' he said, quietly. Graham stood over his wife for a brief moment and held both her hands in his before putting his face to hers. 'Please don't leave me, I love you so much,' he whispered kissing her lips.\n\nDetective Sergeant John Benjamin was at the hospital with the Family Liaison Officer getting a brief resume from the paramedics and arranging with uniformed officers for statements to be taken. He was discreetly seizing Bridey's clothing and personal belongings from the hospital staff when his telephone rang. 'Excuse me,' he said to his companions as he stood aside to take Dylan's call.\n\n'John, I'm going to have Danny Denton and Billy Greenwood's flat turned over,' he said. 'I've been speaking to PC Whitworth and he has confirmed to me that he wasn't happy with Denton but he had no evidence to keep him in.'\n\n'Okay, boss,' John said.\n\n'Keep me updated from the hospital will you, I'll have my mobile on.'\n\n'Maybe sooner than you think boss, it looks like the doctor is heading towards the room where Graham Tate is.'\n\n'Poor bugger, I wouldn't want to be in his shoes,' said Dylan.\n\n'No, me neither,' said John.\n\n## Chapter 16\n\nWhile some of Dylan's team were making enquiries into Mildred Sykes's murder, he took a handful of officers to lock up Danny Denton and Billy Greenwood and search their flat. The two youths needed to be placed in or out of the investigation once and for all and at the moment they were his prime suspects in the Bridey Tate hit and run enquiry.\n\nDylan stood looking up at the grey, sullen concrete monolithic block of council owned residences. What had once been deemed as ideal living for the masses was now nothing more than an urban eyesore of suffocating maisonettes piled on top of each other.\n\nA man about Dylan's age came up behind him without him noticing, so deep was his concentration.\n\n'I've been mugged twice,' said the man to Dylan as he looked down at his walking stick. 'Had my pelvis broken two years ago and it gets worse. I pay \u00a353 a week for the privilege of having a flat with a two foot by four foot patch of soil outside my front door with a garden gnome and asthmatic rose bush,' he said sullenly. Dylan didn't know what to say so nodded instead.\n\n'I see the comings and goings of all the shit round here you know, but I also look at the boarded up windows of the flat across the street that was petrol-bombed last week. You're not going to get anything out of folks round here mate, if that's what you're here for,' he said before shuffling on his way.\n\nA call from Dylan's radio brought officers to his side from the nearby police cars. The assembled group climbed the stairs to the targeted flat. To be fair the flats were not the worst Dylan had seen. Some he had raided sported the metal grilles of a prison cell at the windows and doors. However, the stairs and landing leading to Flat seven were dark, smelly and vermin infested. On seeing the half glass entrance door to the flat Dylan was tempted to instruct his officers to take it off its hinges, which he knew would bring about an element of surprise \u2013 but on reflection he decided he might get more co-operation from the inhabitants if he adopted the softly, softly approach; to start with anyway. He needed solid evidence to enhance what the investigation team knew already. He knocked at the door and got an instant response.\n\n'What the fuck do you lot want?' said Danny with a swagger. 'You found out who nicked my car?' he said, putting his nose to Dylan's.\n\n'You sure your car was stolen?' Dylan spat in reply. 'You're under arrest on suspicion of attempted murder,' Dylan said pushing him back against the wall with a hand that gripped his shoulder.\n\n'What?' Danny screeched. Officers pushed past Dylan and Danny in a military fashion to seek out Billy. One stopped alongside Dylan to handcuff Danny and escort him out to the waiting marked police car. Dylan then walked through to the lounge and watched Billy Greenwood's jaw drop open as he was read his rights by a detective.\n\n'Check their pockets for keys then take them away,' said Dylan to the officer as he walked Billy past him, leading the way with the cuffs. 'Let's search this shit hole.'\n\nThe flat screen TV in the corner of the room stood out to Dylan like a sore thumb and he ordered it to be seized immediately, along with anything else that looked out of place in the flat that resembled a doss house rather than a home. A scan with the ultraviolet light across the TV revealed a house number and a postcode.\n\n'You see,' he said, smiling. 'It may not work very often but when it does it gives you a bloody good feeling, doesn't it?' he laughed. He knew further checks would tell them just who it belonged to.\n\nThe search team was thorough. They recovered an unexpectedly large amount of cash, tools and a key for a garage with a tag attached that read, No. 7, which would be their next point of call. Dylan held it smugly in his clenched fist. They also found a set of car keys, but for what car? Dylan pondered. They were on a new Subaru key fob. The car surely wouldn't be far away. The search of the garage didn't reveal much other than a few car parts, which were seized, bagged and tagged.\n\nNow it was time to return to the nick and rattle the cages of Denton and Greenwood and see what dropped out of their interviews. Charging a person was complex. Although they had been arrested on suspicion of attempted murder, Dylan knew from experience that the charge was likely to be reduced to death by dangerous driving, even if it was proved they were in the car at the time of the hit and run accident. However before that the charge would be escalated to Murder if the accident proved fatal.\n\nNext hurdle for them would be to prove which one of them was driving the car. Then, they had to show the passenger's involvement. Hopefully they would get the passenger charged for encouraging the driver to commit the crime. The team now had twenty four hours' detention of the men which wasn't a great deal of time to complete the necessary investigation, but Dylan would be moving the investigation forward all the time, and that was all he could hope for at this stage.\n\n## Chapter 17\n\nThrough his tears, Grahan saw the figures of two people in white coats walking down the corridor towards him, as if in slow motion. A nurse stood beside him and laid a hand on his shoulder as she settled him on a chair by the side of his wife. The surgeon bent down on his haunches in front of him. Graham held his wife's hand in his tightly and screwed up his eyes. 'Our son,' he said quietly.\n\n'Mr Tate, I'm truly sor...' he said. Graham heard himself shriek like an animal in pain. The doctor reached out to him and, staring at Graham now wide-eyed, he gulped before he continued. 'Toby is being brought to you as we speak. I'm a procurement specialist; there is no easy way of saying this,' he inhaled. 'Your wife and child are clinically dead. They didn't suffer. Neither regained consciousness.'\n\nThe nurse bent down and put her arms around Graham's trembling body.\n\n'No,' he wailed, flinging her to one side. 'I need to see him,' he begged. 'I want him here with us,' he sobbed, his hands shaking uncontrollably as he reached out into thin air.\n\n'Of course, Mr Tate, he's on his way...' the doctor said. 'This seems so inadequate but I really am truly sorry for your loss.'\n\nWhat seemed like seconds later, Graham saw Toby's little lifeless body. He was swaddled in a white sheet. Graham's tears had stopped. He felt numb. There was nothing outside the tiny, quiet, dimly lit hospital room that mattered to him. He looked into Toby's face and gently kissed his tiny bow shaped pale lips that held a bluish tinge. He looked so peaceful, even though tubes and wires were attached to his little body.\n\n'Somebody will pay for this if it's the last thing I do, I swear to you,' he said through gritted teeth. 'Don't worry, my precious.' Graham stroked his wife's cold cheek. 'I'll find you both again. We've so much yet to do together,' he sobbed. 'You know; like we'd planned,' he smiled. A sob caught in his throat. He inhaled deeply and brushed away his tears. The nurse knocked at the open door.\n\n'A cup of strong tea,' she said, putting it down on the table. His wife and son were now side by side.\n\nDS John Benjamin watched him from the corridor with tears in his own eyes. He couldn't help but think, what would he do if that had just happened to him? He shuddered at the thought and looking up to the ceiling he prayed silently that he would never know.\n\nFixing his mind to the job in hand he noted that Graham Tate was built like anyone would imagine a bricklayer to be; stocky, thick necked, rugged and muscular, but his deflated form portrayed a crumbled man with his strength sapped and his spirit gone.\n\nA phone ringing at the nurse's station broke John's train of thought. 'Mr Tate, it's for you. I believe it's your wife's father. Do you want to take it? Graham stood robot like. Reluctantly he moved from Bridey's side to answer the call.\n\n'Hello, is that you lad?' said the panic-stricken older male's voice at the other end of the phone.\n\n'They're dead you know,' Graham managed to gasp.\n\n'I know son they've told us. We'll get to you as soon as we can,' Ronnie said with a trembling voice.\n\nGraham handed the phone back to the nurse, his face expressionless. There was nothing else to say. As if in a trance he walked past John and back into the room where his wife and child lay.\n\nJohn saw Graham jump when the doctor pulled a chair up beside him. The man coughed before speaking.\n\n'There is no easy way of asking but we've found a donor card in your wife's purse which signifies to us that it was her wish for her organs to be used in the event of her death. This is reinforced on her driving licence. I don't know how you feel about your son being a donor too.\n\n'Time is a crucial factor in respect of some of the organs. They can save lives one person's death can help up to eight others. Let me assure you your wife and son are dead, the machines only keeping the blood circulating, preserving their organs but that's it.'\n\nGraham stood; his face red and contorted as though he was about to burst. His fists clenched. 'Don't you dare. Do you hear me? Nobody touches them,' he shouted. John readied himself to go into the room.\n\n'Mr Tate, please calm down,' John heard the doctor say in a gentle, soothing voice. It was obvious he had seen this reaction many times before. 'Let me assure you it was your wife's wishes, should she die, that her organs be used. Think about it, please.'\n\n'Get out.' shouted Graham. 'Just leave us alone.'\n\n'That I can't do Mr Tate. If we are to make use of your family's organs we need to act quickly to adhere to her wishes. I need an answer.'\n\n## Chapter 18\n\nGraham knelt down at the side of Bridey; turned her hand over and kissed her palm, 'I don't know if I can do it,' he sobbed. 'The thought of someone taking away part of you and Toby,' he whispered. 'Please tell me what to do,' he begged.\n\nLooking at her beautiful, tranquil expression, he sensed her answer. Suddenly, the image of the day she'd sat at the dining room table and filled in the donor card sprung to his mind. They'd been talking to a lady who had been running a stall for the Heart Foundation at a garden fete. Her name was Rita and she'd had a heart transplant six months before.\n\n'I couldn't walk twenty yards without stopping for breath before, my love,' she had said. 'Couldn't play with my grandkids, or go shopping with my hubby, never mind go on holiday,' she said. 'And now look at me,' she'd giggled. 'We're off on a cruise in February,' she'd said as she hugged her husband tight.\n\nBridey had made her decision there and then. She had always said people were brave who donated their organs, but after meeting Rita she didn't have the slightest doubt that it was a wonderful gift to give to a fellow human being, the gift of another lifetime, to someone who deserved it like Rita had. He knew he would give his consent because she always knew the best thing to do.\n\nHe kissed Bridey's forehead, then Toby's chubby little cheek before he whispered. 'Remember I'll find you both again one day wherever you are. I love you.'\n\n'I love you more coz I'm older,' she used to say back to him. Slowly, but without hesitation, he looked up at the doctor. 'Take them, but do it quickly before I change my mind,' he said as he sank into a nearby chair and put his head in his hands, weeping steadily.\n\n'She would be very proud of you,' said the doctor.\n\nGraham Tate's large hands easily cupped the mug of tea the nurse gave him and he squeezed the ceramic vessel tight as he stared into space.\n\n'I'll go open the windows,' the nurse said putting her hand on Graham's shoulder.\n\n'Why?' he asked.\n\n'To let their spirits go free, together,' she said, simply.\n\nGraham nodded. 'Thank you,' he whispered.\n\n'Boss,' John said quietly into his mobile phone. 'Both mum and baby have been pronounced dead.'\n\nDylan couldn't find the words. He sighed deeply, instead. 'We've pulled Denton and Greenwood in, and their flat's being searched. Give me a call when you're leaving the hospital will you. I'd like you to be involved with the interviews.'\n\n'It might be a while, I'm just going to try to speak to Mr Tate, but as you can imagine...'\n\n'I know John. Just speak to me as and when you can mate.'\n\n'Will do,' said John as he rang off.\n\nDS Benjamin found himself in the room where Mr Tate sat, grasping the untouched mug of tea. 'Can I take that from you Graham and get you a fresh cup?' the nurse asked as she introduced John. 'This is Detective Sergeant Benjamin, who would like to talk to you.'\n\nWithout fuss or question Graham Tate handed the nurse the cup.\n\n'Milk and sugar?' the nurse asked John who nodded.\n\nGraham Tate's expression was blank.\n\n'I'm really sorry about your wife and son,' John said. 'I thought you might like me to tell you what we know about the accident, unless it's too soon?'\n\nGraham Tate shook his head. 'No, please. Are you married?' he asked, watching John who took a seat.\n\n'Yeah.'\n\n'Kids?'\n\n'Two \u2013 and no, I can't begin to understand how you're feeling right now.'\n\nGraham Tate closed his eyes and shook his head. 'They'd gone shopping you know, to Mothercare. Not a nightclub, nor a football match.' He sighed. 'A place you'd think they'd be safe. It's the first time she'd been out on her own since she'd given birth to Toby. Just a short walk round the block, she'd said; just a chance to try out the new pushchair, you know.\n\n'I would have been with them if we'd not been behind on the house build. She'd rung me and left a message to say they were okay and they both loved me, listen' he said, holding his mobile phone tightly to John's ear. He pressed a button and played the message.\n\n'Hi gorgeous daddy,' said a happy smiling girly voice. 'Toby wanted to let you know he's got lots of nice things,' she giggled. 'I know you'd be worried so I thought I'd ring you to let you know we're all safe and sound without you fussing over us. Just going back home now for a feed, aren't we son?' she said. 'We love you lots and see you soon.' The phone went dead.\n\nGraham put the phone to his ear and played the message again. Tears ran down his face, his mouth wide with grief.\n\nJohn's heart sank. The nurse carried in two mugs of tea and handed them to the men.\n\n'Mr Tate, Graham, try drinking some, please? And let me tell you what we know.'\n\n'Wait, let me show you their picture,' he said, taking photographs out of his wallet with trembling hands then touching the images fondly. He mopped his tears with a handkerchief.\n\n'They're beautiful, Graham,' John said, looking closely at the young faces \u2013 so alive, so happy.\n\n'I've just agreed to donate their organs you know,' Graham said. 'She'd signed up you see.' He looked to John for approval and John nodded. 'But it was the hardest thing...' he said, gulping. 'And now I've got to live with it.' He looked up at John and he saw the panic rise in his eyes.\n\n'How could I have agreed for my wife and son's body to be mutilated? How could I?' he said sobbing.\n\n'Your wife and son will probably save more than one life, maybe even another mother and child who would have died without your bravery. Bridey was obviously a very sensitive and caring person. If she signed that donor card, she has trusted you to make sure those wishes are carried out,' John said.\n\nGraham, deep in thought, took a sip of tea from his cup but didn't speak. However, obviously mulling John's words over, he looked calmer.\n\n'The car involved in the accident was a Ford Fiesta. That car was found burnt out shortly after the accident but it was reported stolen,' John said. Graham turned his head to look at John with red, expectant eyes. 'Stolen?' he asked.\n\n'Well, we're not certain it was actually stolen, although we did find a screwdriver jammed in the ignition. A police officer spoke to the registered owner of the vehicle and his friend when they reported the car missing. We're turning their house over at the moment and then we'll interview them.'\n\n'Who are they?' Graham whispered. 'Tell me who they are?' he said his voice rising. 'I'll get the truth out of the bastards for you,' he said through clenched teeth.\n\n'Listen Graham, earlier in the day we believe the pair failed to stop for a police car that was in pursuit of their car. They jumped a red light at the railway barrier, narrowly missing being wiped out by the Leeds train. At that point the police lost them. A few hours later, the car was seen again by a police patrol in the town centre as it was approaching traffic lights. The lights turned to red and the police driver pulled in behind them. The officers got out and as they went towards the car to speak to the two occupants, the driver set off at speed and went up onto the pavement, which is when they hit Bridey and Toby's pram. The officers cannot be sure who was driving the vehicle at the time though.'\n\n'Who are they? Tell me?' Graham asked again.\n\nJohn shook his head. 'I'm sorry, I can't give you the names. We've got to ascertain whether they were driving the car first.'\n\nGraham Tate stared at the floor. 'And if it is them?'\n\n'Then you'll be told.' John said, laying a hand on Graham's shoulder. Graham sat up straight and stared him in the eyes.\n\n'Good, because once I know who did it they won't be safe even locked up.' he said, vehemently.\n\n'Look, I'll arrange to speak to you and Mrs Tate's parents tomorrow with my boss, Detective Inspector Jack Dylan,' John said, standing up to leave.\n\n'Come on mate give me their names. You can't tell me you wouldn't want to get hold of them if you were in my position,' Graham said, staring straight into John's eyes.\n\n'You're understandably very angry at the moment, but I'm sure Bridey wouldn't want you to do anything stupid.'\n\n'She won't know will she? She's not here to see.' he replied, shrugging his shoulders. 'So what does it matter?'\n\n'If you need anything, here's my number.' John said, handing Graham Tate his card. 'The Coroner's Officer will be along to see you shortly and I'll see you tomorrow.'\n\n'Come on, name them,' Graham shouted after him as he walked out of the room. John didn't look back. The door slowly began to close 'One father to another, I won't stop till l find them and then you'll have two more bodies,' he shouted. John heard a loud cry. The door banged shut.\n\nJohn walked on not allowing the straight-faced mask of the detective to slip once, while inside, his heart ached for the young man who had lost everything. \n\n## Chapter 19\n\nDanny Denton and Billy Greenwood signed their release from custody forms, agreeing to be bailed. Their black Subaru stood proudly in the back yard of the police station awaiting them. The officer dropped the key fob in Danny's outstretched hand. Danny examined the exterior carefully. The officer breathed deeply through his flared nostrils, turned and marched briskly across the parade square without a word passing his pursed lips.\n\n'Best get ourselves a new phone Billy, it'll be ages before they give us ours back,' Danny said.\n\n'And two more stripes for the wing.' Billy shouted, a cheeky grin crossing his face.\n\nThe officer stopped momentarily in his tracks, but thought better of retracing his steps and walked on into the police station.\n\nThe boys grinned. 'It's time we gave Pam a call to tell her we've been locked up and wrongly accused of sommat,' Danny said, sighing dramatically as he slid into the driver's seat. 'I wonder if that copper's kid Sara goes to her school? We should ask her.' Danny said with his eyebrow raised.\n\nIt was late. Pam's mobile phone vibrated.\n\n'Hello' she said in a whisper as she answered the unknown number flashing on her phone, from under her duvet.\n\n'Pam, Danny. We got pulled by the cops.'\n\n'Oh my God,' Pam said.\n\n'Don't panic, we've done nothing wrong. But they've took our mobiles off of us, so we've had to get a new one.'\n\n'Are you alright?' she said.\n\n'Yeah, course. Tell you all about it tomorrow,' he said, grinning over at Billy as he turned the wheel and revved the engine to take the next corner at top speed.\n\nPam sighed with contentment and plumped up her pillow. How awful she thought, snuggling down under her duvet, to be locked up for something you hadn't done. Why didn't the police leave Danny alone? She couldn't wait for tomorrow. She closed her eyes, turned over and willed herself to go to sleep, for the sooner that happened, the sooner it would be morning.\n\nBefore she knew it Pam heard the distant cries of her mum and dad calling her. In the transitional state between wakefulness and sleep she heard the front door slam and the house shake.\n\nPam yawned and stretched. Her eyelids shot open. She jumped out of bed and raced to the window to watch her parents drive away.\n\nOutside, leaning against a black shiny new car, was Danny. She stood statue-like as she watched him look both ways up and down the road and then walk up the driveway, Billy in his wake. She heard Danny's knock at the front door. Flinching, she hid behind the bedroom curtain not sure what she should do. Her heart hammered in her chest. How long had he been there? The knocks got louder and followed by shouts of her name. She ran down the stairs, pulling her dressing gown over her shoulders. She'd have to answer the door before the pair drew attention to themselves.\n\n'What're you doing here?' she said with a grin that spanned her flushed face. Danny stood leaning against the doorjamb, a cigarette hanging from his mouth.\n\n'Thought you might want a lift to school in our new wheels.'\n\n'That'd be great but I'm not dressed. Look, I won't be a minute. Come in before someone sees you,' she said pulling Danny in by his hoodie. She waved Billy in behind him and then popped her head around the door and glanced around to see if anyone was watching.\n\n'Can I use your karsi?' asked Billy, as she shut the door.\n\nPam frowned.\n\n'Your bog.' Danny said.\n\n'Top of the stairs,' she said. Distractedly, she pulled her dressing gown tightly round her.\n\nDanny and Pam watched him run up the stairs, two at a time.\n\n'He's not the only one who's desperate,' Danny said with a grin as he reached out for her. He pulled her towards him. With two arms he held her tightly around the waist. 'But not for the...' Danny pulled her to him and kissed her roughly on the lips.\n\nPam's heart pounded. She could hardly breathe. This is how she had dreamt it would be to be loved by Danny Denton. He expertly untied the knot in the belt of her dressing gown and it fell open to reveal her pyjamas. He leaned forward and she dropped her head as he pulled the straps to one side and rained kisses on her neck. She closed her eyes. Her legs felt like jelly.\n\nBilly searched quickly and quietly through the bedrooms, he pocketed the small amount of cash and jewellery that he came across. Inside the small drawer of the dressing table he could hardly believe his eyes, when staring up at him were keys tagged and labelled with the shop, surgery and house details. He put them in the breast pocket of his jacket and zipped it up, patting it gently. Grinning at his reflection in the mirror, he turned and headed for the door to the landing and shut it behind him with a bang.\n\nPam pushed Danny away. He moaned and tried to hold onto her by sucking hard on her neck. She heard the toilet flush, Billy's footsteps on the landing and then him running down the stairs.\n\n'I'm gonna be late for school if I'm not careful,' she said, with a grimace as she released herself from Danny's hold and ran past Billy on the stairs. Billy winked at Danny.\n\n'Pam stood before her dressing table mirror and inspected her blotchy neck. Damn it, she thought that always happened when she got excited. Then she saw the love bite. How on earth was she going to explain that to her mum and dad. 'Grrr...' she cried, grabbing a scarf from the door handle as she hurried out. Good job these things were in fashion, she thought. She was pleased with how organised she had been under the circumstances; that was what being grown up was all about, wasn't it?\n\nWithin minutes, they were in the car and on the way to school.\n\n'The car is amazing Danny,' Pam said, admiringly stroking the leather seat.\n\n'Special, int' it? Cost us a pretty penny didn't it Billy?'\n\n'Sure did,' Billy said, turning around to wink at her.\n\n'Ever thought of skiving off one day?' Danny asked as he made contact with her pale blue eyes in the rear view mirror.\n\n'I've never had reason to,' she said shyly.\n\n'Well, what if I asked you to? Good enough reason?'\n\n'Yeah it is,' she grinned, shyly.\n\nThey were at the school gates and as she leaned forward to get out of the passenger side door Danny leaned over. 'I'll text you later, but think about what I said.'\n\nWow, she thought staggering up the school's driveway in a dreamlike state. 'What a morning.' The smile on her face reached from ear to ear. Now she sighed, the sigh of pure contentment.\n\nIn the classroom it mattered not what the lessons were, all she could think about was the impending day out and where they might take her. Dreams really did come true if you wanted them to, she sang in her head.\n\n'Pamela, Pamela. Are you paying attention?' The teacher's voice broke her thoughts but only for a moment. 'You'll wish you'd listened to me one day, girl,' said her headmistress.\n\n'Yep,' she replied, scrawling Pam Loves Danny on her notebook.\n\n'Well, sit up and try to look as if you're listening. Sex education is important. even if you think you know it all at your age,' the angry teacher stressed.\n\n## Chapter 20\n\nDanny stopped the car in the car park of the dam. Billy tore a can of lager from the four pack and handed it to Danny.\n\n'So what did you get Billy?'\n\n'A ring, a couple of watches and fifty quid,' he said, emptying his coat pockets onto his lap.\n\n'That all?' exclaimed Danny, holding his hand out, palm up. Billy hit it with his before reaching into his breast pocket. Danny frowned.\n\n'Ah, but there's more,' Billy said, as he pulled out a bunch of keys. To his friend's delight he read the tags. 'House, Shop and Surgery,' he read, beaming.\n\n'You're a fucking star, you are,' Danny whooped with delight. 'Times are good.'\n\n'How did you get on with her, get a feel did ya?' Billy asked with a sullen face as he pulled the ring-pull on his can. 'I would rather have been snogging her than thieving.' He took a long swig.\n\n'Woh, she's really up for it. No doubt about that. She's hot.' Danny said, laughing. 'You'll get a go,' he said. 'Don't fret. Let's go for a drive, eh? Give the car a spin and see if we can sell that jewellery on over in Lancashire,' Danny said, pointing to the ring Billy had placed on his finger. Danny turned the key in the ignition and revved the engine. Music blared out, disrupting the quiet tranquillity of Dean Reservoir as he reversed back at speed, skidded and pulled the steering wheel to do a ninety-degree spin.\n\nIt was the morning that Dylan was due to meet with Graham Tate and Bridey's parents Ronnie and Rose Carter. He sat at his desk and tapped his teeth with his pen as he pondered over the meeting. He wished he had something positive to tell them, but all he could do was enlighten them as to what the investigation team knew so far, and assure them of their commitment to finding those responsible for the deaths of their daughter and grandson. He scratched his head and rubbed his eyes. A knock came at his office door and without preamble, in walked John Benjamin. 'I've offered to collect the Carters but they're gonna make their own way here. 'They should be with us in about ten minutes boss, you still okay?'\n\n'Yeah, arrange some coffee will you and put the Do Not Disturb sign on the door. I was just sat here thinking about them.'\n\n'It's difficult knowing what to say isn't it? Apart from the shock of the two deaths they've had to deal with their son-in-law agreeing to the organ donation.'\n\n'Mm,' Dylan said, nodding his head.\n\nThe first to arrive was Graham Tate and John introduced him to Dylan. They shook hands. Graham had a fierce grip. His face was blotchy, his eyes puffy and he looked fatigued which was understandable under the circumstances, but he definitely hadn't lost his strength, Dylan noticed.\n\n'Please take a seat,' Dylan said. 'We'll just wait for Bridey's parents to arrive before we begin. How did they take the news about the organ-donations?'\n\nGraham put his hand to his brow before running his fingers through his hair. 'Not good,' he said taking a deep diaphragmatic breath. 'But it was Bridey's wish, not mine. What was I supposed to do?'\n\n'I've got to tell you I've nothing but admiration for you,' said Dylan with feeling. 'It was not only a courageous decision but an unselfish one too, that'll no doubt save, or definitely dramatically improve the quality of a number of lives. Bridey would be very proud of you, I'm sure,' he smiled, reassuringly.\n\n'So people keep saying,' Graham said with a wan smile back at him.\n\nThe sight of Ronnie and Rose Carter at his door stopped Dylan from saying more. John escorted them in. Graham and Dylan stood and John introduced Bridey's parents to Dylan.'\n\nIt was apparent the atmosphere between the relatives was cool as they nodded briefly in acknowledgment of each other's presence, but sat avoiding eye contact. Vicky brought in warm drinks on a tray and they sat with the mugs cupped tightly in their hands. Dylan started by telling them how sorry he was for their loss in such horrific and tragic circumstances. He outlined slowly and gently to them what had happened according to what the investigation had uncovered and what witnesses had told them.\n\n'I want to reassure you that the paramedics did all they could at the scene but unfortunately they couldn't save Bridey, or Toby,' Dylan said, watching the numbed expression on their faces. 'I don't know if you were aware but your daughter carried an organ donor card and authority was given for her wishes to be carried very bravely by Graham at the hospital which must have caused him the most unimaginable grief,' he said with a sigh.\n\nDylan saw the tears well up in Rose's eyes and she turned to Graham, took his hand in hers, and smiled weakly at him. Dylan noted the gesture and decided to go on. 'That unselfish act in these terrible circumstances needs to be made instantly. The poor lad was put into a situation that, let's face it, no one would ever want to be in. Like I said to you earlier Graham, your courage at that time will no doubt have saved lives. And, you not only had to make that decision once, but twice.' I'm sure Mr and Mrs Carter you understand what a terrible predicament he was put in.'\n\nRose Carter sobbed into her handkerchief and looked across at her husband for support.\n\n'We can't bear to think about it,' he said downhearted.\n\n'That's understandable. And, I'm sure it was just the same for Graham when he had to make the decision to respect Bridey's wishes,' Dylan said.\n\nDetective Sergeant John Benjamin watched and listened in silence with great admiration for Dylan as he carefully created the opportunity for them to discuss the situation with each other.\n\n'It was Bridey's wish, not mine; I could never have...' Graham managed to blurt out as he struggled with the lump rising in his throat. 'It's what she... she said she wanted me to do if anything... I agreed at the time. I never thought anything would, and at first I said no to the doctor, quite categorically, no. I couldn't bear to think... But then I remembered why she had signed that donor card and I had to allow it to happen, for Bridey.'\n\n'I'm sure she'd want you all to be together on this. It was her wish, like Graham said, no one else's,' Dylan added, gently. 'And I don't know if you're aware but no one has a legal right to veto Bridey's wish.'\n\n'Thank you Inspector, we agree with Graham,' Rose Carter said with a stronger voice. 'Aren't we Ronnie? We're just in shock,' she sighed, looking at Graham who sat with disbelief written all over his face. 'Graham's like our own,' she said, turning back to Dylan as she reached out and squeezed Graham's hand.\n\n'You did what you have to do lad. I can see that now. Let's concentrate on finding out who did this to her and Toby,' said Ronnie, nodding at Graham.\n\n'I think you need to leave that to us, Mr Carter. When we know who did it we'll let you know,' said Dylan.\n\n'Oh, don't you fret Ron. I'll find out who did it,' Graham said through gritted teeth, 'and when I do...' his face screwed up and he gulped back the tears.\n\n'Look, at this moment in time you can't put the blame on the lad who owned the car because he had reported it stolen. I've explained that to you. Him and his friend are telling us the same story. We did find the car ablaze on the moors with a screwdriver stuck in the ignition and they still had the car keys in their possession, which at this moment in time convinced our officer of their innocence and he had to bail them. There may be some truth in their story,' said John. 'And until we can prove otherwise...'\n\n'Never assume Mr Tate. That's one of the first rules of investigation,' Dylan said.\n\n'Can you tell us who the owners of the car are then?' asked Ronnie.\n\nJohn looked at Dylan.\n\n'I don't think that would help, do you?'\n\n'Come on, Inspector. We're upset and it'd be a comfort to us to know something, anything.'\n\n'Okay,' Dylan said. 'It's a couple of lads from the Greenaway Estate called Danny Denton and Billy Greenwood. But let me warn you we'll know if you go anywhere near them. Look, let us do our job. If it was one of them driving the car we'll find out, I promise you,' said Dylan.\n\n'The Inspector's right, Graham our Bridey would have been the first to tell you to let the police sort it out \u2013 you know, she would. Don't you go doing anything stupid now,' said Rose.\n\n'I just feel so bloody helpless.' Graham said, flaying his arms. 'I've let them both down so badly,' he said breaking down once more.\n\nRose reached out to comfort him. She laid an arm protectively around his shoulders. 'Why, our Bridey and Toby? Why?' she said, shaking her head.\n\n'I didn't think you'd name them boss,' John said, walking back into Dylan's office when he'd shown the visitors out of the building.\n\n'I wasn't going to. Then I decided that some information, however small, would be a lifeline for them to clutch to, like Ronnie said.'\n\n'You wouldn't want Graham as an enemy would you, boss?' John said, grimacing. 'I'm glad the doc didn't tell him he couldn't stop him taking their organs before Graham had come to his decision that would have been horrendous.'\n\n'No,' Dylan smiled as he shook his head. 'I wouldn't like to think he had a grudge against me.'\n\n## Chapter 21\n\nOutside school gates at 3? Danny texted.\n\nPam's phone beeped. 'Mum?' she mouthed, with a turn up of her nose and a frown.\n\nAunt Mona's ill. Off to France. Pick you up straight from school. Tell your teacher you'll be away till next Tuesday. 'Bummer.' she cried, stamping her foot.\n\nAs planned, Danny pulled up outside the school at three o'clock. Pam looked around cautiously for her dad's vehicle before she ran over to his car. She leaned in. 'What's up?' he said.\n\n'Aunt bloody drama queen Mona is ill,' she said, kicking the toe of her shoe on the tarmac. 'We're off to France till Tuesday.\n\n'Ah, never mind kid. Nought's spoiling, we'll arrange another time when you get back,' Danny said patting her hand. She took another look up and down the road.\n\n'Dad'll be here any minute and if he sees me talking to you I'm dead meat,' she said with a grimace. 'I'd better go,' she said with a tut and a raise of her eyebrows.\n\n'Hey, before you do, tell us, do you know a Sara Whitworth?' Danny said.\n\n'Yeah. Why?' she asked with more than a hint of sulking in her protruding bottom lip.\n\n'Is her dad a copper?' Danny went on.\n\n'Yeah, I used to go round with her when I was a kid but she's a bit of a geek now to be honest,' she said pulling a face. Pam saw her dad's Audi creeping slowly past the stationary cars not fifty yards away.\n\n'Text me, won't you,' she called as she ran holding her hand high in the air to catch her dad's attention.\n\nDanny watched her go. 'I think we might need to visit the dentist this weekend Billy,' he said out of the corner of his mouth.\n\n'And the flower shop,' Billy mumbled. Danny turned and sniggered at his friend.\n\nMiss you already, hun. Danny texted Pam.\n\nPam snuggled down into the luxurious seats of her dad's car. As they cruised past Danny and Billy, Pam blew Danny a kiss and smiled to herself as she sighed with contentment, like the cat that had got the cream, as Aunt Mona would have said.\n\nThere was no sign of an alarm on the wall of the dentist surgery. Danny turned the key and pushed the door open with trepidation. It opened easily enough. He stood still, silencing his friend with a finger to his lips and listened. No bells, nothing. Billy followed Danny silently into a small, neat kitchenette.\n\nWalking around the building, it became apparent that the pickings weren't that great from a dentist apart from a small amount of petty cash left in the open till.\n\n'Danny, sit in the chair and let me look in y'gob,' Billy said, putting his arms into a white gown from an old coat stand in the corner of the surgery and picking up a face mask from the work units.\n\n'Piss off. Grab the computers and stop arsing around.'\n\n'We off to the flower shop next?' Billy said, grumpily.\n\n'We'll go to the house first and see what they've got in the fridge, then I'll think about it if I can be bothered.'\n\n## Chapter 22\n\n'Boss, Grace Harvey's fatal. Forensics just rang. The scientist, off the record, is certain some plastic from a light casing found at the scene of the accident is a match to an item taken from Denton and Greenwood's garage. She wants to do a further test before committing herself to paper but wanted us to know ASAP in case it fitted in with any ongoing enquiries,' Dennis said, with a glint in his eye.\n\n'Wouldn't that be a great result? If it comes back a hundred per cent we'll have Denton and his mate in for one death by dangerous and they'd be on site to charge if we get the evidence for Bridey and Toby's murder. Do we know if Grace knew either scrote, or have we any intelligence as to why they might be in Merton on the day Grace died?'\n\n'No, unfortunately we've no links between them and Mrs Harvey. They were probably just bombing through the village like bloody idiots.'\n\n'If it turns out that the glass from the headlight that was seized with the car parts from their garage is a positive match, then we'll be able to drop it on Denton and Greenwood's toes in an interview and hopefully nail the little bastards there and then.'\n\n'And on the Mildred Sykes murder boss, the only visitor seen going to the house recently is a man that matches the description of our Mr Stevenson. However, he doesn't deny going there and he's connected to her and Grace Harvey because of their financial affairs so that doesn't help us much, does it?' said Taylor.\n\n'Are you happy with him? Have you got anything back from the financial investigation side?'\n\n'No, is the answer to both your questions. It feels like there's a rabbit off there somewhere, but I just can't put my finger on it at the moment. Anyway, once I hear back from the Forensic Intelligence Unit I'll be having further words with him.'\n\n'I'll come with you when you go and see him. So far he's the only person we've got with a connection to Ms Sykes, so we need to get his fingerprints and DNA to connect or eliminate him from the enquiry.\n\n'Keep me posted Taylor, I'm going to call a meeting for everyone involved with Grace Harvey's death, Mildred Sykes's murder and Bridey and Toby Tate's murder to see if there's anything drops out by having all the teams together and also, to bring everyone up to speed. Let everyone have the chance to share their thoughts and information. Can you arrange, Dennis?'\n\nDennis nodded.\n\nTaylor left the office and Dylan picked up the ringing phone. 'What are you eating?' he asked, with a smile.\n\n'A strawberry cream tart,' Jen replied, giggling.' PC Whitworth just brought them in.'\n\n'Very nice... What's he after?'\n\n'Why do you always think people have an ulterior motive?' she said, laughing.\n\n'I'm a suspicious kinda guy.'\n\n'What's new at your end?'\n\n'Not a lot, I'm waiting for forensics to come back to us and keeping my fingers crossed for their findings. Tell Brenda in your office she needs to reach for her prayer mat, again.'\n\n'As bad as that is it?' Jen said.\n\n'Yep, I'm afraid it is. It's good to hear your voice. I seem to have got myself so immersed in work again lately that I don't feel as if I've seen you much.'\n\n'It won't be forever, will it? But, if you get your finger out in the meantime and solve a few crimes you can spend more time with me and other people won't have to keep treating me to cream cakes,' she said.\n\n'You might well laugh. How does he know strawberries are your weakness anyway?'\n\n'He doesn't. Now go solve some crimes and who knows, the next strawberries I have might even be with my fella.'\n\n'Love you lots,' he sighed. 'I've had my fix now so I'd better get on with some work.'\n\n'Let me know what time you're gonna be home and I'll have tea ready.'\n\n'Okay love, bye for now,' Dylan said with a smile in his voice as he put the phone down. DS John Benjamin knocked at his office door and walked in carrying his coat.\n\n'Boss, just to let you know I'm off to see a snout who's telling me someone is asking a lot of questions on the estate about Denton and Greenwood. '\n\n'Graham Tate?'\n\n'Don't know. I haven't used this snout before so I don't know how good he is. Do you need me to sign the forms for his money?'\n\n'Yes, please and then I'll go up to admin. Looks like we might have to go and have a word with Mr Tate,' Dylan said, frowning as he scribed his name on the given supervisors place on the form.\n\n'Get back to you as soon as,' John said, strutting out of Dylan's office with a purpose in his steps.\n\nLisa brought in a fax for Dylan's attention. The scenes of crime officers had lifted a number of fingerprints from Mildred Sykes' house. Of these; a duplicate was causing some interest as it appeared on her bedside cabinet and other drawers in her home.\n\nThey were satisfied that they were not Mildred's because they had checked them against the limited fingerprint impressions, that they had taken from the body at the mortuary. They were checking the marks found through the automated fingerprint identification system but they hadn't had any hits so far, meaning that the person who the fingerprints belonged to didn't have a criminal record. However, the information confirmed that someone had been searching the house, which would connect that person to the scene. What it wouldn't be able to tell him was if this occurred, during, or after her murder.\n\nImpatient, Dylan picked up the phone to ring the forensic department. As he listened to their dialling tone he wondered if an update from them would continue in the same positive vain but the office manager told him they'd no results for him, as yet.\n\nHe sat doodling on his blotting paper pad, drawing lines down its brown leatherette corners. What could he tell the personnel at the meeting?\n\n'Vicky, can you call a meeting for tomorrow morning in the incident room please?' Dylan called out.\n\n'Yeah, and I'll stick a brush up my arse and sweep the floor while I'm at it if you like, sir,' she mumbled to herself.\n\nDylan sniggered to himself. 'Can you make a coffee at the same time, do you think?'\n\nA pen flew through the air and landed in front of him.\n\n'Missed.' he called out to her with a chortle.\n\nTwo hit and run fatalities in such close proximity. Could it just be coincidence? There could soon be a shout for a review team to look at on-going enquiries. What was he missing? The last thing he wanted was for this team to find fault with the investigation.\n\nGot them strawberries in? I'm on my way home, he texted Jen.\n\nYep, but eaten them. Think I've found a craving, came her reply.\n\n'What an excuse. Now I've heard everything,' he muttered.\n\n## Chapter 23\n\nHolding the keys for the Forrester's home was far too tempting for Danny and Billy. The house, like the dentists and the florists, didn't appear to have an alarm, or at least not one that could be seen from the roadside. The boys drove up the drive and parked outside the house, letting themselves in without a backwards glance.\n\n'I'm starving,' said Billy, heading straight for the kitchen. He opened the fridge door and shut it again almost instantly. 'Catch,' he shouted to Danny as a can of lager came whizzing through the air. He caught it \u2013 just.\n\n'Bloody idiot,' scolded Danny. 'Let's not be too damned obvious. We don't want to upset Pam, not till we get our way, anyway,' he said grinning. Billy yanked the ring pull. Drinking the alcohol from the can didn't keep him still as he browsed around the room in between swigs, opening cupboard doors and shutting them again, without a care in the world. 'Kit Kat?' he said, offering Danny an unopened packet that he found.\n\n'Just one and then put the rest back,' he said, opening the door into the lounge.\n\n'Nice house, Billy,' Danny said, whistling as he walked slowly up the stairs. I wonder what they might not miss for a week or two?'\n\nCareful not to disturb things, he opened and closed drawers and cupboards.\n\n'God Danny, have you seen how neat everything is?' His face was a picture of wonderment. His friend laughed. 'You moron,' he said. 'Everyone ain't a scruffy bastard like you yer know.'\n\n'We'll have this Billy,' Danny said holding up a gold chain he'd come across on the windowsill. 'It should be worth a few quid like the other stuff we sold.'\n\n'Let's have a look in Pam's room,' Billy said. He was laid on her bed when Danny walked in.\n\n'Oh, Danny,' Billy whined as he draped her nightie around his head. He cuddled and kissed her bear. 'I love you so much,' he said, in a high-pitched soft girly voice. Danny stood looking at his friend with amusement.\n\n'This bed sure smells nice Danny. Come lay with me,' Billy said. 'Come on you prick. Stop pissing about and leave things straight,' Danny said, walking out of the room.\n\n'Okay,' Billy shouted as he jumped off the bed. He knelt on the floor beside her dressing table drawers and opened the top one. 'Found them.' he shouted.\n\n'What?' shouted Danny who was inspecting an old oil painting displayed on the wall on the landing.\n\n'Knickers, knickers and more knickers,' he yelled throwing the garments into the air to Danny's amusement as he popped his head around the door.\n\n'Control yourself man,' Danny warned him in a whispered tone.\n\n'I'm gonna keep these,' he beamed, holding up a bright pink thong to his nose and inhaling the smell of it deeply. 'One day she might model them for me,' he grinned, stuffing them in his pocket. Danny shook his head. 'You're seriously sad,' he said.\n\n'We've spent long enough here,' Danny said with a frown as he looked out of the window. 'Tell you what let's go up the road and do the rich bloke with the Porsche's house over again.'\n\nDanny peered out of the front door and looked both ways before confidently walking out of the house. Billy slammed the door behind him and followed. They climbed in the car and drove up the road to number 42. The Porsche wasn't in the driveway and all was quiet.\n\n'Idle Danny, bloody idle. Look, he hasn't even had the patio doors repaired yet. All that fucking money and he can't be bothered: serves him right if we go in again.'\n\n'He might not have any money left now we've nicked his cash.' Danny chuckled. 'I wonder why they haven't pulled us about his telly. They knew it was his, the officer with the big tits told me.'\n\nBilly put a crowbar in the boarded-up patio door and prised it open. Within a minute they were in the kitchen. Quickly and thoroughly they checked the rooms out. Within a matter of minutes they had grabbed a portable radio, DVD, camera, bags of sweets and small change. There was a pre-cooked chicken in the fridge.\n\n'That'll do, Let's get out of here,' Danny called out.\n\nThey threw their spoils in the car, jumped in and threw their hoods up. As they pulled out of the driveway Brian Stevenson arrived home. Billy leaned forward and gave him a v sign.\n\n'We can't outrun that car, Billy, you nob.' Danny scolded. Billy turned round to watch what the Porsche driver was doing.\n\nBrian Stevenson had more to worry about than two-bit burglars.\n\n'Bastards, absolute bastards,' he grunted through clenched teeth. 'They'll pay for this,' he whispered. He had already been told who they might be and seeing their car registration number had proved the money he'd paid to find out had been worth it. Now he'd seen their car for himself he didn't need to chase them, he knew exactly who they were and where they lived. Revenge would be sweet, but in his own time.\n\nDanny and Billy laughed as they drove up onto the moors. Billy tore off a chicken leg and handed it to Danny.\n\n'Text Pam.'\n\n'Do it your bloody self, you lazy git,' Billy said.\n\n'Doh, I'm driving...'\n\n'What you want to say?' he asked, wiping his greasy fingers down the front of his jeans before picking up the mobile phone.\n\n'When will you be home?' he said.\n\nBilly took Pam's thong out of his pocket and wiped his greasy mouth on it.\n\nThe reply was instant, 'Tuesday,' she replied, 'I miss you.' Pam thought studiously. She was sure she had told Danny when she was home. Wasn't he counting the days like she was?\n\n'Ah, she misses you,' Billy said, portraying his sad face to Danny. Danny screwed up his nose.\n\n'Sad bitch,' he said.\n\n## Chapter 24\n\nDylan made his way to the incident room which was cram-packed with officers. The heat hit him. The smell of body odour was as intense and the lack of air was apparent. All heads turned at his entrance. Dylan fanned his face with his paperwork as he walked to the front of the room. He sat, leaned back in his chair and scanned the faces in the room. All was quiet and still. Anticipation hung heavy.\n\nHe introduced himself, DS John Benjamin and DS Taylor Spiers before he went on to outline the purpose of the meeting, which was to exchange and update the information on each of the three incidents he was currently dealing with. Whilst they were all being investigated independently, snippets of information suggested there might be a connection.\n\n'In respect of the fatal, fail to stop accident that killed Grace and her dog, we recovered debris left at the scene,' said Dylan. 'We now know that she'd withdrawn a large amount of money from her investments recently and sold her home to an equity release company. Brian Stevenson was Grace Harvey's financial advisor and he was attacked by Donald Harvey, Grace Harvey's son, at her funeral. Donald Harvey accuses Brian Stevenson of swindling his mother out of her money. Brian Stevenson says Donald Harvey has had the money to help him maintain a certain lifestyle abroad. Donald Harvey denies the allegation.'\n\n'Brian Stevenson was also the late Mildred Sykes's financial advisor,' added DS Taylor Spiers before shooting Dylan a toothy smile.\n\n'PC Whitworth, boss,' said a uniform officer at the back of the room. 'Do you think the two whose car was involved in the double fatal outside Mothercare, might have ran over the old lady too?'\n\n'Maybe, but we will need the evidence to prove it beyond doubt, as usual,' Dylan said.\n\n'Boss, it maybe something or nothing but Stevenson was the name on the TV with a postcode that we seized from Denton and Greenwood's flat. I personally telephoned Mr Stevenson and although he said the TV was his he told me he'd sold it on,' said Vicky.\n\n'But he was broken into,' said DS Taylor Spiers, defiance blazing in her eyes at Vicky. 'I've seen the damage to the patio doors.'\n\n'Let's stay with him then. You will see I'm having passed around a picture of Mildred Sykes for the people who are not fully up to speed with that investigation. Was Stevenson the last person to see Mildred Sykes alive? We know he fits the description of a visitor to her home, and we have a re-occurring finger mark in her house that's yet to be identified. We do know that the fingerprint is definitely not Mildred Sykes's. We don't have Brian Stevenson's prints do we?'\n\nDS Taylor Spiers shook her head.\n\n'So, that's something we need to do as a priority,' Dylan snapped.\n\n'Big mistake,' Dylan heard Vicky say to Taylor in a low murmur, but he let it go with a glare at the pair.\n\n'We also seized a glitzy clock from Denton and Greenwood's flat that was obviously out of place and we're checking to see if we can find any marks on it to identify whose it is,' said Vicky, sitting up straight in her chair.\n\n'Do we know if Stevenson, Denton and Greenwood know each other?' asked Dylan\n\n'Sir, this picture of Mildred Sykes.'\n\n'Yes Vicky.'\n\n'The clock in the background is just like the one I've been trying to place.'\n\n'Really?' Dylan said, feeling slightly excited at the revelation.\n\nVicky looked at the photo again. Her mouth opened and shut without her saying a word. She looked at Dylan. 'I don't believe it,' she said.\n\n'There's no intelligence to suggest that they know each other but I don't know if that question has been put to any of them,' said Taylor.\n\n'Okay, so, we've got on-going tests to prove Denton and Greenwood's car is involved in Grace Harvey's murder. Now, let's talk about the one involving Bridey Tate and her son Toby. You, PC Whitworth, dropped behind their car in stationary traffic at a red light on the high street didn't you?'\n\nPC Whitworth nodded.\n\n'You get out and proceed to approach the men inside when the car sets off at speed. Is that right?'\n\n'Yes, sir.'\n\n'But you don't identify them?'\n\n'No, sir.'\n\n'Then you see the occupants of that car mow down our young mother and baby who are stepping off the pavement at the time, shoot the red light and the car as we all know is then found burning a short time later on the moors. Our two suspects come into the station to report the very same car stolen with an alibi. So do we have anything new on this?'\n\n'We're sifting through CCTV and speed cameras boss, to see if we can get a good enough picture to identify the driver and passenger of that vehicle. There are a few hours yet to be looked at to see if we can ID the vehicle and the occupants on their journey to the moors if it was them. At this moment in time we know there were two occupants in the car that was involved, but we can't get a picture that's good enough for the ID of Denton and Greenwood. It's apparent that the driver and his passenger have either their hoods up or hats on,' said John.\n\n'Well, probably isn't going to be good enough for CPS. We need to ensure that we have the evidence to show there's no doubt,' Dylan snapped.\n\n'And where did they get the Subaru from? Was it stolen?'\n\n'No bought, cash, sir. I checked it out, it's legit,' said PC Whitworth.\n\nDylan shook his head. 'Well the cash must have been stolen or they've sold some stolen gear; any reports of a large amount of money going missing?' There was a sea of shaking heads before him. 'Come on, we're not talking peanuts here are we? I mean how much does a brand spanking new Subaru cost?' The room's occupants remained silent. Dylan sighed. 'I'm also hearing that there's someone asking about Denton and Greenwood on the Greenaway Estate. I thought it was Graham Tate, he makes no bones about the fact that he wants revenge, which is understandable but the description that John's snout has given us is definitely not him.'\n\n'What about Stevenson?' asked Taylor, 'or Donald Harvey? He didn't hesitate in attacking Stevenson in broad daylight at his mother's funeral.'\n\n'The answer my friends lies within a small group of people that are possibly connected, so we need to dig deep to find the evidence to connect them and prove who did what. If you're telling me we need more people looking at CCTV tapes then let's get on with it,' Dylan stressed.\n\nThe meeting ended with Dylan feeling frustrated. He walked down the corridor to his office like a man on a mission. He could hear Taylor's heels clicking on the lino as she followed him. The likelihood that Denton and Greenwood were responsible for the car incidents was looking good and Stevenson was looking more like a fraudster than a murderer; but what connected Stevenson to Denton and Greenwood?\n\n'Taylor,' Dylan said without stopping or glancing back. 'Chase the financial investigation team up on Stevenson. Tell them I want a result in the next seventy-two hours and I don't want any excuses.'\n\n'Sure, but you know what they're like,' she panted, as she tried to match his pace.\n\n'Look, just do it, please, will you. Or do I have to do everything myself?' Dylan said stopping at Taylor's desk in the incident room. Taylor dropped into her chair. 'I'm on with it aren't I?' she said, raising her eyebrows at Vicky who sat sedately opposite her.\n\nDylan walked the few paces to his office.\n\n'Want a coffee, sir?' shouted Vicky.\n\nDylan slammed his door shut.\n\n'Guess that will be a no-thank-you then, Vicky,' she mumbled.\n\nDylan opened his door. 'Yes, please,' he said, in a softer voice, 'and about time too,' he smiled. It made him so angry when he knew who was responsible for a crime but he had to wait for the results of enquiries to come in. No singular person or department ever seemed to have any urgency unless they were being paid overtime. He wanted these incidents wrapped up \u2013 and he wanted them wrapped up now.\n\n'Dylan,' he snapped, snatching up the ringing phone.\n\n'Somebody sounds grumpy,' said Jen.\n\n'I'm just busy, that's all,' he sighed.\n\n'Shall I ring back?'\n\n'No, no, I'm sorry Jen,' he sighed with his head in his hand. 'It just pisses me off. I just need that bit of concrete evidence to get these three jobs sorted. I can feel it in my bones that we're on the right track.'\n\n'Jack you're letting things get to you and you know yourself it's making you grumpy. You're tired, it's not helping that you're not getting your sleep and people won't like you for it, you know.'\n\n'Sorry, but I'm not here to be liked,' he said sulkily as he put down the phone.\n\nPaperwork: Dylan looked at his in-tray in dismay. The pile must be at least eighteen inches high and he needed to clear it. With the mood he was in it seemed like a good time. Shredder at the ready, he took the first piece of paper off the top and stared at the subject matter.\n\n'What? What the fuck is this?' he said out loud as Vicky walked in with his cup of coffee in her hand and two biscuits.\n\n## Chapter 25\n\n'Boss, you ready to go?' asked John slightly unnerved by Dylan's tone. Dylan stood, took the cup off Vicky and gulped a mouthful of coffee before handing it back to her. He slid a biscuit off the plate she held and popped it into his mouth, collected his jacket from the back of his chair and headed towards the door, clipping on his black tie.\n\n'Yeah, let's go,' he said.\n\nThe funeral procession for Bridey and Toby was about to commence when they arrived. Dylan stood alongside his colleague. A marked police vehicle shone in the afternoon sunshine at the front of the cort\u00e8ge. The streets were lined with townspeople for as far as Dylan could see. A camera was set on the procession.\n\nHarrowfield Parish Church was at the heart of the town. Anglican worship drew the riches of the Christian tradition old and new. Dylan stood beneath its mighty towers and immediately realised these as the church's beacon to direct the faithful to the house of God.\n\nThere was a gathering of people in black. The footpath leading to the wooden porch was awash with bouquets, soft toys and photographs. Local media were there along with one or two Nationals who made themselves known to Dylan.\n\n'Detective Inspector Dylan,' called a chirpy little voice, have you identified the driver yet?'\n\nHe looked sideways and saw Riley Shaw from the local paper.\n\n'Not yet Riley, but we're making progress,' he called back. Not quickly enough though, he thought to himself.\n\nThe inside of the Church was full to bursting with mourners. Dylan felt a chill that sent a shiver down his spine, or a goose walking over his grave, as his old mum would have said. There was standing room only at the back, which is where John and he stood.\n\nThe music started. I've Been Missing You by Chris De Burgh echoed around the room and through the speakers to those stood outside. Dylan shuffled. He looked up at the stained glass window at the front of the church and clasped his hands in front of him.\n\nShuffling could be heard to his left and out of the corner of his eye he saw the first of the two coffins being carried down the aisle. The same aisle that Bridey and Graham had walked not long before, a gentleman whispered to his friend who stood in front of them. This time there was no smiling faces, no jubilation, and no wedding march. The coffins were adorned with brilliant white lilies, which Dylan thought created a heavenly light of their own, a halo and a tribute to the loves of Graham Tate's life.\n\nThe coffins were laid to rest at the end of the aisle in front of the altar, together side by side. The vicar read Psalm 23, The Lord Is My Shepherd; Dylan's favourite Psalm. Readings were read through the tears of loved ones and there was an address before Jerusalem rang out of the hearts of the congregation. Afterwards were prayers and Dylan prayed hard for the capture and conviction of the people who had done this terrible deed. Dylan watched Graham pick up Toby's tiny coffin and lovingly cradle it in his arms as he walked back up the aisle with it to Toby's final resting place with his mum, Bridey in the graveyard.\n\n'Do not stand at my grave and weep, I am not there, I do not sleep. I am the thousand winds that blow. I am diamond glints in the snow. I am the sunlight on ripened grain. I am the gentle autumnal rain. When you waken in the morning hush, I am the soft uplifting rush of quiet birds in circled flight. I am the soft stars that shine in the night. Do not stand at my grave and cry. I am not there, I did not die,' said the vicar.\n\nDylan and John turned and left the family and friends of Bridey and Toby to their grief, tossing coins into the collection for the church roof fund as they passed.\n\n'I need a drink,' said John, loosening his tie as he hurried his step to catch up with Dylan's long strides.\n\n'Me too,' Dylan said, shaking his head. 'Tell you what; I'll stand you a brandy in a coffee, how's that?'\n\n'Anything with a hint of alcohol sounds good to me,' John said, as they reached the car. 'Right or wrong boss I'd want revenge if that happened to me and mine.'\n\n'It wouldn't bring 'um back.'\n\n'No, but I'm sure it would make me feel a hell of a lot better. A few years in prison, which let's face it, is all the driver of the car will get, isn't sufficient for their lives.'\n\n'I know but we don't make the law John, we only enforce it mate.'\n\n'If Graham Tate gets hold of the people responsible for Bridey and Toby's death I can't imagine what state we'll find them in,' John said thoughtfully.\n\n## Chapter 26\n\nIt was that time of day. Billy and Danny were outside the school gates in their new car. Pam hesitated as she looked beyond the crowd and saw Danny. 'Wow,' she murmured.\n\n'You look good,' said Danny to the excited teenager. Pam giggled and a blush crept up her cheeks. She stood coyly looking over at the group of girls who watched on. Throwing her hair over her shoulder she smiled at them like a cat that had got the cream.\n\n'That's Sara you were asking about,' she said to Danny. A big grin spread across her face as she waved to a girl that stood at the opposite side of the road.\n\n'Whitworth's daughter?'\n\n'Yep, the ginger haired girl,' she said.\n\n'She's not very old is she?' said Danny.\n\n'She's my age,' said Pam, indignantly.\n\nBilly stared at Sara Whitworth long and hard. 'Is she?' he said, with surprise.\n\n'Enough about her. When you coming for a spin with us? 'What about tomorrow?'\n\n'Yeah, that'd be great,' Pam said. She'd done her duty by going to France with the oldies, now it was her time and she'd do anything to spend some of it with Danny.\n\nBilly was quiet as he watched the ginger haired girl cross the road. A car stopped in front of her and Billy thought she was about to get in but she walked around the back of it and made her way up the main road.\n\n'Is he coming?' mouthed Pam.\n\nDanny nodded. 'Don't worry, we'll get rid of him,' he whispered and she giggled once more. 'Pick you up from yours tomorrow morning.'\n\n'The oldies will be gone by half-eight at the latest so see you after then. I've gotta go, I've got a riding lesson,' she said tucking her wayward hair behind her ear.\n\nPam's mind was all over the shop as she walked away from them with a grin so wide it made her nose wrinkle. What would she tell them at school? Would she need a note? What if her parents found out? If she didn't go Danny might not want to see her again.\n\nOh, it was a no brainer; she was going alright, what was she thinking of? How could she even contemplate missing out on a day out with Danny? It was a thrilling thought but scary too because she'd never done anything before that her parents didn't know about.\n\nShe shivered with excitement. What would she wear? She'd do her hair and nails tonight she planned. 'Whoopee.' she yelled flaying her arms in the air as she threw caution to the wind and ran down the grass banking in delight.\n\n'Let's see where that copper's daughter goes Danny?' said Billy, pointing to the figure of a girl disappearing slowly out of their view.\n\n'Why? What're you thinking?' Danny said suspiciously.\n\n'Don't know yet, but I do know I'm looking forward to tomorrow,' he grinned showing off the big yellow stain on his two front teeth.\n\n'Thought you weren't listening?'\n\n'Well you know what thought did, don't you?' he said. 'Too right I was,' he said pulling the pink thong out of his pocket and sticking it under his nose as he sniffed it.\n\n'She won't want to come out with us again after that then,' Danny snarled.\n\n'So, we'd better make the best of it then hadn't we?' Billy said, with a glint in his eye. 'Why don't we give the copper's daughter a bit of a fright?'\n\nDanny drove the car slowly. Just close enough to keep their prey in sight.\n\nSara Whitworth walked the well-worn route home, totally unaware she was being followed. She walked across the green and through the little park with the swings and slide that her mum and dad had taken her to often when she was little. She marched over the tarmac in the small car park where she had learnt to ride her bike. Next she came to the picnic area where they often had their tea outdoors and the onwards into the coppice that led to their back door. Although the traffic had been busy on the main road there weren't many people on foot, Billy noted.\n\n'I've got an idea. Tomorrow if we've dumped Pam in time let's come back here and wait for her to walk home from school. I'll give her a message for her dad. I'll need a balaclava,' he said wistfully.\n\n'You're a bad lad Billy Greenwood, a very bad lad,' Danny scoffed.\n\n## Chapter 27\n\nIt was a quarter to nine when Pam heard a car rolling along the driveway pebbles. She peeked out of her bedroom window to make sure it was them. She felt sick with exhilaration at the sight of the Subaru. She could feel the blood pumping through her veins. Was her heart going to burst she wondered as it beat madly in her chest.\n\nShe had tossed and turned all night with a knot of anxiety in her stomach. It felt like Christmas morning and the day held great expectation. At four o'clock she'd got up and poured herself a drink of juice, unable to stay in bed and walking back into her bedroom she had caught sight of the short denim skirt hung on her wardrobe door and the low cut bright pink lycra top, in the light from the hallway. She nervously giggled with the thought of wearing them.\n\nShe wished she knew where her pink thong had gone, but she could hardly ask her mum, could she? How could she explain she wanted a thong on a school day? Knowing her dad, he would have thrown the present her friend had bought her for her birthday straight in the bin. He had been very vocal in telling her she was far too young for such a thing.\n\nA last look in the mirror and a spray of her mother's expensive perfume she ran out to the car, pulling the door with a bang behind her.\n\n'Wow' Danny said. 'Look at you.' He held the door open wide. Billy poked his head between the front seats, grinning sleazily at her. She smiled back; the sooner they could lose him the better, she thought.\n\n'You smell nice,' he said, his eyes willing her top to drop and allow him a glance at her breast.\n\n'Thanks,' was all she could muster; she was feeling very self-conscious of Billy's roving eyes. She pulled her skirt down by the hem as far as she could and held her handbag tightly on her lap. Billy was weird, but Danny seemed to approve of him so that's all that mattered to her.\n\n'What did you decide to tell the oldies?' asked Danny\n\n'I haven't,' she said, shyly as their eyes met in the rear view mirror\n\n'And school?'\n\n'I'll tell them I was sick tomorrow.'\n\n'I'm impressed,' he said with a nod of his head.\n\n'Thought we'd go to the Country Park, it'll be nice and quiet there and there's that sandy stretch near the water where we can sunbathe.'\n\n'Great,' she said. Her stomach did a flip.\n\n'I'm going fishing, 'Billy said with a wink.\n\nEven better, thought Pam; her eyes wide with glee.\n\n'We'll call at the garage and get some sandwiches, drinks and that,' Danny said.\n\n'Oh, I've got some money for...' Pam said, frantically scrambling in her bag for her purse.\n\n'No, put your money away,' Danny said gallantly.\n\n'Yeah, that's a first,' Billy said, chuckling.\n\nPam screwed up her nose. He was a sick pig and she couldn't wait to get rid of him.\n\nDanny and Billy strolled into the garage and Pam took the opportunity to check herself in the mirror. She touched her cheeks, stroked her eyelashes and threw a smile that showed her even white teeth. She undid her bag and taking her lip gloss out she swiftly ran her index finger around her lips with the mint flavoured sheen. She'd seen her mum do it often when her dad was filling up with petrol. Was this how it was going to be from now on? A warm glow engulfed her.\n\nFlipping the mirror up she watched the two friends saunter out of the store with carrier bags full to bursting. Danny opened the car door and passed a bag over the seats to Pam.\n\n'Didn't know what sort of sarnies you liked so we got a selection,' Danny said with a big smile crossing his face. 'Pass a Snickers over will you.'\n\nPam delved into the bag. Beer, cider, sandwiches, crisps, more beer she noted as she groped around.\n\n'You want a beer?' Billy said as he shook a can before pulling the ring tab. Foam and alcohol squirted all over the car much to the amusement of the pair.\n\nPam squealed, 'Oh, the lovely new...' she said, trying desperately to mop up the spray that had landed all over her clothes. 'Later,' she said whilst blotting the rancid liquid from her skirt. The smell of beer and now the motion of the car made her feel nauseous. She had never been a good traveller and as she felt the familiar draining of colour in her face and shortness of breath, she prayed that they would soon be at their destination.\n\nThe Country Park was bathed in glorious sunshine. Meadow grass wafted in the warm breeze along the long winding path that led to the sculpture park. Pam breathed in the warm, clean air in big gulps as she stepped from the car. The views were magnificent for as far as the eye could see. Pam stretched her body to the sky. She lifted her face to the sun and was glad of its warmth. Swaying slightly, she found herself in Danny's arms and for an instant she felt like she was in heaven.\n\n'Let's go down to the water's edge. Down there,' Danny pointed, as he gazed at her lustfully. Billy handed her bags to carry.\n\n'Yeah, that looks like a good spot,' said Billy, heading for a shaded spot under a huge willow tree. There was a path down to the lake. Pam wished she had worn different shoes as she tottered behind the two tittering youths.\n\nTurning round Billy grabbed the bags from her grip and ran ahead like an over-excited child. Danny held back and reached out for her hand. She sighed with contentment as she closed her eyes and wallowed in his closeness, confident as she was in his charge.\n\nThis must be what it's like to date an older, more experienced guy, she thought as Danny swung her round and kissed her roughly on the lips before laying a blanket on the ground. She would have liked to be alone with Danny but it was their first date and having Billy around would maybe stop him getting over-friendly, she thought. She wasn't ready to go all the way with him yet; after all she was only thirteen.\n\nThe water lapped a shingled path in front of them. They could have been at the seaside, she thought, as the boys discarded their tops and threw them in a pile on the ground under the tree. She reached out to fold them neatly, watching the boys playfully splashing around in the lake.\n\n'Get the cans out. I'm thirsty,' Billy shouted as he got out of the water and began picking stones up and skidding them on the surface. Danny sat down next to her and threw a can of beer at Billy. It landed in the water and he waded out for it.\n\n'Fancy a skinny dip Pam?' Danny asked.\n\n'Oh, no thanks, it's too cold for me,' she said feeling very mature as she took a sip from the opened can of lager Danny offered her.\n\n'Billy will do when he's had a few more. He's fucking mad.' he said rolling his eyes. For a split second she felt unnerved. She looked around. It was an isolated spot and all of a sudden she realised how little she knew of Danny Denton and Billy Greenwood. Danny put his hand on her leg just above her knee and stroked the inside of her leg gently without looking at her. She instinctively tensed.\n\n'Here have some more lager, it'll help you relax,' he said, soothingly as he handed her a second can from which he had begun drinking. She took a long swig of the liquid and coughed.\n\n'I don't usually...' Pam started to say, by way of an apology.\n\n'Yeah, but today's special, so have a drink with me to celebrate, eh? '\n\nShe tilted the can and took a long drink. Danny held the bottom of the can in the palm of his hand and tilted it so that the liquid came faster into her mouth.\n\n'Yeah, that's it, good girl \u2013 have a good drink.'\n\nThe liquid started to run down her chin and onto her chest as her throat tightened up. She knocked the can to the side and gasped for air and coughed uncontrollably. Danny patted her gently on the back, laughing hysterically.\n\n'Come on, drink up, there's plenty more where that came from.'\n\n'Let's open a bottle of cider each and see who can drink it the quickest,' Billy said joining them and instantly reaching into another carrier bag. 'Good game, good game,' chortled Billy as he stood shivering in his wet clothes.\n\n'Perhaps we should have something to eat first,' said Pam, hoping that they might forget about the stupid game.\n\n'Five minutes and there'll be a consequence for the person who finishes last,' Danny said.\n\n'But... but I'm not used to drinking so that's not fair,' said Pam, with a little cry. Her head was already starting to spin.\n\n'It's not fair.' Billy mimicked the whine of her voice.\n\n'No, Pam's right,' said Danny holding up his hand in protest. 'We won't start to drink ours till Pam is halfway down her bottle, Billy come on, don't be a dick.'\n\nPam smiled nervously and looked to Danny for reassurance.\n\n'You'll be fine,' Danny said laughing at the look on her face as he pulled her backwards onto the grass and leaned across to kiss her full on the lips.\n\n'Nice view,' Billy whistled. Pam knew he could see up her skirt.\n\nShe sat up as quickly as she could, 'Er, what's the consequence going to be if you lose?' Pam asked, taking a little sip of the cider.\n\n'What d'you think it should be?' asked Danny.\n\n'I dunno,' she said, quietly.\n\n'The loser skinny dips,' Billy shouted.\n\n'That's not a consequence for you, you do that anyway,' said Danny.\n\n'Yeah, but I'm not gonna lose am I?' said Billy, with a squeal as he flopped backwards into the lake.\n\n'But, I haven't got a towel.'\n\n'Ah, never mind,' Danny said.\n\n'Awh, just strip off, we don't mind,' Billy said, chortling.\n\nDanny threw his empty can. Billy threw his further. Danny hurled a cider bottle.\n\n'You shouldn't drink any more should you?' Pam said to Danny. 'You're driving.' Danny looked at her, eyes wide in disbelief. He sniggered. Billy laughed out loud.\n\n'I think I need a slash,' Billy said, as he came to stand beside them. Stepping back he unzipped his fly and urinated on the grass.\n\nPam's heart jumped into her mouth. She felt the blood rush to her cheeks. It was the first time she had seen a man's penis except in pictures or on statues. She didn't know where to look. 'Like the look of it love?' he said laughing as he dangled his penis in front of them shaking the excess drips from its end.\n\n'Quick,' Danny said, giggling like a little kid. 'He bloody means it,' he said pulling her up from the grass by her hand.\n\n'You bloody moron. Put it away and go do some fishing or sommat for a bit,' Danny said nodding suggestively to his friend.\n\nWithout a fuss Billy snapped a twig from the tree, picked up his drink and winked at Pam. He sauntered down the side of the lake and out of sight behind the trees.\n\nDanny and Pam sat in silence. Pam shivered and goosebumps rose on her arms.\n\n'You cold?' Danny asked throwing his drunken arm around her shoulders. His breath smelt of beer as his mouth found hers and she gagged. 'Bet you're glad you skived off now,' he said putting a hand on her chest and guided her body onto the grass. Within seconds his body was on the top of hers. He started to fumble under her skirt.\n\n'Stop, stop,' she cried.\n\n'What the bloody hell's up with you?' he asked. 'Oh, no, don't tell me you're a prick-tease?' he said with eyes that looked dark and menacing to her.\n\n'No, I... I... need the toilet,' she said, pushing his body off hers. He eyed her with displeasure and she could feel his anger.\n\n'Well you'll have to go in the bush over there, there's nowhere else out here,' he said.\n\n'Okay. I'll just be a minute,' she said, getting to her feet and brushing the grass off her skirt. Squatting behind the bush she heard the sound of a ring-pull being torn from a can and she knew Danny was opening another can of alcohol. She looked heavenward, what was she going to do?\n\nThe crack of a twig breaking close by made her jump. She stood hurriedly. Her heart raced. Staring at her she saw Billy watching her. She opened her mouth but nothing came out. Billy put his finger to his lips and grinned before casually walking away. Tears welled up in her eyes. She had a feeling telling Danny in his inebriated state might antagonise things so she decided to keep quiet and try and get him to take her home.\n\n'Can we go home now, please?' she said as she sat down beside Danny who was laid on the ground pointing to the clouds in the sky and giggling to himself. He didn't reply but reached out towards her and pulled the back of her top with such force that she fell back to the ground. Instantly, he was on the top of her again, his hands up her skirt and inside the crotch of her knickers. Pam screamed and struggled to break free.\n\n'Danny, please stop,' she squealed as tears sprung to her eyes. He pulled her hand away, looked at her as if he wasn't really seeing her and ignoring her plea he lifted up her top and tore it off. Pam cried out for help. He smiled at her. 'Nobody for miles around I'm afraid, sweetheart,' he breathed into her face. 'Come on now. Don't struggle, you know you want it as much as me,' he said in a calm, rich, dulcet tone.\n\nPam saw Billy's face hover over them.\n\n'Need any help?' Billy asked. Pam sighed, a huge sigh of relief.\n\n'Please Billy, please tell Danny to stop,' she begged.\n\n'I didn't mean you,' he laughed, taking Pam's pink thong from his pocket and dangling it from his fingers above her.\n\n'Hold her arms Billy,' Danny said, 'she's a right bloody wriggler this one.'\n\nPam screamed the loud shriek of a frightened animal. Danny put a hand over her mouth. Billy held her shoulders down so tightly that she had no chance of breaking free. Seconds later she was being raped. Pam whimpered for her mum, for her dad, for anyone who could help her, but her muffled screams fell unheard on the miles of countryside that surrounded them.\n\n'I'm thirteen,' she sobbed, turning her head into the grass. She heard a groan and the weight of Danny fall upon her. He rolled off and she lifted her head and wretched to the side but before she had chance to get up Billy pushed her onto her onto her back and was raping her too.\n\n'It's your own fucking fault,' Danny told her as he caught his breath. Billy bit her nipple hard and she screamed out in pain but once again a hand was put over her mouth. Billy quickly let out a moan and after a few seconds got off her. Pam turned and curled instinctively into a ball and held her stomach as if in excruciating pain.\n\nFrom her place on the ground she saw Danny pick up a can of beer and throw it into the water. They both walked to the lakeside and sat drinking, talking and laughing as if nothing had happened.\n\nShe sobbed uncontrollably. Bile rose in her throat as she tried to heave herself onto her elbow. Her body ached, her stomach swirled and finally getting up onto all fours she was violently sick. Danny looked back, stood, walked towards her and picking up her clothes he hurled them at her.\n\n'For God sake, you silly cow, get dressed. What did you expect? he shrieked. 'Get dressed.' Pam stood. Blood ran down her legs and she wiped it best she could with the thong.\n\n'Dirty fucking bitch,' Billy sneered. 'Perhaps you should get a wash in the lake,' he cooed. 'Oh, but...' he said. 'We don't have a towel.'\n\n'You, you raped me...' she sobbed. 'You raped me.' She screamed at them. 'How could you? I thought you liked me?'\n\n## Chapter 28\n\nDylan held the facsimile confirmation from the forensic science lab in his hand.\n\n'The headlight found in Denton and Greenwood's garage is a match with the debris for that at the scene of the Harvey murder,' said the quiet, studious voice of the scientist. Dylan placed the phone down. He had it, he had the first positive link to Grace Harvey's fatality, but the connection was the car make and not the driver.\n\nHe picked up his phone, held it to his cheek and studied for a moment before dialling DS Spiers' extension. 'Come and see me in my office,' he said. Instantaneously Taylor breezed in.\n\n'You wanted me, boss?' she said with a glint in her eye.\n\nHe tried to avert his eyes from her over-exposed cleavage, but she saw his interest and smiled.\n\n'Have a seat,' he said. Taylor did as she was told. Sitting in the seat directly across from his desk, she slowly crossed and uncrossed her long brown legs. He knew exactly what she was doing, but like a rabbit in car headlights he was momentarily transfixed. Dylan coughed and resumed his conversation.\n\n'The glass recovered from the scene of Grace's fatal.'\n\n'Yes?' she said, leaning forward. 'Come on, don't you know it's rude to keep a girl waiting,' she said licking her bright pink lips as she played with the tips of her hair that was scraped back into a ponytail.\n\n'They've got a match with a headlamp seized from Denton and Greenwood's garage,' he said shuffling the paper around on his desk.\n\n'Fantastic, when're we gonna bring them in?'\n\n'Don't get too excited, it's a match for the make of car Denton owned. There's a long way to go yet. I'm thinking about the day after tomorrow. That'll give us chance to plan the interviews and enable us to get stuck into their ribs,' Dylan replied. 'You never know, if they admit to Grace's death we might get them to roll over for Bridey and Toby's murder too,' he said, thoughtfully. 'The carriage clock that Vicky mentioned; have we got proof it was Mildred Sykes'?'\n\n'Why would it be? The fingerprints at Mildred Sykes house are not theirs, we've checked.'\n\n'Do we know if Denton and Greenwood knew Stevenson? Could they be on his payroll?'\n\n'Dunno,' she said. 'Do you think they'll soften under pressure in interview?'\n\n'Doubt it. On the advice of their solicitor it's more likely to be no comment. I'll give CPS a call and see what they'll go along with in respect of charging them. Probably, death by dangerous driving is as much as we can hope for, which is better than nothing. But we'll push for murder, manslaughter at the very least.'\n\n'You must be feeling generous,' Taylor said, teasingly.\n\n'Why?' he said, eyeing her quizzically.\n\n'Day after tomorrow is Bank Holiday Monday, remember? Everybody will be on double time,' she said with a smile.\n\n'Good God woman, it's a good job you told me. Headquarters would crucify me.'\n\n'Ah but, the team would love you,' she said flicking her hair over her shoulder as she leant towards him.\n\n'Make it Tuesday. Early start, you sort out the arrest teams,' he said as he dismissed her. She turned to leave.\n\n'Oh, arrange for them to be taken to separate nicks. I want distance between those two once and for all. If Danny Denton's the driver then he's the man in control.'\n\n'Billy Greenwood might grab a lifeline from us if it's offered,' she said as she stopped at the door and looked over her shoulder at him.\n\n'And Greenwood might turn out to be the driving force of the pair?' he said, frowning.\n\n'I'll speak to Stevenson again and get the samples off him that you want,' she said.\n\n'Do it here, at the nick. Invite him in. I'll sit in with you. Let's see what vibes we get from him. It's about time I met him.'\n\n'It'd be nice to find out what makes certain men tick,' she said looking at him quizzically.\n\nDylan looked to his computer screen. 'Try getting him in today and see if the financial unit's got anything to tell us about him before you do. The more ammunition we have the better,' he grunted.\n\nDylan watched her walk out into the CID office. She turned. Looked over her shoulder at him and smiled, just like Jen did. He felt guilty, he'd never once looked at another woman since he'd met Jen and there was nothing special about Taylor Spiers, she wasn't his type. What the hell was he thinking of?\n\nHe picked up his phone. He needed to speak to Jen. 'We've just got a breakthrough on the mowing down of the old lady and her dog,' he said excitedly.\n\n'That's brilliant,' Jen said. She never asked him who the suspect was or what the breakthrough entailed, she knew if she asked he would tell her but if she didn't know then she couldn't accidentally mention anything to anyone else.\n\n'It means an early start on Tuesday but the day after tomorrow I'm told is Bank Holiday so how you fixed for a lie-in?'\n\n'Sounds wonderful, I'm shattered,' she said with a sigh as she rubbed her bulging stomach.\n\n'I'll try to get a flyer today love, see you soon,' he whispered into the phone, 'I love you.'\n\n'Me too,' she said, hanging up. Jen smiled to herself as she put her phone down and carried on reading her baby book. At this stage of your baby's development, she read, you are probably feeling pretty tired and cumbersome. You may be feeling anxious or irritable and have mood swings. Well at least she was normal. You may also feel a heavy dragging feeling in your pelvis, as the weight of your baby bears down. You may be experiencing vivid and unsettling dreams, which is your mind's way of adapting to an approaching life change. Her eyes closed slowly and she drifted off to sleep.\n\nIt was only since Dylan had met Jen that he had started to think he would rather be elsewhere than at his work. He picked up his phone and on impulse rang the pensions departments number to see what his finances would be if he decided to retire. He had an idea, but the figures he was given were better than he thought. Taking a moment to himself, he sat back in his old worn leather chair that he refused to have replaced by Avril Summerfield-Preston when she refurbished the offices. He scanned the walls of his office and took time to read the endless lists of detected murders and other crimes he had dealt with in the past two years along with the vast array of commendations for outstanding work.\n\nThe phone rang, bringing him back to the present. 'Boss, I've arranged for Stevenson to come in tonight at seven. It's the best I could do. Is that okay?'\n\n'I suppose so. I'll let Jen know I'm gonna be late,' he sighed.' Taylor Spiers could see him over the screen of her computer; she winked at him as she put down the phone. Did she never give up?\n\nJen's phone bleeped and it woke her. Startled and sleepy she read the message. 'Another night alone Max,' she groaned as she reached out to stroke his head. She flopped dramatically back on the cushions. 'Flaming work,' she mumbled switching on the TV with the remote control.\n\nMax settled on her handbag like a brindled suitcase \u2013 to be sure if she went out he wouldn't be forgotten. She picked up the newspaper but couldn't concentrate long enough to read it. She was tired and thirsty. She stood up and waddled to the kitchen to draw a glass of water from the tap. Making her way back to the settee she threw a cushion down first to support her bump then laid on her side to try and get comfortable. Within minutes she felt three large kicks from her baby. 'Oi, Buttons,' she said stroking her stomach and grinning to herself.\n\n'Hormones,' she said out loud as tears rolled down her cheeks and she wiped them away with a tissue. Dylan was getting back into a routine of early starts and late nights and she was frightened he would make himself ill yet again.\n\n'Awh, hurry home Jack,' she whined, and Max barked as if he agreed. She was never surer he understood everything she said as she stroked his strong, soft head to quieten him. \n\n## Chapter 29\n\nPam's sadness was reflected in her tear-filled eyes. She had fallen in love with the wrong kind of boy. How could she have been so stupid? She had turned a deaf ear to anyone who had badmouthed him. She'd truly thought he liked her.\n\nThe realisation that neither of the boys had worn any form of contraception made her blood run cold. What if...? 'Oh God no,' she moaned as her hand moved to her stomach and felt it contract. She started to shake uncontrollably.\n\n'Come on,' Danny yelled. 'Move, otherwise we'll leave ya.'\n\nPerhaps she would be better off left alone.\n\n'If you don't move I'll give you some more of this,' Billy smirked, pulling his zip down. He rubbed his crutch, suggestively.\n\n'No,' she said, sobbing, reaching for her clothes. Billy kicked them away just as her fingers touched the cloth.\n\n'Let her have 'em Billy, we need to get going,' said Danny, his voice taking on a bored tone.\n\nShe felt stupid, dirty and ashamed as well as in pain. Again she reached out for her clothes, trying desperately to hide her nakedness with her free arm. Danny's phone clicked. She glared up at him.\n\n'Just a couple of pictures of you crawling naked in the grass, just in case you decide to tell anyone about our picnic,' he said clicking the camera on the phone once again.\n\nHer fingers were numb as she fumbled with the fastening on her bra. 'Shall I help you fasten that?' Billy said laughing.\n\n'Don't... don't you dare touch me,' she said, staring angrily at him. 'Keep away,' she screamed.\n\nBilly looked as though he was going to hit her. 'Leave her be Billy, she's not worth it. Let her scream all she wants nobody can hear her here.'\n\nSilently, she followed them back to the car. As they neared their vehicle she saw an elderly man walking his dog in the distance. Danny turned to her as if reading her thoughts. 'Don't even think about it unless you want us to kill him,' he said flicking open a knife.\n\nShe froze. Danny sounded serious and she now knew only too well what they were capable of. If they attacked him what else would they do to her? They had her picture. Who'd believe that she wasn't involved? The man walked closer.\n\n'She'll let you and the dog have a go for a tenner mister,' Billy shouted loudly.\n\nThe man put his head down and ambled on.\n\nPam looked ashamedly at the grass beneath her feet as she walked on. The man shouted his dog to heel and when she looked his way he had turned and had began walking in the opposite direction. Who could blame him?\n\nPam sat in the back of the car that was now strewn with cast-off food cartons, drink cans, pizza boxes and chip wrappers. She stared at the mess as if seeing it for the first time. She could taste vomit and smell alcohol and the stale cigarette smoke upon her. Hurting, she moaned. Quietly she closed her eyes and as she did so she was lulled by the motion of the car, which gave her a little comfort.\n\n'I suppose you expect us to drop you off at home?' Danny said.\n\nShe nodded weakly, glancing up for one moment to see the stranger's eyes peering back at her from the car's rear view mirror.\n\n'You'll be okay when you calm down. Remember what we said, say nothing and you'll be okay,' he said in a gentler tone.\n\nWas this really the Danny she had fallen head over heels for?\n\n'Yeah cross us and we'll show everybody your tits on the internet,' Billy said. 'Mind you, they're not bad,' he said.\n\nPam's lips were swollen and she could taste blood in her mouth. The journey home seemed to take forever but eventually she could see the familiar buildings on her street out of the window. The car came to an abrupt halt. Billy got out and opened the door. Reaching into the back he grabbed Pam's arm and unceremoniously bundled her out onto the pavement.\n\n'Remember, say anything and there'll be trouble,' Danny called after her. He revved the engine ferociously three times. She stood at the gate looking dishevelled and forlorn. Danny drove off at speed, sounding the horn for everyone in the street to hear which spurred Pam into action. She ran into the house and locked the door behind her.\n\nPam held her breath and listened. Her mum and dad were still at work and she exhaled a sigh of relief. She ran straight upstairs and into the bathroom where she stripped off all her clothes. Feeling uncomfortable with her nakedness she grabbed her dressing gown and hurriedly set the shower running. Slowly she turned and caught her reflection in the mirror as she de-robed. Not only was her mouth red and bruised but there was a great welt on her arm. 'Oh God,' she said, gasping as she put her hand up to the tender flesh of her breasts that bore red, angry teeth marks.\n\nShe climbed into the shower and reached for the loofah. Scrubbing her skin until it felt sore, the feeling of nausea suddenly took over as she saw the river of dried blood on the inside of her thigh. She slid down the shower cubicle and sat on the floor of the stall, letting the water pelt down on her body like hailstones.\n\nSuddenly, she twitched as if she had been falling into a semi-conscious sleep. The side of her face was squashed against the shower cubicle door. How long had she been there? The bathroom was full of steam. Fighting to stay lucid she managed to push the door open and claw herself up with the aid of the towel rail. She turned off the water. Wincing, she buffed herself dry with a big, soft towel. She wrapped a turban around her head and grabbed her toothbrush to brush her teeth until her gums bled. She swilled her mouth with cap after cap of mouthwash that burned, but it felt good.\n\nAs soon as she was dry she felt dirty again, dirty, used and stupid. She sobbed and sat in the corner of the bathroom on its cold tiled floor. She had no concept of time but slowly she gathered her clothes from the floor and, screwing them up, she threw them into the bin. She put on her Disney tracksuit and curled up on her bed. Her eyes closed, she cried hugging herself until she drifted to sleep.\n\n'Pam. I'm home. Where are you darling?' Pam's mum's voice intruded into her dream and before she had fully woken her mum was through the bedroom door and at her side.\n\n'What on earth?' she said, seeing her little girl's form curled up in a ball under the duvet. 'You ill? Did they send you home from school? You should have called me,' she said stroking, the top of her daughter's head. Her hand wandered under the covers to her brow where she let it linger to see if it were hot.\n\nShe sat beside Pam on the bed like she used to when she was little and reached out to cradle her in her arms. Pam couldn't look at her. 'What on earth has happened to your face?' she said, holding Pam's face by the chin and turning it this way and that. Pam's face screwed up and crying hysterically she held her mother tightly.\n\n'Mum,' she whimpered.\n\n'Darling, look at me, has someone hurt you? I need to know.'\n\nHolding her daughter close quietened Pam but, she didn't speak. Linda stroked her daughter's head soothingly.\n\n'I know some of my jewellery and money's gone missing. You've been bullied haven't you?' she said lifting Pam's face to look at her.\n\n'Oh, sweetheart we can sort it, don't worry,' Linda said. 'I'm not cross with you.'\n\nLinda pulled away slightly to get a look at Pam's face once again but Pam clung to her mum's jumper as if her life depended on it.\n\n'You're safe now baby, you're safe. I told your dad there was something wrong. You were so... so quiet when we went to France. Tell mummy what it is,' Linda coaxed.\n\n'I've been raped, mum.'\n\n'What?' Linda yelled, as her heart stopped and she gasped for air. \n\n## Chapter 30\n\n'She's never thirteen with tits like that,' Billy said as he looked at Pam's image on the phone's gallery.\n\n'Nah, she were making it up so we wouldn't do her,' Danny said as he tapped his fingers on the steering wheel.\n\n'Do you think she'll blag?'\n\n'She can please herself Billy. As far as I'm concerned she was up for it. She was the one who gave us the come on; that's our story and we're sticking to it right? And she told us she was sixteen didn't she?' Danny said.\n\nBilly looked confused, 'No, she told us she was thirteen.'\n\n'She didn't, she told us she was sixteen,' Danny said, nodding his head and winking at his friend. Danny tutted, 'If you had a brain you'd be friggin dangerous man,' he laughed.\n\n'She's fit though in't she,' Billy said, still studying her pictures.\n\n'Delete the one where you can see her bawling,' said Danny.\n\n'Oh, yeah, smart. Are we still gonna see if we can see that copper's daughter? I'm in the mood now.' Billy gave Danny a cheesy grin.\n\n'Once you've been let loose there's no stopping you is there? Why not, I'm worried that you might be coming a bit of a cradle snatcher though,' he scoffed.\n\nDanny pulled up outside the school entrance. Within minutes Billy had spotted Sara Whitworth running out of the gates and he signalled her appearance to Danny. Her run soon slowed to a walk.\n\nWhen she was far enough up the road not to suspect them following her, Danny swung the car out of the lay-by and did a three-point turn in the road. Slowly and quietly the car crept close to the kerb behind her. At the very same point as the day before she crossed the road towards the green and they knew she would walk towards the swings. Danny steered the car past her and laid on its horn. Sara didn't give the car driver the satisfaction of a look as she put her nose in the air and walked on. Danny expertly steered the car at speed on the road leading to the children's playground.\n\n'Drop me off at the car park near the picnic area,' said Billy.\n\n'What you got in mind?' asked Danny. Billy put his finger to his nose. 'That's for me to know and you to find out,' he said.\n\n'Moron,' said Danny.\n\nSara walked across the grass swinging her schoolbag in the air. It was a lovely day and she tipped her face to the sky to catch the warm afternoon sun. Being stuck in a classroom all day wasn't her idea of fun; she'd much rather be outside.\n\nBilly squatted in the bushes, sniggering to himself. Seeing her pass he leapt from his haunches and grabbed her round the waist. Before she could scream he had his hand over her mouth.\n\n'Tell your dad I'm repaying a debt. Tell him he doesn't bully me or my mate and get away with it, right?'\n\nSara gasped for air,\n\n'Keep looking behind ya', coz next time. I plan to rape you,' he growled, rubbing his hand down her stomach towards her crutch. 'Go, run, as fast as you can to daddy,' Billy said menacingly as he released her from his grip. Laughing in a sinister manner he put a firm hand to her back and pushed her away from him.\n\nAt first she shuffled a few steps, and then, when she knew she was free, she ran like the wind \u2013 or at least as fast as her wobbly legs would carry her. Billy turned; ducked back into the bushes and out the other side. Looking both ways to make sure there was no one around, he ran quickly and jumped into the waiting black Subaru.\n\n'Go, go, go Danny,' he yelled at the top of his voice. 'Maybe daddy might think twice about kneeing people in the bollocks now, eh?' he smirked, relaxing back in the passenger seat with a sigh of satisfaction. His friend shook his head.\n\n'Thanks for that mate,' he said, throwing Billy an endearing look.\n\n'Wassak,' he replied.\n\n'Fancy a McDonald's?' Danny said, grinning.\n\n'Yeah, think I deserve a Big Mac.'\n\n'We'll be on CCTV there. Good alibi mate,' said Danny.\n\n'You think of everything don't you?' Billy grinned.\n\nIt was reasonably quiet at McDonald's and they got served straight away.\n\n'I think I'm in love,' Billy cooed as he threw his tray of food on a table. There was a young man sitting at a nearby table tightly holding a bunch of flowers.\n\n'What's your fucking problem, nobhead?' Billy asked. The man stuck a middle finger in the air and resumed drinking his Coke through a straw.\n\n'Weirdo,' Danny said screwing up his nose.\n\n'I'm gonna have the fucking twat,' said Billy. 'Nobody does that to us and gets away with it, right Danny?' Billy rose from his chair and its legs scraped nosily on the tiled floor. The young man stared at Billy with deep-set dark eyes that were hidden under his woollen hat.\n\n'Leave it,' Danny said, blocking his friend's path. 'Look, her, over there,' he pointed to a young waitress who was giving him the eye. 'I think she fancies me,' he whispered. The waitress winked and proceeded to clear the tables around them. Slowly but surely she got to theirs. She stood with her hand on the back of Danny's chair and holding a wet cloth with the other.\n\n'Did you notice how dark it was last night Billy?' The waitress leaned over to pick up their used cartons, exposing a large cleavage.\n\n'No, why?' asked Billy, screwing up his nose.\n\n'Because this little angel must have fallen from heaven,' Danny said, smiling up at the waitress.\n\n'Can I get you two any fink else?' she giggled. Billy was transfixed.\n\n'When's your next day off?' Billy asked, speaking directly to the waitress's chest.\n\n'You're cute,' she said. 'Tomorrow actually, why have you something in mind?'\n\n'Well it could be your lucky day,' he grinned.\n\nShe reached over and pulled up Danny's sleeve. Taking a pen out of her top pocket she held his hand in hers as she wrote down her phone number on his forearm. 'Anytime after eleven,' she said, pulling the sleeve back down and releasing his hand slowly from hers.\n\n'I'm Danny and this is my mate Billy,' he said.\n\n'I'm Shaz, will you be coming?' she said, looking at Billy.\n\n'I hope so,' he replied, swallowing hard.\n\n'Well who knows it might just be your lucky day too little man,' she said over her shoulder as she winked at the boys and walked back to the counter.\n\n'I'll call you. Can we have more Cokes over here, gorgeous,' Danny said.\n\n'Large ones?' she called back.\n\nBilly nodded as he watched their new-found friend. Neither spoke a word. As she walked back to the table, Billy noticed the man watching her and he glared at him with his chin jutted out towards him. Shaz put the drinks on the table and leaned heavily against Danny's arm.\n\n'Who's that fucking weirdo?' Billy asked, nodding in the man's direction.\n\n'Ah, he's harmless. Me mate Tracy says he's in love with me,' she said. 'Bless him, he comes in most days and sits there holding a bunch of flowers. Tracy finks that he's too shy to give them me, he always take them home with him,' Shaz whispered in Billy's ear as he drank his Coke through a straw. 'I'm glad he doesn't give them me; they're those ones that stink vile,' she laughed heartily.\n\n'Fucking wanker,' Billy shouted out loud in his direction. 'He better leave our girl alone from now on.'\n\nShaz smiled as she walked back to the counter wiggling her large hips for their benefit.\n\n'I am in love Danny,' Billy said, visibly swooning. 'Now that's what you call a woman.'\n\nDanny laughed. 'You were in love with Pam two minutes ago. Make your bloody mind up.'\n\n'Shaz what?' Danny asked as they passed the waitress to leave.\n\n'McDonald,' she said pointing to the McDonald's sign. 'That's what they call me.'\n\nDanny placed a ten pound note down her blouse. 'For you,' he whispered in her ear. 'Don't work too hard, it could be a tiring day tomorrow,' he said with a wink.\n\n'Hey, Danny you don't think maybe we should have offered to wait and give her a lift home do you?' asked Billy, as they stepped outside. 'We don't want him to spoil our fun,' he said, throwing a backward glance at the man sat at the table near the window with the bunch of flowers still firmly in his grasp.\n\n'Patience, Billy,' he laughed as he strutted down the precinct in front of his friend without looking back at McDonalds or the girls watching after them.\n\n'I think I'm gonna dream about Shaz all night.' Billy pulled at the crutch of his trousers. 'I'm getting a stiffy.'\n\n'Pam or Sara?' asked Danny.\n\n'Nah, Shaz is the only girl for me now,' sighed Billy.\n\n## Chapter 31\n\n'My God! Look at me Pam,' Linda said, tilting her daughter's face to her.\n\n'When did it happen? Where? Your dad'll... The police, we must report it,' Linda cried. She sobbed as she rocked her daughter in her arms.\n\nIt wasn't long before two Police cars were gracing the driveway of the Forrester's home. Linda's call to her husband's receptionist had sounded frantic. Bill bounded into the house still in his dentist's scrubs.\n\n'Where's Pam?' he asked as Linda flew into this arms.\n\n'She's safe. She's upstairs with one of our female officers, sir,' the young uniformed officer answered as Bill held his wailing wife to him. He stroked her hair and made soothing sounds in an attempt to stem her tears.\n\n'Can I see her? Is she okay?' he whispered, to the officer over the top of Linda's head. 'What's happened?'\n\nAn older looking lady, with kind eyes, walked down the steps towards them and stopped midway. 'I'm sorry Mr Forrester, you can't,' she said softly. 'Your daughter has been raped and we have to be ever so careful about contamination at this stage. Even though your daughter has had a shower, we want the best chance of obtaining any evidence that remains. We'll look after her, I promise you,' she said reassuringly.\n\nBill Forrester looked horror-struck. 'What?' he said with a lump in his throat that threatened tears.\n\n'Once we've gone through the routine procedure here, we'll take her down to a specialist suite we have at the Child Protection Unit. She'll need to have a medical examination and make a statement,' the plain-clothes officer explained.\n\n'If you could just give us ten minutes sir?'\n\nMr Forrester nodded, a numb expression on his ashen face.\n\n'I'll put the kettle on,' Linda said, wiping a lone tear that tricked down her already mottled red, puffy, cheek. Bill smiled kindly at his wife but the smile didn't reach his eyes.\n\n'That would be lovely, thank you,' said the officer.\n\nBill Forrester followed his wife into the kitchen. They could hear the uniformed police officer talking on the radio in the hallway. Appearing at the kitchen door, she made her apologies and left to attend another call.\n\n'What's Pam said?' Bill asked his wife.\n\n'Not a lot. Older boys who abused her naivety, and treated her badly from what I can gather. There isn't enough education in her world, Bill. She didn't say who they were, where it happened or when, all I know it's happened today. They could've killed her,' Linda cried. 'She's only a baby, my baby,'\n\nBill reached out to his wife and she went into his arms. He held her tight for a moment or two as she clung to him and sobbed as if she would never stop.\n\nThe whistling kettle pierced the tension of that moment and, on automatic pilot, Linda robotically pulled away from Bill's embrace and started to take cups out of the cupboard and place them on the work surface. How many did she need? She couldn't think straight. She placed four tea bags in the teapot and hoped that would suffice, filled a milk jug and slid the sugar bowl onto the wooden tray.\n\n'Why do people always make tea in times of shock?' Linda said with a sniff as she wiped her nose with a tissue before stuffing it in her trouser pocket. Bill shook his head.\n\n'I know I need something stronger than bloody tea,' he said, as he perched on a stool at breakfast station and put his head in his hands. 'When I find the bastard that did this to our Pam I swear I'll...' he cried, dragging his hands through his hair. 'Let's just say they won't get the chance to do it again,' Bill said grinding his teeth. Linda saw the hatred in his eyes and she knew he wasn't lying.\n\n'I'll get you a brandy,' she said. Collecting a glass from the cabinet she headed for the drinks globe, poured a large Cognac and handed it to him. He took the bottle from her hand, drank from the glass and filled it again.\n\nLinda took the tea upstairs with an assortment of biscuits on a plate. Pam's door was still closed and she paused awkwardly outside, not knowing what to do. Her hands occupied, she tapped the door with her foot and an officer opened it just enough to take the tray from her. The room with its curtains drawn was dark compared to the rest of the house and she couldn't see her daughter but could hear a mumbling of voices.\n\n'We shouldn't be much longer now,' she whispered. 'Could I just remind you not to touch any of the clothes that Pam was wearing, please,' she said.\n\n'No, no I won't. I've already been told to leave them. Me and her dad are downstairs in the kitchen if you want us.'\n\nLinda and Bill sat in silence sipping their drinks as they stared into space. They waited for the sound of Pam's door opening, or a creak of a floorboard on the stairs that would indicate to them that someone was leaving her room.\n\n'She didn't have a boyfriend did she?' asked Bill.\n\nLinda shook her head. 'Not that I'm aware of, no.' The two looked at each other, a question was on their lips, but neither of them spoke.\n\n'She only goes to the riding stable on her own, apart from school. Do you think it's someone she met there?' Linda said, putting her hand to her mouth to silence her gasp. Bill shrugged his shoulders.\n\nA shuffling of feet upstairs warned them that someone was on the move. Bill jumped off his stool and Linda followed him out into the hall. A uniformed officer was coming down the stairs with a number of brown sealed bags in her hands. 'Pam's clothes,' she said, as if she needed to explain. Pam followed behind, her pallor grey. She looked longingly at her parents with sad puppy dog red eyes. Bill and Linda both smiled at her, eyes filled with tears.\n\n'Mrs Forrester,' the plain-clothes officer said, breaking their reverie. 'We'll need you to come with us so that you can consent to the examination and to be the adult present for the interview, if you would?'\n\nLinda nodded, smiling weakly. 'Of course,' she said softly. She reached out and grabbed her coat from a peg in the hallway, a force of habit as it wasn't cold.\n\n'Is it alright if I come along?' asked Bill.\n\n'Yes, of course Mr Forrester but I think it best if mum sits in on the interview,' she said.\n\n'I understand. It's just... I want to be there.'\n\n'That's not a problem. It's likely to take a few hours so be prepared for a wait. We'll have to take photographs and there will be a medical examination. Do you both want to follow us in your car?'\n\n'Yes, whatever's best,' Bill said heading for the kitchen to pick his car keys from the breakfast bar where he'd left them.\n\n'Should you be driving?' asked the uniformed officer as he passed her in the hallway. Bill handed his keys to his wife. 'Perhaps not,' he said wanly realising how much alcohol he had consumed.\n\nBill and Linda followed the police car that transported their daughter. 'Keep positive love. At least she's alive,' Bill said, trying to comfort her.\n\n'I know,' she sighed. 'We have to think she's one of the lucky ones. She shouldn't be going through this. We should have been able to protect her.'\n\n'Don't even go there,' he said, and she saw his jaw tighten.\n\n'What if they've given her some horrible disease,' Linda said, with a sob that caught in the back of her throat and made her cough.\n\n'She needs us to support her. We can't go thinking anything like that otherwise we'll go to pieces. We don't know exactly what's happened yet; so let's not let our imagination run wild yet, eh? One step at a time,' he said, with a glace in her direction as he patted her leg.\n\nThe building they were led to wasn't the police station as Bill and Linda expected, but a large detached stone dwelling that could have been someone's home. Bill was shown into a lounge area, while Linda went with Pam and the officers into what he was told was the medical room.\n\n'The doctor should be here in the next half an hour. Can I get you a coffee or a cup of tea?' the clerical officer asked him.\n\n'Thank you,' Bill said as he watched the lady go into the kitchenette. He heard her filling the kettle, saw her arm reach to a shelf for a mug and listened as she opened a drawer where no doubt she got out a spoon.\n\n'Sugar?' she shouted.\n\n'Yes please, two,' Bill said.\n\n'Will this doctor be a man or a woman?' Bill asked as he stood up and started to read the posters that were pinned to the wall. 'Chlamydia' one read, another 'Vaginal Warts'. He shuddered and turned away.\n\n'I'm sorry I don't know. It just depends who's the police surgeon on call, but don't worry, they're all really lovely,' she reassured as she studied him over her half moon glasses from the doorway.\n\nBill walked back to his seat and sat down, leaned forward and picked up a magazine from the low table in the centre of the room and prepared himself for the wait.\n\n'I'm sorry, mum, for causing you all this trouble,' Pam said, as she sat on the examination table with her bare legs dangling over its side. She was draped in a dressing gown and looked so young and forlorn that all Linda wanted to do was cuddle her.\n\n'You haven't caused us any trouble darling, you never have. Stop blaming yourself. We'll get through this together, don't worry, everything will be alright,' she sighed, patting the bed beside her daughter as she realised she couldn't touch her, just in time. Her hand rested on the bed. 'I'm just so glad you told me and didn't try to deal with this all by yourself.'\n\n'Doc's here,' said the plain-clothes officer, rushing into the room. Seconds later the door opened with a creak and closed with a groan.\n\nDoctor Lesley Lord proved to be sweet, gentle and kind, with the best of bedside manners.\n\n'Pam, this is going to be a bit uncomfortable for you, but we need to take some samples. First of all I need some of your hair,' she said, combing Pam's locks with care. She collected the hair caught in the brush's bristles.\n\n'This may seem insignificant to you, but it may give us anybody else's hair that may have become entangled with your own, on contact,' she said gently.\n\nPam shivered as the thought of her ordeal came back to haunt her.\n\n'You cold?' Doctor Lord said.\n\n'No,' said Pam.\n\n'Next I'm going to have to cut a sample of your hair, but we'll do it from underneath so you won't be able to see. I'm no hairdresser, as my friends will tell you,' she smiled kindly at Pam. 'I once tried to cut my best friend's fringe and twenty years later she still hasn't forgiven me.\n\n'The next sample is a bit more intimate I'm afraid. I'm going to have to take a sample of your pubic hair. Do you understand Pam? Is that okay?' Pam nodded her head as the doctor guided her down to lie on the bed.\n\nThe room was deathly quiet and the lighting was dimmed. Doctor Lord directed a spotlight onto Pam's body. Pam could hear the telephone ringing in the next room and a mumble of voices as she stared up at the ceiling, praying for the whole thing to come to an end. She felt a gloved hand run over her body.\n\n'I'm examining your body for any bits, scratches or bruising Pam, then I'll take swabs and taping from your breasts and legs. This might help to pick up traces of semen or saliva that your attackers might have left behind.'\n\nPam swallowed hard as tears came into her eyes and rolled down the side of her head onto the pillow beneath.\n\n'I'm sorry,' said Doctor Lord, 'but I am going to have to take some internal swabs from you in case they deny having sexual intercourse with you. Are you okay with that?'\n\nPam nodded once more but didn't take her eyes from the circle of light on the ceiling as she reached out for her mum's hand. The doctor nodded to Linda that contact was okay and she let her daughter squeeze her hand tight.\n\n## Chapter 32\n\nBill Forrester wasn't the only father in the neighbourhood rushing to his daughter's aid. PC Tim Whitworth switched on the sirens on his police vehicle and sped as fast he could to his home address when he got the call.\n\nBraking hard, the car screeched to a skidding halt outside his house and he struggled, due to his size, to disembark in haste. Sara sat shaking in his wife's embrace as he walked through the door.\n\n'This is your bloody fault,' Frances, his wife, said. 'Someone's attacked her because of you,' she spat out the words with pure venom.\n\n'Be quiet woman,' he said.\n\nSitting down on the footstool in front of his daughter, he reached out and laid a caring hand on his daughter's knee. 'What's happened, love?' he asked, softly.\n\nSara looked at him with her big brown cow eyes that appeared sunken in her pale face. 'I was careful, like you always tell me to be walking home, dad,' she snivelled. 'But, he came from nowhere. I didn't hear, or see him before he...' she gulped. 'He grabbed me from behind and put a hand over my mouth,' she swallowed as she struggled to get the words out between sobs. '... then he told me to tell you to stop bullying people or next time he'd rape me,' she cried.\n\n'And what happened then?' Tim asked.\n\n'He pushed me and told me to run,' she sobbed. 'So I did, as fast as I could, and I didn't stop until I got home.'\n\n'Did you see who it was?'\n\n'No, I just remember the smell of alcohol and cigarettes and his stupid laugh,' she said, grimacing.\n\n'For God's sake Tim, she told you he grabbed her from behind, what kind of a policeman are you?' Frances scowled at her husband. 'Don't you ever bloody listen?' she cried, laying her daughter's head to her bosom as she rocked her gently.\n\nThere was a knock at the open front door and uniformed officers walked in. Tim Whitworth nodded to his colleagues. The story was related to them and they began a search of the area where the offence had taken place.\n\nCID were contacted and arrived along, with the scenes of crime officers. It was all a bit of a blur for Sara. They needed her coat, they explained, for possible fibre transfers; a sample of her hair to compare against any others they found and they needed a swab of her face to see if they could get DNA from the offender in case he hadn't been wearing gloves. The officers told her that anything at this stage was worth a try to identify the person responsible.\n\n'This is all because of your flaming job,' Frances whispered to her husband as he followed her into the kitchen. She switched the kettle on and collected cups from the draining board. She could see her daughter speaking to an officer from where they stood. 'Don't you realise, she could have been killed. What if he'd have a knife? What if he had raped her?' she said, suppressing a cry. 'We've had a lucky escape this time but this isn't going to happen again. I want you to resign with immediate effect.'\n\n'There you go again. It's always the bloody jobs' fault isn't it? The last thing Sara needs now is to hear us arguing,' Tim said in a hushed tone. He picked steaming cups of coffee from the worktop and marched into the lounge. Frances watched him hand them to the officers and walk back to her.\n\n'This isn't just another one of your incidents,' she said handing him the milk and sugar bowl. He grabbed hold of them but she held on tight. 'This is our daughter's life we're talking about,' she said with her voice rising. He turned his back. She stood close behind him. 'Oh, it'll be the same tomorrow and the day after that. There is always going to be someone wanting revenge because of you, you arrogant bastard,' she said.\n\n'It's only arrogance when you're wrong. I'm never wrong,' Tim Whitworth turned to answer his wife as he stepped forward. Reaching the coffee table, he slammed the milk and sugar down and flopped in his easy chair. His only ambition at that moment was to find out who had threatened his daughter \u2013 because once he had found out they wouldn't be able to ever threaten anyone again.\n\n'If you won't do anything, I will,' Frances continued much to the other officer's surprise. 'I'm taking Sara to mum and dad's and we're not coming back till you catch him or you leave the Force, do you hear me?' she yelled grabbing Sara by the hand and pulling her up from the settee, she headed for the stairs. What did this say about him, them, their marriage? He wondered. Tim looked across at the two officers, who sipped their drinks in an embarrassed silence.\n\n'Mum, I'm okay. Don't fuss,' he heard Sara cry. 'I'd rather go to school and be with my mates. Really, I'm alright now.'\n\n'Just for a few days,' she said, as she pushed her daughter into her bedroom and slammed the door behind them.\n\nTim Whitworth raised his eyebrows to the ceiling at his colleagues who rose from their seats, shook his hand and wished him the best of luck as they left.\n\nTim climbed the stairs, knocked on Sara's bedroom door and opened it with trepidation. He found Frances throwing clothes into a holdall. Tim sat beside his daughter on the bed. She blew out a breath of exasperation before getting up and walking out of the door. Settling on the top step, she leaned heavily against the wall as tears ran freely down her face.\n\n'I've got to ask you love,' he said. 'Did he touch you?' Tim said as he sat beside his daughter and handed her his handkerchief.\n\n'He put his hand on my stomach and down towards my legs,' she whispered mimicking his actions. Tim closed his eyes and looked heavenward.\n\n'But it was over my coat Dad. He didn't DO anything,' she said, her face turning mottled shades of red.\n\n'Oh my God,' Frances screeched rushing out of the bedroom on hearing her daughter's admission. Tim laid a hand around his daughter's shoulders.\n\n'And you're sure you don't know who it was?' she said, as she stood behind them, clothes hung over her shoulder and dangling from her arms.\n\n'A lad from school perhaps, did you recognise the voice?' Tim asked.\n\n'No Dad. If I knew who it was I would have said. Do I really have to go to Gran's with mum?' she said with a whine. 'I want to stay here with you,' she said, turning her head into his shoulder.\n\n'It might be for the best, love,' Tim said, looking round at his wife. 'Just for a few days, to put your mum's mind at rest.' He squeezed her tight.\n\n'Who've you been upsetting who knows our Sara?' Frances said.\n\n'No one that I can think of,' he said.\n\n'Trouble with your dad Sara is that he has lulled himself into a false sense of competence and for once in his life he needs to stop talking and get something done, because until he does we won't be coming back. Nobody in their right mind threatens a young girl just because their dad's given them a speeding ticket. So whatever he's done, it must be bad.'\n\n'For God sake woman, I'm trying,' he yelled. 'But running away to your mum's is hardly gonna help is it?'\n\n'Help who, you, the job, our daughter, or me? If you think I'm gonna sit around here waiting for our daughter to get raped, then you've another thing coming,' she said as she flew past them, bags in hand, down into the kitchen and two minutes later she stood waiting in the hallway with the car keys in her hand.\n\n'I'll ring you to let you know we've arrived,' she said, beckoning her daughter. 'This needs sorting Tim, and quick,' she said, grabbing Sara's hand in one hand and the bags in the other before heading out of the front door.\n\n'Bye Dad', Sara sobbed. 'I'm sorry.'\n\nTim ran after them; the door slammed and locked behind him. He looked back in despair.\n\n'Think, did you see anything at all, anything that was out of the ordinary', he begged as Frances slammed the passenger side door, her daughter safely inside.\n\nSara wound down the window. 'No, I just left school as usual. There were crowds. There were cars. But the only one I remember was Pam Forrester's friend's car; he papped his horn as he went past,' she shrugged.\n\n'Okay. If you remember anything else, let me know,' he said as their car pulled away. 'I'll sort it, I promise,' he called out after them.\n\nHe turned and secured the front door, retrieved the police car keys from his trouser pocket and got in. He turned the ignition on. Putting frighteners on a young girl could only be the trait of a coward. Who did he know who fitted that description?\n\n## Chapter 33\n\nBrian Stevenson was late, and Dylan was just beginning to think he wasn't coming, when his office door was flung open.\n\n'I'll take him straight into the front office, sir,' DS Spiers said, her hand still on the door handle.\n\n'And I'll be with you in a few minutes if you want to get started taking down his details,' he said, as he put the top on his pen.\n\nThe door slammed behind her.\n\nAs she set eyes on Brian Stevenson in the foyer, Taylor Spiers immediately noted that he was smartly dressed in an expensive suit, complemented by a cashmere scarf. The undeniably strong bergamot aroma of his Vera Wang eau de toilette filled the small interview room. This wasn't a man who bought cheap, she knew, as the very same scent had put her back a good few pounds on many occasions.\n\n'Now, how do you think I can help you, my dear?' he said, staring at her for a moment before cocking his head in a way that reminded her of a bird listening for worms in the ground.\n\nHe very slowly put his hands together on the table, which showed off gold cufflinks, and gave her a sickly smile. At their first meeting she had thought him quite attractive. Instinctively she now saw before her a smooth-talking serpent-like man who looked like nothing more than a snake in the grass.\n\n'We need clarification on one or two issues, Mr Stevenson.' Taylor cleared her throat as she opened the file and pulled out several pieces of paper. 'Please bear with me until Inspector Dylan arrives,' she said with authority.\n\n'Of course, sweetheart,' he said as he pulled his seat nearer the table. The sound of the chair's feet dragging on the tiles set her teeth on edge and she shuddered involuntarily.\n\n'Did you happen to locate the relevant business documents I asked you about last time we spoke?' said Taylor.\n\nMr Stevenson opened his mouth as if to speak just as the interview room door opened and Dylan walked in. Taylor blew out a relieved breath.\n\n'Can I introduce my boss, Detective Inspector Jack Dylan, to you Mr Stevenson,' she said politely and Dylan nodded in Brian Stevenson's direction.\n\n'Please continue,' Dylan said.\n\n'Where were we Inspector?' Stevenson asked Taylor, looking slightly confused.\n\n'It's Detective Sergeant Spiers, Mr Stevenson, as I keep reminding you. Documents?' she said, tapping her pen impatiently on the table.\n\n'My accountants assured me he'd send them to you,' he said with a surprised look upon his face.\n\n'Well he hasn't. One thing I need to understand, and perhaps you can help me with in the meantime, is why you've had such large amounts of money deposited into your bank account this year.'\n\n'Oh, I understand,' he laughed a smoke and whisky laugh. 'Money, you see my dear is paid into my account from several companies and then I pass this onto my clients. Business has been good.'\n\n'Talking of your clients, Mr Stevenson, you told me previously that Mildred Sykes had released equity from her property. Can you tell me how much that was?' continued DS Spiers.\n\n'Oh, quite a lot,' he mused. 'Several thousand pounds.'\n\nDylan sat quietly watching Brian Stevenson's body language as answered the questions put to him.\n\n'I did warn her not to keep money in the house,' Brian Stevenson said, shaking his head.\n\n'You mean you paid her in cash?' asked a wide eyed Taylor.\n\n'Yes,' he said, nonplussed. Taylor appeared lost for words.\n\n'So, what you're telling us, Mr Stevenson, is that there is no paper trail?' said Dylan.\n\n'That's the way she wanted it. She was a cute old bird, Mildred was.'\n\n'Obviously not cute enough,' mumbled Taylor under her breath. 'Do you have any idea why she wanted the money?' she asked.\n\n'No. Mildred wasn't for small talk. Different as chalk and cheese were Grace Harvey and her. In fact she could be quite abrupt, to the point of being rude, at times,' he said, thoughtfully. 'Do you think she was killed for her money?'\n\n'It's as good a motive as any, don't you think?' said Taylor.\n\n'And you're sure she never hinted to you why she wanted the money?' said Dylan, with furrowed brows.\n\n'No,' he said shaking his head.\n\n'Your gain from this equity release transaction would be what, commission, a fee?'\n\n'It depends. Most financial advisors charge a fee as well as receiving commission from the lender.'\n\n'In Mildred's case?' Dylan asked.\n\n'I managed to negotiate Mildred a free valuation survey. The lenders charged one per cent fee and they paid half of this to me. I also got her a solicitor whose fees she had to pay.'\n\n'And what happens then?' Taylor said.\n\n'The interest payment is rolled up until the house is sold either by her or her beneficiaries.'\n\n'And the solicitor's fee is?'\n\n'Usually between four and five hundred pounds.'\n\n'She paid that, how?'\n\n'I took her to the cash machine to draw the money.'\n\n'When you visited Mildred, which rooms did you visit in her house?' Dylan enquired.\n\n'The lounge, the kitchen and the bathroom, why?' he said, bottom lip protruding like a sulky child.\n\n'How often did you visit?' Dylan went on.\n\n'Depends.'\n\n'Regularly?' Taylor said with a smile. 'No, doubt your elderly clients look forward to your visits?'\n\n'Yes, I think they do,' he said, with a satisfied grin on his face. He glanced across at Dylan, who was watching him intently with a steely glare. Stevenson held his gaze and when it wasn't returned his smile faded.\n\n'The flowers,' Taylor said. Brian Stevenson looked quickly back at her. 'When did you give her the flowers?'\n\n'I can't remember when,' he said.\n\n'Where did you get them from?'\n\n'The Flower Pot Emporium, I always get flowers from Linda. Look, how long am I going to be here?'\n\n'I'd like you to come with me so that I can take your fingerprints and DNA for elimination purposes, Mr Stevenson,' Taylor said, pushing her chair back and standing up.\n\n'Oh,' he said, obviously taken aback. 'I hope it's painless,' he laughed waspishly as he stood.\n\n'Sorry, just before you do, DS Spiers,' Dylan said. 'Mr Stevenson, I'll need a list of your current clients, please.'\n\n'Er... er yes,' he stammered.\n\n'In fact, no, send me a list of your clients over the past five years and mark it for my urgent attention when you do.' Dylan said, thoughtfully as he rubbed the forming stubble on his face. 'I want them as a matter of urgency.'\n\n'Yes, I'll see to it directly,' he said, sitting back down.\n\n'Sooner rather than later, please,' Dylan said, waving him away to join Taylor. 'Just as a matter of interest,' Dylan said to the retreating Brian Stevenson, who stopped suddenly in his tracks. 'Are a large percentage of your clients elderly?'\n\nStevenson turned. 'Well, yes, they are. That's not a crime is it?'\n\n'No, not that I know of,' Dylan said. 'But if you continue to lose them at this rate you're not going to have a business for long, are you?'\n\n'Oh, of course. I see what you mean.' Brian Stevenson stepped in Taylor's direction and she opened the door.\n\n'Have you had a burglary at your home lately?' Dylan said. Mr Stevenson didn't reply or turn around to face Dylan. 'Because DS Spiers tells me that she saw damage to your door when she visited but you told her there hadn't been a break-in. Then you told another officer there had, so which is it?'\n\nBrian Stevenson pivoted around to face Dylan.\n\n'I thought someone had caused a bit of damage to the door. Later I discovered someone had been inside,' he said.\n\n'I understand you told my officer you'd reported it, but you haven't, have you? Why?' Dylan continued. He could see Brian Stevenson becoming agitated.\n\n'I meant to, but...' he said, dropping his shoulders and letting out a tired sigh.\n\n'So have you reported it now?' Dylan asked.\n\n'Yes I... I telephoned the non-emergency number on the leaflet that was pushed through my letterbox and someone took details and gave me a number,' he said studying for a moment. 'A crime number. I think they said that I would need for insurance purposes.'\n\nDylan made a mental note to get his story checked out. 'So what did the thieves steal Mr Stevenson, anything?'\n\n'Cash and a clock that was left to me.'\n\n'Not a television?'\n\n'No, your officers asked me about that, but I... I sold it. Look, do I need a solicitor?'\n\n'Do you think you need a solicitor?'\n\n'No.'\n\nDylan smiled. 'Then you're free to go when you've given DS Spiers your fingerprints and allowed her to take a buccal swab.'\n\nDylan followed them into the fingerprint room and stood leaning against the door jamb while Taylor opened drawers and extracted forms to be completed. Opening the fingerprint inkpad, she reached for Brian Stevenson's hand.\n\n'Any idea who might've broken into your house?' Dylan asked. Brian Stevenson concentrated hard as Taylor Spiers rolled his fingers one by one on the fingerprint ink and then onto the designated places on the form. Without looking at Dylan he shook his head.\n\n'Do you know, DS Spiers, I once knew someone who took the same fingerprint for each space on the form as the others were in plaster,' Dylan said. Brian Stevenson never flinched. 'Did you see anyone acting suspicious around your house, Mr Stevenson?' he asked.\n\nTaylor Spiers handed Brian Stevenson a cloth to wipe his hands. 'Look,' he said, impatiently. 'I've got an appointment to keep, when can I go?\n\n'In a minute, sir,' said Taylor as she extracted a cotton bud-like implement with cotton swab on the end of a longer reach from a DNA collection kit. 'Can I just check you have nothing in your mouth.'\n\nBrian Stevenson opened his mouth wide. 'Now can you swallow for me and open again so I can buccal swab the inside of your cheek.'\n\nBrian Stevenson did as he was told and Taylor inserted the swab. 'Just the same pressure as brushing your teeth, sir, it should only take about thirty seconds to scrap the inside of each cheek, lightly.'\n\n'The term 'Buccal swab' derives from the Latin, Bucca, meaning cheek and a swab, therefore, refers to a DNA collection process involving cells taken from the cheek,' Dylan informed him.\n\nBrian Stevenson swallowed and licked his lips. 'All done,' Taylor said, as she inserted the swab into a tube to keep it sterile and snapped the top shut.\n\n'Now, can I go?'\n\n'Yes, but before you do, can you just tell me about the clock that was stolen from your house. Was it identifiable?' asked Taylor.\n\n'I'd definitely know it if I saw it again.'\n\n'Good. Don't forget the documents. We don't want to have to get a warrant to search for them now do we?' Dylan said, as he reached out and took the fingerprint forms and the swab off the desk. DS Spiers silently guided Mr Stevenson out of the office.\n\n'Nice job,' said Dylan to Taylor when she joined him. Taylor looked a little confused. 'The question you put to him about the clock?' She smiled at him knowingly.\n\n'Do you think it is the one that's in the picture?'\n\nDS Spiers shrugged her shoulders. 'Could well be,' she said.\n\n'Get the photographic department to blow the shot of the clock up for us and let's see if he identifies it. I want to see the clock that was recovered from Denton and Greenwood's flat as soon as possible,' continued Dylan.\n\n'Fancy a quick one Boss?' DS Spiers asked, as she collected her coat from the back of her chair in the CID office.\n\nDylan flashed her a wide-eyed glance.\n\n'Drink?' she smiled.\n\n'Okay, just the one,' he said, slightly flustered. 'I'll see you at the Kings Head in a minute.'\n\n'Last one there pays,' she said, grabbing her bag as she hurried out. Dylan watched her out of his office window as she ran to her car.\n\nJust calling for a drink on the way home. See you soon pretty lady x, Dylan texted Jen.\n\nDylan's mobile rang just as he placed a pint of beer and a glass of wine on the table in front of Taylor. She took the opportunity to shuffle on the seat closer to him as she removed her jacket.\n\n'Somebody's popular,' she said grabbing his thigh with one hand as she picked her wine glass up with the other. She smiled at him with her perfectly painted red lips.\n\n'What the hell are you doing?' he said, furiously wiping the beer he spilled down the front of his coat.\n\n'Come on, all work and no play,' she said seductively. 'You could do with a relaxing massage.'\n\n'Yeah, and I'm going home in a minute to the woman who knows just how I like it, so don't bother,' Dylan said.\n\n## Chapter 34\n\nBill Forrester paced up and down outside the video interview room. They waited and waited as the events of his daughter's ordeal were being disseminated piece-by-piece, minute by minute, in fine detail, so the officers could gain as full a picture as possible.\n\nInside the room Pam, was telling interviewers of her first crush on a boy called Danny Denton. How she'd lied to him about her age at the beginning of their friendship but how she'd told him and his friend Billy Greenwood the truth before they raped her. She told the officers that she was flattered an older boy had paid her attention and that she had thought he loved her. She wept, and Linda's heart went out to her.\n\n'We need to start at the very beginning,' said the interviewing officer.\n\n'But that's lies, all lies. I never agreed to... I told them how old I was... when I realised what they were after,' she said with pain and anguish in her eyes. 'I didn't want sex. I've never.' she sobbed as she wiped away her tears.\n\n'I know, I know,' the officer said sympathetically. 'You're doing really well Pam.'\n\nBill Forrester was making plans. Once he had the names of who had done this to his daughter, it wouldn't take long to find out where they lived.\n\nPam talked. The officers took the statement. Linda had told the officers that both her shop and her husband's business premises had been broken into as well as their home over the weekend that they had been in France. They hadn't been able to figure out how the perpetrators had got in, as there had been no sign of a forced entry, but now it seemed possible that the intruders could have used a set of the Forresters' keys.\n\n'Pam, you'll have to identify the exact location that the rape took place, so a search can be done to corroborate what you have told us.'\n\nPam nodded. Linda remembered when she had been upset as a child but this time was different; she couldn't put a plaster over a wound and kiss it better. The interview seemed to go on and on and all she wanted to do was hold her hand and give her daughter a cuddle.\n\nBill Forrester looked at his watch. Almost four hours had passed. One consolation was that they were together.\n\n'What happens next?' asked Pam.\n\n'The samples that have been taken from you will be sent to Forensics for examination, along with your clothing, and the two youths accused will be traced, arrested and interviewed as soon as possible,' said the interviewing officer.\n\nPam's face was now flushed with exhaustion.\n\n'It isn't over yet though. You may have to go to court, but let's not worry about that at the moment,' said the officer kindly.\n\n'I never want to see them again, not ever,' Pam sobbed.\n\n'You did really, really well Pam. You've been very brave,' they said as Linda reached out to embrace her daughter in her arms.\n\nPC Tim Whitworth sat in his local, thinking. He stared into the glass of beer stood on the bar, which looked a bit worse for wear. Frances always blamed his job. If the tea burned it was because he was home late from work. If his shift pattern didn't permit them to go somewhere it was the job that was at fault. If they had no money, she blamed his job. In fact the police force had a lot to bloody answer for in his marriage.\n\nHe was angry, frustrated and tired, not only with the person who had threatened Sara but also with Frances. It was a coward's approach to threaten his daughter instead of him though, so he decided he had the right to be angry as he downed his third pint.\n\n'Little bastard,' he said out loud. It had to be Denton. It just had to be.\n\nDylan moved away from the saloon to hear the voice of the caller. He listened intently. Taylor sat looking up at him with puppy dog eyes.\n\n'Drink up, time to go,' he said as he rang off and hurriedly picked up his coat.\n\n'My place? I've got a nice bottle of Pinot Grigio in the fridge,' she said as she staggered around the table and followed his billowing coat out of the pub's swinging doors.\n\n'No thanks, we've an early start tomorrow and you need to get people notified so that we can lock-up Denton and Greenwood earlier than planned. They've just been named in a rape.'\n\n'It'll keep. I suppose,' she said flatly as she ran to keep up to him as he walked across the car park. What was wrong with him? He wasn't like the other guys she knew that would jump at the chance of being invited back to hers. 'I'll ring around the team leaders and get things organised for a meet at five in the morning then, shall I?' Taylor said.\n\n'Yeah, see you then.' Dylan said jumping into his car and slamming the door shut in her face. Taylor stood alone, looking bemused, as he sped away.\n\n'The good news is I'm home,' he told Jen. 'The bad news is that I have to be back for five in the morning.'\n\n'Oh, Jack... how many times do I have to plead with you not to?'\n\nDylan gave her a tired look that told her he wasn't in the mood for an argument.\n\n'I know, when the job's running,' she sighed. There was no point in trying to discuss it. 'Go up and put something comfy on; I've got something warm in the oven.'\n\n'Thanks,' he said with a wan smile before reaching out to cuddle her. He buried his head into her shoulder and, hugging her tight, he moaned with fatigue.\n\nMax laid across Dylan's feet in the lounge. For now, the dog was going to make sure he wasn't going anywhere.\n\n'I suppose it'll be a long day tomorrow too?' Jen said as she put a plate of stew and dumplings in front of him. Dylan screwed up his nose. Jen laughed. 'You are funny. Stew's good for you.'\n\n'But I like pies and chips and crisps and...' he wailed at the tray balanced precariously on his knee.\n\n'And I'd like you to be around to see our baby and not in an early grave, thank you mister. Now eat that veg and then you can fall asleep,' she scolded, sitting down on the settee next to him with his drink in her hand.\n\n'If I can get these two put away then things will quieten down, I'm sure,' he said, shovelling a mouthful of dumpling into his mouth; his dislike of vegetables soon forgotten in his haste to tell her of his day. 'I want to disturb them before they wake, if I can, tomorrow morning, which is why we're in so early.'\n\n'Until the next murder you'll rest then, eh?' she said reaching over to stroke his brow.\n\nHe didn't reply.\n\n'I only nag because I love you,' she whispered, kissing the top of his head as she stood to take away his plate and fix him rhubarb crumble and custard.\n\n## Chapter 35\n\nThere was an almighty crash.\n\n'Billy. Coppers.' screamed Danny. His eyes were blinded by the torchlight. Blood beat within his temple. Fear gripped his entire body.\n\nBilly pulled the duvet over his head, curled up in a tight ball and braced himself.\n\nDanny saw the outline of a dark figure before he felt a blow to his head and heard his nose crack. His legs buckled and he fell heavily to the floor. A strong hand grabbed him by the hair and yanked his head backwards. There was a jab at his throat and the intruder drew a sharp knife expertly across his neck.\n\nBilly could hear a tussle and waited for them to come for him. He knew it was only a matter of time.\n\nDue to the carotid arteries being severed and the lack of oxygenated blood to the brain, Danny passed out almost immediately. Blood pumped from the gaping wound and the intruder stepping over Danny left him to drown in his own blood.\n\nAs suddenly as the noise started it stopped. Billy dared to raise his head from under his bedcover to hear nothing. The weight of a body thrust upon him took his breath away. Suddenly, he felt a sharp stabbing pain. He screamed. His attacker pressed the pillow in his face. Billy gagged for air.\n\nAnother flurry of stabs rained upon him and he tried in desperation to prevent the blade from penetrating his torso. But, it was no use. The knife was piercing his body in the frenzied attack. In a dazed, death-like state, he realised the attack had ceased. He groaned. Everything was still. Then with no warning his attacker jumped on him again, as he screamed like a banshee.\n\nDylan and the arrest team made a silent approach to the target's flat. Eight shadowy figures crept up the stairwell. A rat scurried in front of them making headway to an overflowing bin. Dylan stopped in his tracks and shuddered. The stench of the landing was gut-wrenching.\n\nBemused by the open, smashed door at the abode of Denton and Greenwood, he turned to face his colleagues and shrugged. He put a finger to his lips and signalled to them to stand flat against the wall. The council flat was in darkness. Dylan reached inside and fumbled for a light switch. He found one just inside the doorway. Only then did he start to take the lonely walk of an SIO into the flat, unaware of the horrific sight that awaited him.\n\nA corpse lay at the end of the hallway. He stood over it and noticed the resemblance to the man he knew to be Danny Denton. Gingerly he stepped to the side of a two-foot square patch of thick bright red blood so that he could check the rest of the flat, mindful that the murderer might still be there. It wouldn't be the first time he had caught someone at the scene shortly after they had committed a crime. He cautiously looked around him as he stopped frequently to listen for the tell-tale sounds of the killer.\n\nHe pushed open wide a door, which led into a bedroom. Again, he reached for the light switch inside. This time the bulb was out. Using the light from the hallway, he could make out bedcovering in a heap on a mattress laid on the floor. Examining it as much as the darkness would allow, he could make out cuts in the cloth that appeared to be consistent with it being slashed. Carefully he lifted one edge of the duvet and beneath it saw the motionless body of another male that Dylan automatically presumed was Billy Greenwood.\n\nMultiple stab wounds were now visible as his eyes became accustomed to the light and he bent down further. Greenwood was motionless. Dylan assumed he was dead too until he did something that he had never needed to do before in his career, he felt Greenwood's neck for a pulse. Was it wishful thinking, or could he really feel a faint throb beneath his fingers?\n\n'Get paramedics here quickly,' Dylan shouted. 'And arrange for the scenes of crime supervisors. We've one dead male and another with multiple stab wounds. I think I might have a pulse.'\n\nHe noted the body was still warm to his touch, so he knew the attacks had happened just a short time ago. There was very little first aid he could do and even if he tried which wound did he try to stop the bleeding from first?\n\nHe felt helpless. The injuries were beyond any training Dylan or any members of his team had ever had, he was sure of that. If they'd come to the flat an hour earlier? He should have come to arrest them last night. They had the relevant evidence. His thoughts quickly moved to suspects as he stood above the dying man.\n\nWho was enraged enough by these two to commit these premeditated brutal murders? In his experience he didn't give Greenwood a cat in hell's chance of survival. Where should he start?\n\nCareful not to disturb any evidence, Dylan retraced his steps, best he could towards the entrance of the flat.\n\n'Where's SOCO?' he asked, impatiently. 'I need footplates and I need them now.'\n\nHe tiptoed past the body of Danny Denton and for the first time noticed flowers strewn on the floor. What on earth were flowers doing in Denton and Greenwood's flat?\n\nDS Spiers stood in the doorway. 'Boss, maybe I can help. 'I'm first aid trained.'\n\n'So am I, but what we've been trained to do would be futile,' Dylan replied.\n\n'But at least I'd have tried,' she pleaded.\n\n'When I say no, Taylor I mean no,' he said firmly. 'Billy Greenwood may be dying but his best chance of survival is with the paramedics when they arrive.'\n\n'But, you're just letting him die.'\n\n'Taylor, go back to the nick and start calling staff in will you, please.'\n\nIf looks could kill, Dylan thought, he would have fallen on the spot. He stood with the team outside on the landing. Scenes of crime personnel arrived.\n\nThe sirens of the ambulance could be heard getting closer. As always it was a comforting sound.\n\n'Get the footplates down. They'll want to go in,' Dylan said, pointing his finger at the ground.\n\nAs DS Taylor Spiers left, the green suited paramedics arrived in the car park.\n\n'Danny Denton's been almost beheaded,' Dylan told SOCO. 'It appears that he was disturbed from his sleep when the door was put through and was the first to meet the prowler. The reason I say that is that there's another person, who I presume is his flatmate Billy Greenwood, who's still under a duvet in the bedroom. He's got numerous stab wounds but I think he may still be alive,' he said, nodding towards the approaching green suited paramedics. SOCO officers moved into the scene.\n\n'There is one body in the hallway \u2013 that's obviously dead.' Dylan told the paramedics. 'There's another person who's got numerous stab wounds, but I found a faint pulse. Can you confirm life extinct for me on the first and be as careful as you can there's lots of blood and we're trying to protect as much of the scene as possible.\n\n'We need to get this entrance secured and then searched along with the flat. DS Benjamin, can you make a call and arrange for uniform to do the necessary with the scene to keep it sterile,' he added. 'We'll let SOCO do their stuff while we all re-group at the nick. We need to plan our lines of enquiry, the management of this scene, mortuary and maybe the hospital if Greenwood is alive. We also need to select arrest and search teams for the suspects we identify. He or they are likely to be covered in blood. Time's important. Any questions?'\n\nIt seemed like only minutes later the paramedics came out of the scene with Billy Greenwood on a stretcher, an oxygen mask clasped tightly to his face.\n\n'Very week pulse and vital signs aren't good,' commented the paramedic at the rear of the stretcher as they passed Dylan. 'We can confirm the other's dead so we've left his body in situ for you.'\n\n'Vicky, go in the ambulance with Greenwood for continuity,' Dylan said. 'Don't forget about dying declarations. You never know, he might come round briefly and talk.'\n\n'Okay boss,' she said, nodding to Dylan before running after the paramedics who he could see carrying the stretcher out of the stairwell and into the car park towards the waiting ambulance.\n\nDylan watched the scenes of crime officers taking photographs of Danny Denton's body from a distance. Once this was done, he could arrange for it to be taken to the mortuary. At this stage he had to consider calling Forensics but he would discuss that with SOCO. Dylan knew he would be back at the scene booted and suited in his protective clothing to take a more detailed look but for now he would put scene guards on the entrance, go back to the nick to get the incident rooms established and create direct enquiries for immediate suspects.\n\nThere was no time to waste \u2013 they needed to move fast.\n\n## Chapter 36\n\nDetective Sergeant John Benjamin sat straight-backed in the chair opposite Dylan. 'My money's on Graham Tate. He's got the strength and the motive,' he said, stabbing the lead of his pencil into a page of his notebook.\n\n'He's got to be a prime suspect with an abundance of reasons but I don't know, is he our killer? At the scene there were white lilies, strewn on the floor near Danny Denton's body. Do you think that's the kind of modus operandi a man like him would use?' Dylan said, screwing up his face.\n\n'He arranged for a bouquet of white lilies to lie on Bridey's coffin,' John said, raising an eyebrow. 'Who knows how your mind works when someone has just killed your wife? Maybe, in planning the murder of the killer, in his eyes, it was something he just visualised.'\n\n'They were also the flowers on Grace Harvey's coffin. So does that put her son Donald in the frame too?' asked DS Taylor Spiers. Her voice held a note of sarcasm.\n\n'Has Donald had any contact with Denton and Greenwood that you know of?'\n\n'No, but... well, what about Brian Stevenson? He sent Grace and Mildred flowers and Grace's flowers we know were lilies,' she said.\n\n'Did Denton and Greenwood know Stevenson? I suppose if it was them that burgled his house and he'd found out,' Dylan said, thoughtfully.\n\n'You'd better put Bridey's dad on the list to be eliminated too, he did threaten to kill them,' John said. 'And let's not forget the recent events. These two were accused of raping Pam Forrester, which is why we were going to arrest them. We need to eliminate her parents and relatives too.'\n\n'Her mum owns a flower shop,' Vicky mumbled sleepily. Her head rested in the crook of her arm on the desk.\n\n'Brian Stevenson uses her shop for his flowers,' said Taylor.\n\n'That's enough, for now,' said Dylan.\n\n'I'd like to start with Brian Stevenson, sir,' said Taylor.\n\n'Okay, you start there with your team. John you take the others for Graham Tate. Let's see how we go with them two for the time being. Then, due to limited resources we'll have to have a rolling programme, to trace and eliminate each and every suspect, as soon as possible. I also need a team to deal with the latest scene, which I'll take charge of,' said Dylan. 'Vicky, you stick with me on that one, will you?'\n\n'Nowhere else I'd rather be boss but your right-hand woman,' she yawned, with a distinct smile as she rested her chin in her hands and looked at him with puppy dog eyes.\n\nTaylor glared in her direction. 'You're so bloody obvious,' she whispered with a sneer.\n\nVicky tilted her head and blinked her long eyelashes at Taylor as she smiled broadly. 'And I suppose you aren't?' she replied.\n\n'Remember everyone; it's our first chance to secure evidence against the suspects, maybe our only chance. We need concrete alibis for the full night in question from these people, and I want their co-operation. Any issues, I'll be at the end of the phone \u2013 so don't hesitate to call me if you need to.'\n\n'I think it's worth a mention, boss, that PC Tim Whitworth's daughter was stopped on her way home from school and threatened with rape. His wife has taken their daughter to her mother's and he was out drinking on the town last night I'm told, drowning his sorrows.\n\n'He hasn't turned in as yet for his shift. He had involvement with Denton and Greenwood after the Tate fatalities if you remember. I'm not saying for a minute he is capable of such an act, but I thought I should mention it,' said the uniformed duty Sergeant.\n\n'Sorry I don't know your name. You are?'\n\n'Sergeant Palmer, sir.'\n\n'Thanks for that. Let's see if we can locate him as soon as possible.'\n\n'If I know Whitworth, he's probably got a massive hangover and he'll still be asleep,' said Vicky.\n\n'But, he'll still need an alibi like any other suspect. Could you follow that one up for me Sarge please? Also no doubt there's a welfare issue that needs monitoring too,' Dylan said considerately.\n\n'Yes for sure. No, I wasn't pointing the finger, sir,' said Sergeant Palmer looking slightly flushed.\n\n'You never knw. History, as we are all aware, tells us policemen can turn into murderers too. We have to consider all possibilities. Right, so that's everybody occupied then, I think,' Dylan said with a deep sigh. 'We'll have to leave Bill Forrester until a team comes free. He too, like you said, has one hell of a motive, Denton and Greenwood raped his daughter.' Dylan told the assembled team of officers. 'Okay everybody, let's get out there and be professional. Don't forget the reporters will be sniffing around, and remember keep me updated with any developments. The slightest of problems, anything you need to discuss, well you know where I am. If the press ask questions refer them to Liz at the press office. I'll put out a brief statement. Debrief at five. Let's do it,' Dylan roared.\n\nThe room emptied with a noisy buzz. Everyone was eager; all had a mission. Dylan wondered about Sergeant Palmer's reason for throwing Tim Whitworth into the pot as a suspect for murder. Did he know more than he was sharing with them?\n\nEveryone slept in from time to time. Dylan remembered one occasion when he had slept in as a rookie. He should have been ready to parade at 05.45 for the six o'clock shift. He got there at 07.30. He'd thought about telephoning in sick when he'd woke late after working over until midnight the previous day, but hadn't wanted to let his team down.\n\nHe'd dreaded what his Sergeant would say. His supervisor at the time was a stocky bull necked ex-military man who spoke with his fists, then asked questions. He wasn't known for patience in waiting for answers. Dylan recalled sheepishly sneaking in the back door of the nick that morning as if it was yesterday. The sergeant had been ready to lift him off his feet by his collar and pin him up against the wall, as Dylan feared.\n\n'The shift Inspector doesn't know that one of his men is missing yet,' he had said through gritted teeth. Dylan smirked as he remembered vividly trembling in his boots \u2013 all nine and a half stone of him, at the time. 'And it'll stay that way...' he sniggered, putting Dylan's feet back down on the ground. 'Now get yourself some coffee and toast before you get out there, otherwise you'll be useless to me. MOVE,' he'd hollered. Dylan had scarpered so fast he was sure he'd created sparks on the wooden floor with his toecaps.\n\n'It'll never happen again. Will it PC Dylan? The sergeant had shouted after him.\n\n'Not on your life sir,' Dylan had hollered back.\n\nDylan remembered taking off his helmet and mopping his brow in front of the mirror in the gent's toilets. In those early days supervisors didn't stand for any messing about \u2013 and the strategy worked, Jack Dylan had never been late for a shift again.\n\nDylan was concerned that he didn't have an obvious front-runner for Denton and Greenwood's demise, someone who stood out from the rest of the pack who would have viciously attacked the pair. He didn't even have a strong feeling towards any one of the suspects. It could be any of them or then again, none. They had angered, upset and annoyed so many people.\n\nHe knew the death of a loved one affected people differently but rarely to the extent of making them murderers too. There was no love lost for these two by the investigating teams either. Denton and Greenwood to all intent and purpose had got what they deserved, summary justice, were the whispers around the room even at this early hour of the investigation. Dylan wasn't na\u00efve. It was a bad on bad murder. Who really cared if gang members or drug dealers killed each other, as long as innocent people weren't hurt? He knew it was his job to motivate the team to gain results.\n\nIt certainly wouldn't be an easy investigation unless they got an early break. Some of his counterparts seemed to fall on the domestic murders or the ones that didn't need a lot of investigation. Dylan always seemed to land what the police force deemed 'the runners'.\n\nHe absentmindedly wrote on his notebook, Ring to see how Dawn is... he kept intending to, but hadn't got around to it.\n\nHe picked up the phone to call Jen to let her know that their plans for a quiet Bank Holiday were out of the window. He knew he was giving her information she didn't want to hear yet again and his heart sank.\n\n'It's only me,' he said trying to put a smile in his voice.\n\nJen knew by his tone what he was going to say. Dylan always started the same way when he was about to give her disappointing news, she dreaded the 'It's only me,' phone calls.\n\n'The lock-up never happened. Someone got there before us,' he said with a sigh. 'It's gonna be a long day. One's been murdered in the flat and the other's critical in hospital.'\n\n'Oh no, you owe me big time Mr, leaving me to spend the Bank Holiday alone.' Jen tried to sound cheerful but she had a heavy heart.\n\n'I'll make it up to you, I promise,' he said. Jen put the phone down and rubbed her stomach lovingly, once again the job had won. Yes, she knew she was being selfish but didn't she deserve the time with her man that others took for granted? He'd bring the smell of mortuary home with him again tonight and no doubt wake her up but, she smiled, she knew she could cope with anything as long as he came home. \n\n## Chapter 37\n\nJohn Benjamin was confident that his target was the murderer. In fact, he was so confident he would have bet his salary. The pain and anger Graham Tate must be suffering was beyond anything he could imagine. And he was just as confident that once he locked him up he'd confess. Why wouldn't he want to tell the whole world about his revenge on the men he believed to be the murderers of his young wife and child?\n\nIn a few minutes John would know if his gut instinct was right, as two cars containing his team of eight police officers drew up outside the Tate family home. The curtains were closed and a car was in the driveway, which intimated to John that Graham was inside.\n\nThree officers were directed quickly and quietly to guard the back of the house with a dog handler. John could only hope and pray that the dog would be quiet as he watched the handler open the van's doors.\n\nSatan was a huge black Alsatian with fierce, staring red eyes. As he was unleashed from his cage he lurched from the vehicle and standing by his master he started barking with excitement and John cringed. Everyone moved rapidly into position.\n\nJohn walked up the garden path and banged with gusto on the front door. There was no response; tilting his head he listened intently for noises within. The sound of him knocking again echoed down the street. Still there was no response. He stepped back and looked up at the windows before hammering again and this time he peered through the letterbox.\n\nHe wondered whether Graham might be dead. It wasn't unknown for people to commit a murder and then commit suicide. But, on the other hand he could just be refusing to answer the door to them. A hell of lot of people did, in DS John Benjamin's experience. They often thought that the police would go away, but they soon learnt that they were wrong to assume.\n\nAgain, he beat his fist against the door. The noise was beginning to raise interest from the neighbouring houses as curtains were drawn back and doors opened. People stood in their gardens now and at their gates. John was left to make the decision. Did he go away and come back later or did he force entry? Graham Tate could be inside injured. Should he ring Dylan? What would Dylan do in his position? He closed his eyes, prayed he was making the right decision and gave his colleagues the order to smash their way in. At the third attempt the door gave way to the battering ram and the front officer was catapulted inside.\n\nShouts of POLICE rang out from his team members as an organised search of the house commenced. There were pots in the sink, empty beer cans and take away food containers littered about the kitchen worktops. Photographs of Bridey and their son Toby were scattered over the sofa. John could feel the deep sadness in the darkened lounge. The scent of the room smelt familiar; musty like a muddy river, the air thick in some way. Where was Graham Tate, he wondered?\n\n'Arrange to have the door boarded up,' he told the team, despondently.\n\nJohn stood in the garden of the house watching daylight rapidly bringing sunlight to the street as he keyed in Dylan's mobile number. He took a deep breath.\n\n'Boss, there's no one home,' he said, his head hung low.\n\n'What do the neighbours say?' asked Dylan.\n\n'We're just going to start house to house. I have had the door put through.'\n\n'You've put the door through before asking neighbours if they know where he is?' Dylan shouted down the phone. Vicky put her hands over her ears. 'Why did you need to get in there so quickly? What if he's totally innocent? After everything that's happened to the poor guy and then we go and smash his bloody door down. Great.' Dylan said with a moan as he held his head in his hands.\n\n'But I thought he might've attempted to take his own life or...'\n\n'You're assuming a hell of a lot weren't you?' Dylan yelled. 'Look, stick with the fact that you were concerned about his welfare and you thought he was inside requiring medical assistance. I presumed you thought you saw the curtain move or heard a noise from within?'\n\n'Err, if you say so, boss.'\n\n'What a bloody mess,' Dylan groaned.\n\n'I'm sorry, sir.'\n\n'In future, just have a bit of patience, eh?' Dylan sighed. Dylan broke the silence. 'Look, don't worry, we'll find him. And by the way I'd have probably done the same mate, speak to you later,' Dylan said. He knew how John felt and he knew he'd done the same thing over the years and it soon brought you down to earth when the target wasn't where you thought he should be.\n\nHe knew young John Benjamin would learn from his mistake and Graham Tate would be incensed by it, but nonetheless it \u2013 was and always would be \u2013 an everyday occurrence in policing, that he knew for a fact. Unfortunately, in that situation, as the man in charge were damned if you did and damned if you didn't.\n\n'At least it was the right address,' Dylan said out loud. Vicky smiled, but her face held a grimace. 'Oh, yes. I've known officers raiding the wrong houses. Now, that's embarrassing not only for the officers but petrifying for the innocent occupiers.'\n\n'I'll go and make us some strong coffee, shall I?' Vicky said.\n\nDylan was worried. He was feeling negative. He was in charge of enquiries into three road deaths, a rape, an assault, a murder, and an attempted murder that could turn at any minute into a murder. None of the aforementioned looked like being solved and all eyes were upon him. The public wanted people locked up. Headquarters, hierarchy were on the warpath. The performance figures for violent crime were no longer on a downward spiral, because of these crimes. All, his fault of course, or that's how it felt when his bosses contacted him for answers. In spite of his predicament he smiled. Isn't that why he loved the job; the challenge? His office door opened, bringing him out of his moment of self-pity.\n\n'Billy Greenwood's in theatre. News is that they don't think he's gonna make it,' said Lisa. 'He's not regained consciousness and the officer guarding him just told me he's got at least thirty-five stab wounds.'\n\n'Thanks for that,' he sighed. 'We have his DNA and fingerprints on file but it would be helpful if we could get a sample of his blood for comparison purposes. Liaise with the incident room staff, will you. We need to arrange to keep him under constant supervision, that's if he survives theatre. If he recovers consciousness, no matter how briefly, he might be able to tell us something about his attacker and we've a duty of care, even for scumbags like him.'\n\n'Will do boss. Do you want a coffee, you two?'\n\n'That would great,' yawned Vicky.\n\n'Looks like you'd better make it another strong one,' he laughed.\n\n'You know I don't do early mornings and late nights,' she scowled.\n\nNo sooner had Lisa closed the door, the phone rang.\n\n'Ignore it,' Dylan said to Vicky as she reached out to pick it up. 'It's time we went back to the flat. Danny Denton's body is still in situ.'\n\nSuited and booted in protective clothing, they re-entered the scene for a closer look, accompanied by the scenes of crime officer.\n\n'The flowers need collecting as an exhibit,' he instructed. To Dylan they were just flowers but who knew what they could reveal? There was no murder weapon to be found inside the flat, he was told by SOCO, and searches were on going of the immediate area outside, including the drains as he'd instructed.\n\nAlthough he talked of the murderer being one person, there was a possibility that he couldn't ignore that there may have been more than one attacker.\n\n'I hate bloody lilies,' Vicky said, screwing up her nose. 'They stink,' she said as she picked them up with a gloved hand and put them in an exhibits bag. 'I'd rather have daffs if you ever feel the need to buy me any.'\n\nDylan couldn't help but smile. 'And the likelihood of that is?'\n\n'If the murderer did bring them with him, what's he trying to tell us?' she said with a puzzled look on her face. 'Time will tell, as you say boss,' added a distracted Vicky as she leaned over the body on the floor. 'It's a bloody massive wound that, in't it? The killer certainly wanted to make sure Danny Denton was a dead man.\n\n'On the positive, we shouldn't have any problem proving intent and pre-meditation,' Dylan said. 'He nearly took his flaming head right off.\n\n'Mmm that's true.'\n\nThe scene itself revealed nothing else but Dylan decided to keep it sealed just in case they needed to return. His phone rang as he left the flat.\n\n'Taylor sir, Stevenson's not at home. His Porsche has gone and neighbours tell us they last saw him leaving the house with a suitcase yesterday evening.'\n\n'Do we have his car registration to circulate?'\n\n'Already done, boss. I'll take my team onto Donald Harvey's, shall I?'\n\n'Yeah, if you're sure Stevenson's not there you might as well.'\n\n'Oh, I'm sure,' she said, climbing into her car.\n\n'You haven't forced entry have you?' he asked with baited breath.\n\n'No, why would I?' she snapped.\n\nDylan exhaled. 'Just wondered: we've got Stevenson's DNA on recorded. Let's hope he gets stopped quickly,' he said.\n\n'Yeah, I'll be in touch,' DS Taylor Spiers said, as she rang off and tossed her phone into her handbag.\n\n'No suspects in custody yet,' he sighed to Vicky.\n\nBrian Stevenson was becoming more and more interesting to Dylan. There were no apparent friends of his that had come to light. Dylan had taken an instant dislike to him. But then again there were quite a few people he didn't like but that didn't mean they were criminals.\n\n'What you got to smile about?' Vicky asked.\n\n'Ah, nothing,' he said. 'Why doesn't Taylor like you? Is there some history between you two that I should know about?'\n\n'I don't know do I? You know me I'd tell you if there was. But, I'll let you into a secret. I don't like her much either,' she whispered. 'So, it makes no odds to me whether she likes me or not,' she said, shrugging her shoulders.\n\n'Women. You're about as clear as mud, Vicky,' he laughed. 'But, if she causes you any problems then let me know.'\n\n'She doesn't frighten me boss, I'd deck her and then ask questions later,' she said with a belly laugh.\n\n'Yeah, I know and that's what frightens me,' he said. It was nice to hear someone's laughter amid the sadness. What did they say 'If you didn't laugh, you'd cry sometimes?'\n\n## Chapter 38\n\nDanny Denton's body was as pale as the mortuary slab he was laid on. The fatal wound now cleaned, Dylan could see how close he had really been to being beheaded. It wasn't a sight for the faint-hearted. A body in a mortuary seemed more clinical to Dylan, whereas at the scene it looked like something out of a macabre horror film.\n\n'Guess where I am?' he said to Jen as she answered his phone call.\n\n'Too easy,' she said. 'About now, I guess you'll be in the mortuary. How's it going?' she asked.\n\n'Slowly, very slowly,' he said, taking a seat as he waited for the pathologist. 'Our two main suspects weren't at home,' he said groaning, as he stifled a yawn.\n\n'You sound a bit flat,' she said.\n\n'I am. I was looking forward to a day off with you just as much as you were.'\n\n'Then I guess I'm lucky, because you miss me just as much as I miss you,' she said.\n\nDylan grimaced. 'I treasure our time together too, you know. When something happens like this there is no warning, is there? We lose weeks out of our lives. But more than that.' 'I know, but I'm fine, honestly.'\n\n'Just to hear your voice lifts me,' he said with a disappearing smile.\n\n'And just knowing that you feel like that, believe it or not, makes it bearable,' she said.\n\n'So will you be okay?'\n\n'Course I'll be okay,' she smiled, rubbing her aching back. 'Keep in touch.'\n\n'Yeah, gotta go, it looks like we're about to start the lovely process,' said Dylan sarcastically.\n\n'Love you,' she whispered as she replaced the phone. She loved the way he cared about her. It made her feel warm, safe and content. She listened to the other girls at work and their turbulent relationships. Dylan and her rarely had a cross word. If they did, it was through their disappointment because they had to cancel something they were looking forward to, because of work, always work.\n\nThe post mortem began and Dylan's attention was immediately brought to the fading numbers written on Danny's arm. Vicky was writing down the digits on her notepad. From their position, it looked as if they had been written by a third party. The sound of a click from the camera held at the arm told Dylan it was being photographed.\n\n'Vicky, do the necessary will you and see what enquiries you can make of them,' Dylan whispered.\n\nThe rest of the examination was quick, clean and straightforward, with necessary samples taken and cause of death given as loss of blood due to the throat being cut which had severed the jugular vein. Two hours had passed and Dylan was pleased that the home office pathologist had been available for it to be done immediately. The formal ID would have to be done later by family, if any could be traced, or by his fingerprints held at the station.\n\nBack in the tranquillity of his office Dylan sat quietly tucking into his fish, battered sausage, chips and curry sauce, followed by a can of diet coke. Not a healthy diet, he conceded as he burped loudly, but it tasted mighty good. He wiped his greasy hands on his handkerchief and gave a satisfied sigh as Vicky walked into the office with a cup of steaming coffee.\n\n'Have the search team come across a mobile phone at Denton and Greenwood's flat, do you know?' Dylan asked.\n\n'No, sir not as far as I'm aware, but they haven't searched their car yet,' she said, stifling a yawn. 'How the hell can you eat all that after seeing that disgusting sight?'\n\n'It's called hunger,' he replied. 'I suppose they haven't found a weapon either?\n\n'Any luck with the phone number written on Danny Denton's arm?'\n\nVicky shook her head. 'No, it's a mobile and it's either switched off or the battery's gone,' she said, turning to leave the room.\n\n'Come on,' he muttered tapping his fingers rhythmically on his desk as he booted up his computer to check for messages. He wanted some answers and he wanted them now, not tomorrow. Dylan snatched up his ringing phone.\n\n'Boss, John. It appears Graham Tate set off to Scotland for a couple of days fishing in the early hours according to his father-in-law. Mrs Carter confirms Mr Carter was at home all evening.'\n\n'Who's he gone with?'\n\n'A couple of lads from the building site where he works, seemingly, Mr Carter doesn't know their names but he thinks they'll be doing more drinking than fishing. Graham has apparently turned to alcohol for comfort since the accident. I've got a mobile number for him but I'm not getting a response.'\n\n'Okay John, get your people back here and we'll have an update, re-group and see where we're going next. There are still others to eliminate.'\n\nTaylor had had no joy with Donald Harvey either; she told Dylan as she slumped into his office and threw her exhausted body in his visitor's chair. 'He's not at his mum's address and no one has seen him in the village since the funeral,' she said, despondently.\n\nDylan had experienced days like this before.\n\n'For some strange reason we always seem to expect people to be home when we call and surprised to find they aren't. It's bloody frustrating I know, but once everyone's back we'll have a debrief to see exactly where each enquiry has got to.\n\n'We need to let everyone know what's happening, who's been traced, and who hasn't, and what lines of enquiry are available. We need to keep the ball rolling.'\n\nThe team pulled up chairs and leaned on desks and filing cabinets for the de- brief. The CID room was full and noisy.\n\n'We got a relatively recent picture of Mildred Sykes now which I'll circulate. I know you'll have seen the scene photographs and those of the post-mortem, but it is nice to put a face to the lady's name isn't it?'\n\nLisa stood and passed the pictures round.\n\n'Now we know that we've positively identified debris recovered from Denton and Greenwood's garage as being from the offending vehicle at Grace Harvey's incident so it's highly likely it was them that mowed her down. White lilies were sent to her by Brian Stevenson for her birthday and were also laid upon her coffin at her funeral by her son.\n\n'Mildred Sykes's decomposed body was found at her home. She was murdered by way of a violent head injury. Brian Stevenson was both Grace and Mildred's financial advisor and a visitor to both their homes. We know by his own admission that he sent flowers to Mildred Sykes by way of a thank you for her business. The lady at the florist from where they were purchased has confirmed now that they were white lilies.\n\n'The clock that was seized in Denton and Greenwood's flat; have we had a close look yet? If not, make it a priority.' Dylan said going back to his notes.\n\n'Then we have Bridey and her young son Toby, killed outside Mothercare, Denton and Greenwood's car is involved we know but they alleged that it was stolen beforehand but only after it was found burnt out. Flowers at their funeral were white lilies.\n\n'Denton and Greenwood also feature again in a rape allegation of the thirteen-year-old girl named Pam Forrester whose mother owns the florists where Brian Stevenson purchases flowers; also possibility of access to white lilies for Bill Forrester too. Have we located Tim Whitworth?' asked Dylan.\n\n'Yes sir,' said Sergeant Palmer.\n\n'Thank God we've been able to find someone,' Dylan said sarcastically.\n\n'Let's just say he's nursing a very painful hangover, sir.' he said. 'He turned up at home this morning and we hope to verify his whereabouts last night, later today,' Sergeant Palmer continued. Vicky nodded knowingly.\n\nA wave of laughter went around the room.\n\n'Okay everyone, quiet,' Dylan said taking a deep breath. 'Let's keep at it. John, Taylor, a quick word, please before you disappear,' he said. The officers and civilian staff filed out of the room as Dylan took Taylor and John to one side. 'It may be that Pam Forrester can tell us a lot more than she has about Denton and Greenwood and their movements and acquaintances etcetera. I'd like a timeline created so we can show when they were seen and who they spoke to.'\n\n'I'll talk to Pam,' said Taylor.\n\n'Good, Taylor; Denton and Greenwood's phone number would be helpful from her phone and we need her mobile if we haven't already seized it. The technical boys could get on with tracking their movements and calls for us if we get them.'\n\n'We're on with it boss,' they said in unison.\n\n'I really appreciate your efforts even if I don't show it sometimes,' he said, smiling wanly.\n\nDylan knew he had to get his head down and catch up with the policy logs and ensure all the actions on the enquiries were recorded for the incident room. There was no doubt about it; the recurring theme with all these deaths was Denton, Greenwood and white lilies. \n\n## Chapter 39\n\nJen was fast asleep, her head neatly tucked under the duvet. It made Dylan smile as he looked upon her lovingly; goodness knew how she slept comfortably in that position. Due to her ever-increasing waistline, she had taken to putting a pillow under her knee and her stomach as she rested on her side.\n\nShe was right, he frowned. He did smell when he'd been to the mortuary, he thought, as he caught the pungent aroma that emanated from his jacket as he hung it on the plinth above the wardrobe. Although he felt weary, he headed for the shower. The lukewarm water's deeply penetrating force roused him and, stepping out of the shower, he felt refreshed.\n\nHe towelled himself dry then, quietly turning out the light, he walked the few steps to the bed in the darkness and lifted the duvet before climbing into bed. He slid across the mattress and cuddled up close to Jen, she felt lovely and warm and he moaned with pleasure as he nuzzled in close to her. Kissing her shoulder he closed his eyes. His hand rested on her stomach and for a moment he was sure he felt the stirrings of the baby.\n\n'Get used to this little one,' he whispered. 'Your daddy comes home from work at very strange hours of night and day.' Jen didn't wake, but stirred momentarily.\n\nHe sighed with contentment as he lay quietly in the darkness. His mind raced through all the information it had stored throughout the day. Vicky had retrieved Danny Denton's mobile phone number eventually so Taylor could get started with that enquiry tomorrow.\n\nJohn Benjamin had been unable to speak to Bill Forrester as he had left the family home for a golf tournament the night before. Genuine excuse and a pre-planned holiday, he contemplated? Only time and enquiries would tell. As for Billy Greenwood, he was out of theatre they had been told and in an induced coma; a state the doctor said they would leave him in for seventy-two hours. He needed a police guard, which meant more expense, he turned over onto his back to try to get comfortable and stared up at the ceiling. Sleep would not come. Forensics, fingerprints, and process, he chanted in his head, as he felt himself falling into oblivion.\n\nThe bright morning sun shone through the yellow bedroom curtains and lit up the whole room. Jen nibbled Dylan's ear, playfully. He screwed up his sleepy face. 'Stop it Max,' he moaned, keeping his eyes tightly closed. Jen squeezed him round his midriff, giggling.\n\n'What time did you get in? I sort of half-heard you, but couldn't for the life of me wake up.'\n\nDylan turned on his back and he lifted his arm so she could lay her head on his chest. 'I wasn't too late but you were snoring your head off,' he smiled. She lifted her head and looked at him with a furrowed brow.\n\n'I do not snore,' she said indignantly.\n\nHe kissed her forehead. 'You so do.' he exclaimed. She tapped him lovingly on his chest.\n\n'I left my clothes in the washing basket, so if it reeks of formaldehyde you know why.'\n\n'You smell nice now,' she said, snuggling her face into his upper body.\n\n'And you feel nice,' he replied with a groan as he squeezed her buttocks.\n\n'You rushing off this morning?' Jen murmured.\n\n'Not now I'm not,' he said, smiling down at her upturned face as he pulled the bedcovers over their heads.\n\nDylan felt more relaxed as he entered the police station than he had done when he'd left. The incident room was buzzing and as he walked towards his open office door he saw Sergeant Palmer sat waiting for him inside.\n\n'Sir,' he said, with a cough as he stood when Dylan entered. Dylan nodded and motioned for him to sit. 'I've spoken to a woman who was drinking with Tim Whitworth last night.'\n\n'And?' Dylan said with a puzzled look on his face. He threw his briefcase on the floor beside his desk and took off his jacket that he placed around the back of his chair.\n\n'It appears Tim spent the night with her after he accompanied her home from work. She wasn't very complimentary about him, in fact she said she thought he was a pathetic loser, who moaned about his wife until he collapsed, drunk, on her kitchen floor and that's where she found him when she woke this morning. So I think it's safe to say we can probably eliminate him.' Sergeant Palmer nodded.\n\n'You'd better contact the welfare department as a matter of urgency.' Dylan said pulling out his chair to sit behind his desk.\n\n'Ah, she'll have looked after him,' he said. Vicky knocked on the door and walked in.\n\n'He's had a lucky escape then,' Dylan said, taking his morning mail from Vicky's outstretched hand.\n\n'Oh, yeah he was lucky alright, there's a lot worse than her about,' said Sergeant Palmer.\n\n'Worse than who?' asked Vicky.\n\n'Some woman that Whitworth spent the night with, that's all. Sergeant Palmer's dealing,' Dylan said absentmindedly as he pressed the button to boot up his computer.\n\n'Get a statement did you?' Dylan asked Sergeant Palmer.\n\n'She was working sir, so I've arranged to see her later at her home address,' Sergeant Palmer mumbled.\n\n'Okay, Sergeant Palmer let me have it for the file ASAP, please.'\n\nSergeant Palmer coughed, again. 'I will, sir,' he said getting to his feet and walking to the door. Holding the door handle, he turned. 'Oh, by the way she did say his shirt was covered in blood when he turned up at the restaurant where she works, sir.'\n\n'What?' Dylan shouted, looking up from his work wide eyed. 'How'd that happen?'\n\n'Don't know yet,' he said with a shrug.\n\n'Oh, for Christ's sake. We'll need his clothes to eliminate him and that means whether he's washed them or not \u2013 and I want a statement from him regarding his movements on the night in question under caution, if he can remember, that is. Everything needs to be covered. Belt and braces, do you understand?'\n\n'Of course sir, leave it to me,' Sergeant Palmer said as he quickly turned and walked out of the door. Dylan shook his head.\n\n'The phone number written on Denton's arm is a girl's named Sharon McDonald, sir,' she said. 'I've spoken to her on the phone.'\n\nVicky had Dylan's full attention. 'She's just told me Danny Denton and Billy Greenwood were in McDonalds yesterday and she was due to be meeting them today. I'm just off to get the CCTV tape, I'll get it copied then go see her again,' she said with a smile.\n\n'Great, keep me posted,' said Dylan with a sigh and a shake of his head.\n\n'Sure boss,' she said sweeping out of the office.\n\n'Oh, Vicky.' he called. But he had a feeling his voice fell on deaf ears, as there were more than one phone ringing in the incident room.\n\n'You want something?' Taylor asked as she walked passed his open office door.\n\nDylan shook his head. 'Nah, it doesn't matter,' he said.\n\n'Well, something's brought a smile to your face this morning,' she said flashing her eyelashes at him.\n\n'Contrary to what you think, Taylor, I do smile occasionally,' he said. 'Now have we sorted out Pam Forrester's mobile so we can plot our pair's movements and contacts?'\n\n'No, not yet but I'm on with it.'\n\n'Good, as soon as, then eh?' he said returning to his paperwork.\n\n'I told the Liz in the press office last night I'd update her today.'\n\n'Oh, you did, did you? Does Denton or Greenwood have next of kin that we know of?'\n\n'No. Shall I make you a coffee?' she asked.\n\n'Yes, thanks,' he said.\n\nTaylor wiggled hips that barely fitted into her tight blue skirt at Dylan as she left the office. Looking over her shoulder to see if he was watching, she gave him a smile.\n\nDylan texted Jen, Thinking of you, he wrote.\n\nTaylor returned carrying both cups precariously in one hand as she finished a call on her mobile.\n\n'Ah,' she winced as she put Dylan's steaming coffee cup on his desk in front of him. She sat down opposite and crossed her legs. 'Motorway have just stopped Stevenson's Porsche on the M1, one male inside. I'm just waiting for an officer to call me back to confirm the driver's details.'\n\n'Excellent. At last one of our suspects in the net.'\n\nTaylor's phone rang and on answering it she listened intently. Dylan stared into the blank expression on her face. She ended the call. 'Bad news,' she said. 'It's not him.'\n\nDylan ran his fingers through his hair and sighed. 'Who the hell is it?'\n\n'An Asian businessman who checks out. He bought the car yesterday.'\n\n'Stevenson is circulated. All ports mind. We need to speak to him and fast. Make sure he's flagged up on PNC as wanted in connection to Mildred Sykes murder.'\n\n'On with it, boss,' she said as she leapt up from her chair and glided out of the office.\n\nHis telephone rang, 'Jack Dylan,' he snapped.\n\n'CPS Inspector Dylan, Case Progression. I'm just confirming the date for R V Harold Wilkinson Little, your double child murderer at Sheffield Crown Court, a four-week space has been allocated.'\n\nDylan scrawled the date on his blotter.\n\n'The necessary notifications will be sent out to you shortly but I thought you'd appreciate the early call.'\n\n'Thank you, forewarned is forearmed as they say. I'll let them know to diary it for relevant witnesses.'\n\nThe evidence was overwhelming and the sentence wouldn't be much different either way, so there was only one conclusion to come to \u2013 that Little was making the families of the victims suffer still. He wanted to see for himself the pain on their faces in court and the distress he had caused them. Was his need for revenge so deep-rooted? Or was he just pure evil?\n\nNow that Dylan had a date he would contact Dawn. He felt guilty that he hadn't been in touch with her lately, but every time he reached for the phone he wondered what he was going to say to her. 'How are you?' He knew how she was. She was having treatment for postnatal depression. He felt sad, inadequate \u2013 there was nothing he could do or say to change her situation so he'd done what he always did when he didn't know what to do and worked his socks off to blot it out.\n\nJohn made him jump; he was deep in thought as he rushed into Dylan's office. 'Had a call from Graham Tate's neighbour; he's back. She's keeping an eye out for us till we get there.'\n\n'Get round there at once,' he ordered. 'And invite him in for questioning. If he refuses, arrest him.'\n\n## Chapter 40\n\nDylan sat patiently listening to the ringing tone that in turn went onto the answering machine. Leaving a message, he wondered if Dawn would be well enough to attend court. Of course she would, he told himself. What was he thinking? She wouldn't miss this court case for the world.\n\n'Just got confirmation that Stevenson's profile's been circulated to all ports, sir,' Lisa told him as she walked in his office. He took the paperwork she held out for him.\n\n'If he was intending to leave the country, we might just get lucky,' he said, hopefully.\n\nTaylor headed for the Forrester's home. The priority was to question Bill Forrester and Graham Tate about their whereabouts at the time of Denton's murder. It was highly likely these two had lots of enemies, but, as ever, Dylan would follow the detective's golden rule and clear the ground beneath his feet before he went on to do anything else. Graham Tate had two good reasons to want to see them dead; the Forresters, too.\n\nDylan closed his door. While the officers were out and about making their enquiries, he decided to sit quietly and grab the chance to review the investigation into Mildred Sykes's death. He needed to satisfy himself that they had left no stone unturned.\n\nIf she had opted for equity release like Stevenson had said, where was the flaming money? Was Donald Harvey's accusation right? Where was Grace Harvey's money? Striking similarities of the two crimes were too close for comfort, thought Dylan. Did Denton and Greenwood do Stevenson's dirty work for him?\n\nFound in their possession was a silver carriage clock, which was obviously stolen property. There couldn't be anything more out of place in their bachelor pad than that bejewelled ornament. Dylan opened the envelope that contained the blown-up photograph of Mildred and stared at it. The clock seized from the flat that Vicky had shown him was most definitely like the one in the picture. He was certain that the clock was not still on the mantelshelf at Mildred's house when he had walked around after her murder.\n\n'Vicky,' he called.\n\n'Yep,' she said opening his door.\n\n'That clock seized from Denton and Greenwood's flat. Has it been checked out yet?'\n\n'Not that I'm aware of.'\n\n'Get me it out of the property store will you? And be careful, I don't want any unnecessary fingerprints on it.'\n\nVicky nodded and slowly turned. 'Yes, boss,' she drawled.\n\n'Vicky, like yesterday please. Oh, Vicky,' he hollered.\n\n'Yes?' she said, stopping in her tracks and retracing her steps.\n\n'Coffee,' he gestured with the cup in his hand.\n\nShe smiled. 'Lisa,' she called as she across the office. 'Boss wants a coffee.'\n\nDylan smiled.\n\nThe clock, of course, would need to be thoroughly examined inside and out and fingerprinted. With vigour he set about writing a list of actionable enquiries for the HOLMES team to put onto the database, to be allocated to ensure no duplicate actions were undertaken. He needed evidence to prove beyond doubt it was Mildred's. If it was, had they stolen it from her or from Brian Stevenson? He needed to prove a sequence of events.\n\nHad Stevenson been systematically robbing his elderly customers of personal property and their savings? His head was buzzing. He searched his desk drawer for his Paracetamols. Popping two in his mouth he chomped on them, swilled his mouth with cold coffee and swallowed them, grimacing at the taste they left.\n\nIt was evident Stevenson hadn't liked all the attention he was getting from the police, and Dylan was sure they were only scratching the surface of his unscrupulous dealings with his clients. Picking up his phone, he dialled the number of the coroner's officer to see if he could get a list faxed to him of elderly people and their cause of death, registered in Harrowfield within the past two or maybe three years.\n\nStevenson's trade may have been that of an accountant\/financial advisor \u2013 but was that just his cover? He had money, but was that because he'd stolen it? Had they stumbled on a serial killer, a wolf in sheep's clothing who had charmed and fleeced his victims? As soon as Dylan obtained the list, he would put the names in the system for them to be checked against Stevenson's clients.\n\nHad they got the list of clients from him yet? The documentation from his account \u2013 where was it? Had Grace Harvey's death just been a coincidence, a little too close for comfort for Stevenson? He wanted the financial investigation unit to prioritise enquiries into Stevenson to see what it revealed and he'd also get a warrant for his home address to get it searched, make use of the time before he was detained, before the Police and Criminal Evidence custody time limit clock started running.\n\nIn some circumstances, he may have been the only visitor to these lonely people. Would anyone be surprised or shocked if an elderly person with a bad heart had fallen at home and died? After all it was a daily occurrence. Had he found himself a profitable niche for a man with no scruples?\n\nDylan was satisfied with where the investigation was going. He now needed to find Stevenson \u2013 and the evidence to nail him.\n\nHe moved onto Denton and Greenwood. Dylan had no doubt their car had killed Grace Harvey and they had raped Pam Forrester. He urgently wanted evidence to prove beyond doubt that this pair had callously knocked down Bridey and Toby. But, who'd killed Denton? Was Greenwood going to survive? If so, would he talk to them? The dilemma laid heavily on Dylan's mind.\n\nDylan walked through the incident room with a wedge of paper enquiries he had written for the HOLMES team to process. He was conscious that the team were spread thin. They were all working independently, which he deemed the right approach in this situation.\n\n'Boss, I think I better make that coffee a strong espresso,' said Lisa, looking up from her computer screen at him.\n\n'I'm flagging,' he said, gratefully. 'And it'll soon be time for the debrief.'\n\n'Hey, I might even be able to find some choccy biscuits too,' she grinned as she stood and headed for the kitchen.\n\n'You're a treasure,' he said looking at his watch. Was it that time already? The teams would be back in soon, but at least he'd had some time to mull over the recent incidents without interruption.\n\n'Two biscuits,' he remarked a few minutes later as Lisa handed him a plate across his desk.\n\nLisa smiled.\n\n'Thank you,' he said. The HOLMES team were the lifeblood for this SIO. They were a constant source of support and he really appreciated them, which was why he always ensured that they were included in everything to do with the enquiry.\n\nDylan's phone vibrated in his trouser pocket and he jumped, spilling his drink. Lisa laughed. 'I put it on vibrate so it wouldn't ring in debrief,' he said. 'I'll never get used to it doing that.' Dylan's face flushed as he pressed the buttons to read the message.\n\nHiya, been baby clothes shopping with Dawn. She sends her love. All okay, said the text from Jen. Dylan closed his eyes. Bless her. She knew how busy he was but also how concerned he was about Dawn so she'd gone to see her. Now he knew Dawn was okay he didn't need to worry about ringing her any more.\n\nThank you, love. You're a star x he replied.\n\nJen grimaced as she felt the baby kick her under her ribs.\n\nDylan dunked his biscuit in his drink and thought instantly of Dawn. How often had he seen her do that and lose half of it? He smiled as he popped the soggy biscuit in his mouth remembering how she would chase the remnants around her cup with a spoon. His phone vibrated again.\n\nJust opened a letter from the hospital. They want to give me another scan \u2013 think you can make it, he read.\n\nTry keep me away x\n\nJen knew he meant every word but she also knew she could be quite easily going alone.\n\nVicky knocked at his door and, seeing him put down his mobile, she entered his office and closed the door behind her.\n\n'You'll never guess what?' she said sitting down opposite him, a look of bewilderment on her face.\n\n'What?' said Dylan?\n\n'Guess who was there when I called on Sharon McDonald?' she whispered.\n\nDylan smirked. 'A uniformed sergeant by any chance?'\n\nVicky looked disappointed. 'You knew he'd be there? Thanks a bunch,' she said, throwing the piece of paper she was carrying with her on the desk. 'I've never been more embarrassed in my life.'\n\n'You embarrassed?' he laughed. 'Now that is something I'd like to see,' he scoffed.\n\n'I'm jealous though,' she said dreamily.\n\n'What? I can arrange for you to spend more time with Sergeant Palmer if you like?' he said, amused.\n\n'No silly, she's got the proudest looking tits you've ever seen... and they're not...' she grabbed her own bought and paid for large bosoms in both hands, 'even implants, I might add,' she said looking down her own top.\n\n'She, being the cat's mother or Ms McDonald?' Dylan asked, taking a sip of his coffee.\n\nVicky ignored him. 'She is the cat's mother. Sharon opened the door in the shortest skirt; I swear she looked like she was going to a gypsy wedding. Well, she may as well have been bloody topless, and,' she continued aghast, 'not only that; she was wearing red high heeled shoes too. Well you know what they say about red shoes don't you, boss?' she added, leaning towards him, arms crossed and wide eyed.\n\nDylan laughed.\n\n'Enough to give you a bloody thrombosis, I'll tell you.' she cried.\n\nDylan laughed a hearty laugh.\n\n'Anyhow, there're way too big for me actually,' she said screwing up her nose. 'I'm quite happy with my babies, thank you,' she quipped.\n\n'You are a drama queen,' Dylan said, shaking his head.\n\n'I'm so not.' she said. 'That bloody Sergeant had his tie off.'\n\nDylan sat grinning. 'It's warm, there is nothing wrong with an open necked shirt.'\n\n'Well, straight up I got the distinct impression he'd been there for a while, especially when she asked him if he wanted another top up or something stronger,' she said.\n\nDylan laughed out loud.\n\n'You'll see boss, he'll still have a glow about him when he gets back for the debrief. That's if he makes it.'\n\n'More importantly did you get the statement from her?'\n\n'It's not funny. I had to sit there asking her questions and she was nearly sat on his bloody lap.'\n\n'Vicky, did you get a statement?'\n\n'Yes, but I think I'm suffering from shock.' she cried, hand to her brow.\n\n'I'll send you for counselling afterwards, damn it, but what did she say,' he said.\n\n'I'd rather have a lager and black,' she grinned.\n\n'The statement, Vicky?' Dylan growled.\n\n'The boys were in McDonalds. Denton chatted her up and she agreed to meet them, so she wrote her phone number on his arm \u2013 end of. She's a nympho, boss, I swear.'\n\nDylan was still grinning, 'Did you get all her details?'\n\n'Didn't need to, did I? I'm sure Purvy Palmer got them down and yes, I mean her details. I wouldn't bother going there boss, you'd get fed up waiting in the queue. She's a very popular girl is our Shaz McDonald, so they tell me. I hope sweaty Palmer doesn't catch something. She's known on the street as Big Mac.'\n\n'One shouldn't make assumptions Vicky. He is there on police business. He's Tim Whitworth's Sergeant and PC Whitworth allegedly spent the night there in a drunken state with her on the night Denton got killed, so he's every right to take his time taking a thorough statement.'\n\n'She's well known on the shift you know. McDonalds' a coffee spot for officers. There'll be trouble there in the future, mark my words, unless they want to be in the Sunday Sport. I can see the headline now. 'Big Mac's Bobbies.'\n\n'And what do you know about the Sunday Sport?' asked Dylan.\n\n'Long story, about a red-blooded rugby player I dated for a while \u2013 what a bloody loser he turned out to be. Always had a copy in his van. Yuk.' Vicky's face fell. 'Why do I always attract them eh? What I need is a nice decent, honest guy,' she sulked. 'You ain't got a younger brother boss, have you?' she said seriously.\n\n'No, sorry,' he chuckled. 'But thanks for the vote of confidence in this situation. And you don't need to worry, if I have to go anywhere near her or McDonalds I'll take you with me for protection. How'z about that?'\n\nDylan heard the girls in the office laugh out loud a few minutes after Vicky had left his office. He shook his head and smiled.\n\n'I wish the criminal grapevine was as good.' he yelled and looked up from his work to see a sea of raised eyebrows and broad smiles.\n\n'Oh, you wouldn't begrudge us a bit of gossip would you, sir?' Lisa said.\n\nDylan, smiled and shook his head before turning to face his calendar on the wall. If he didn't get a breakthrough soon on the Mildred Sykes murder he knew he would have a review team breathing down his neck; as if he didn't have enough pressure, he sighed.\n\nTwenty minutes later, the debriefing began.\n\n## Chapter 41\n\nIt wasn't long before Taylor returned from the Forresters' home, just in time for the debrief.\n\n'Pam's mobile has already been seized by the Child Protection Unit, I've been told, and Danny Denton's number was stored along with text messages from him. It looks as though the love-struck teenager has kept them all.\n\n'Her clothing and relevant samples have been sent to Forensics so the rape investigation is well underway, but Bill Forrester hasn't returned home from his golfing trip which means he can't be eliminated from the enquiry into Denton's murder and Greenwood's attempted murder, yet,' she said.\n\n'Because Mrs Forrester and Pam haven't seen him since Denton was killed I didn't think it was right to tell them about the murder or that Billy Greenwood's life is on the line,' said Taylor. 'Have you spoken to the press? I told them I'd update them, sir.'\n\n'Taylor, don't worry about press. I don't want anyone to speak to them just yet,' snapped Dylan. 'What's up with you woman? You're obsessed with the press.'\n\nTaylor bit her lip and her face flushed with embarrassment.\n\nJust then there was a tap at the door and Sergeant Palmer slunk quietly into the room to a few sniggers. Vicky nudged Lisa. She was right, he did have a glow about his face. Vicky stared knowingly at Dylan. He cleared his throat and carried on.\n\n'Nice of you to join us Sergeant. Have you anything you want to share with us?'\n\n'Sir, sorry I'm late,' he said, bristling. 'I... I've been having an interesting chat with Sharon McDonald,' he said. The Sergeant had everyone's undivided attention. 'She confirms that PC Whitworth was blind drunk when he came into the restaurant, er... McDonalds where she works, which is why she took him back to hers where he crashed out for the night.'\n\n'When she says crashed out?' asked Dylan.\n\n'Ah, he was so drunk he could hardly stand, sir. Apparently he collapsed on her kitchen floor and that's where he stayed till this morning. She tells me his T-shirt was covered in blood. She thought he'd been in a fight but she says he could quite easily have fallen in the state he was in. She believed the blood had come from his nose.'\n\n'And his clothing, has it been washed?'\n\n'No, I've got it here bagged and tagged for Forensics and he has confirmed to me that it is his. I just took notes of what she can tell us at this moment so I could get back for this meeting. I've arranged for her to be seen again for a detailed statement because she says Tim Whitworth was mumbling about Denton followed his daughter home from school and threatening her.'\n\n'Is this the same lady you saw earlier today?' Dylan said.\n\n'Yes, It is, sir,' Vicky said, looking Dylan straight in the eye. 'Basically, two lads, who told her their names were Danny and Billy, came into McDonalds where she works. It was quiet, they got chatting and she arranged to see them again. I've seized the CCTV tape from McDonalds and it is being copied as we speak. The original will be retained as the master. Then we can view it. She says nothing untoward happened and she confirmed she wrote her phone number on his arm because she wanted to see them again.'\n\n'Is there anything else you need from her that I could get for you when I go back?' Sergeant Palmer asked Vicky.\n\nVicky looked at Dylan and then to Sergeant Palmer. 'Oh, I think you've got your hands full with your own enquiries, thanks Sarge,' she said politely. 'But, I'll let you know if anything comes up.'\n\n'Thank you Vicky. At least that accounts for the phone number written on Denton's arm \u2013 and thanks Sarge for getting stuck in... in respect of PC Whitworth's movements, that is,' he said.\n\nVicky held her mobile in the air, signalling that she had to take the call.\n\nDylan continued. 'Okay, I've arranged for a warrant to be obtained from the duty magistrates for the search of Stevenson's house. Let's see what's in the property including documents referring to any of his clients. I've also asked for a list from the Coroner of elderly people who have died in Harrowfield lately to see if there is any connection, plus we are still awaiting the financial investigation result. Does our Mr Stevenson prey on the elderly? We'll do the searches tomorrow morning.'\n\nVicky re-entered the room. 'Boss, Billy Greenwood's been taken back into theatre, he's got internal bleeding,' she said. 'It doesn't sound good.'\n\n'Bloody hell.' said Dylan. 'Has he said anything?' he asked, anxiously.\n\nShe shrugged her shoulders. 'Not that I know of, sir.'\n\n'It sounds like it's highly likely he's not going to be able to help us now.'\n\nDylan rang Jen as he left the building, 'Setting off now love, what's for tea? Please don't tell me it's McDonalds?' he laughed.\n\n'As if. I'll give you McDonalds. Get yourself home'.\n\n'On my way, boss.'\n\n'Shall we discuss baby's names? Dylan asked, as he yawned loudly.\n\n'Let's wait to see if your eyes are still open when I've finished washing the pots first,' Jen said, rolling her eyes as she handed him his coffee cup.\n\n'Yeah, good plan,' he said. Stretching, he yawned yet again as he stood on his tiptoes and touched the kitchen ceiling.\n\n'If I've got my eyes closed when you come in I might be just having two minutes,' he smiled as he rubbed his tired eyes.\n\nJen unpacked the bags of clothes that she had bought and folding them lovingly, she laid them out in the drawers of the nursery. She touched the border that they had bought as the basis for the rest of the decor and a warm feeling ran through her body. It was a good thing that they'd had a decorator in to paint the walls, if she'd waited for Dylan she knew she would have waited forever.\n\nPerhaps this could be her 'happy place' in which she could take herself mentally during the birth. It was hard to believe that before her next birthday, before Christmas, she would be 'mummy'.\n\nThe clock struck ten. Jen woke Dylan.\n\n'Bedtime, sleepy head,' she whispered as she shook his arm so they could go to bed. 'I think we'll just call the baby Buttons for now shall we?'\n\n'Suits me,' he grinned, sheepishly.\n\n## Chapter 42\n\nDylan's priority today was no different from yesterday's; to trace, interview and eliminate the main suspects.\n\n'Boss, you know we've spoken before about the significance of white lilies?'\n\n'Yes, Vicky.'\n\n'I've been thinking.' Dylan raised an inquisitive eyebrow.\n\n'There's nothing unusual for lilies to be sent in bouquets or to funerals is there, but left beside the body at the scene of a murder, that's sick isn't it?' Do you think the white lilies are the murderer's MO? There are lots of lilies, aren't there? And these might be bought in by a particular florist or supermarket.'\n\nDylan looked thoughtful.\n\n'We got pictures of the flowers, I know, but did we get samples? Could they be one and the same type?'\n\n'Yes, I put them in an evidence bag myself at the scene, don't you remember?'\n\n'Yeah, You hate the smell, right? Anything's possible. It might just be the missing link we're looking for. I'll have that line of enquiry allocated to you. We'll make an SIO out of you yet,' he smiled. Vicky smiled sweetly at Taylor. Taylor scowled. Why hadn't Vicky told her about her stupid thought \u2013 or better still kept it to herself, she wondered?\n\n'I'll have to speak to one of those horticut, horticult... oh, you know what I mean, them there flower experts,' Vicky said, with renewed vigour in her voice.\n\n'Yeah, you do that,' said Dylan.\n\n'Why don't you see what Linda Forrester can tell you about white lilies? Unless you've already done that, of course Taylor?'\n\n'No,' Taylor's mutterings were barely audible.\n\n'No worries sir, I'll do it,' Vicky said with a gleaming smile.\n\nDylan checked his watch. 'Okay you lot. Let's see what today brings. Keep in touch and we'll debrief at five.'\n\nDylan checked for himself that scenes of crime had photographed the white lilies found in Denton and Greenwood's flat and swabbed them for a pollen sample. He also made sure enquiries were initiated to ascertain where the lilies for Grace and Winston's funeral were purchased from and what type they were.\n\nStevenson bought the flowers for Mildred and Grace \u2013 they already knew that, so on his admission they would have come from Linda Forrester's stock. Just how many types of white lily were there? They'd have to locate the source of the white lilies at Bridey and Toby's funeral too, if possible. It was obvious the Forresters had a connection with white lilies through their florist. He'd leave nothing to chance. Vicky's suggestions had stimulated his mind.\n\nDylan strolled down the corridor of the first floor of the police station to attend the uniform briefing. Catching the officers at the start of their shift meant he could update them about the investigations himself.\n\nHe knew uniform appreciated the time the SIO took on an enquiry to brief them first hand to keep them in the loop, and as far as he was concerned they were the eyes and ears of the police force at street level, for the next eight hours at least.\n\n'Although there are lots of lines of enquiry, I want you to bring me hard and fast evidence,' he told his attentive audience. 'Then it's our job in CID to meticulously sift through that evidence to make sure we haven't missed or overlooked anything.'\n\nThe shift personnel hung on his every word. 'Billy Greenwood's out of surgery and back on ICU so I'll need one of you on guard at his bedside today,' he said, as he watched their eyes turn from his gaze and fall on their pocket books. No one wanted to guard a prisoner in hospital.\n\n'You never know,' he added. 'Greenwood might just wake up and give you the information to nail the killer.' With that, a few hopeful faces lifted their heads to look at him and he saw a spark of interest in their eyes for the job in hand. 'If, he talks, you will simply need to record what he's saying. Remember, no questions though. He's not under caution.'\n\nDylan picked up his ringing phone the moment he got back to his desk.\n\n'Hello. Ralph, is that you?' he asked, leaning heavily on his desk. Lisa walked in his office with a drink and he took hold of the mug.\n\n'Yeah Jack, how are you?'\n\n'Fine, and Dawn and baby Violet?' he said, switching on his computer, absentmindedly.\n\n'Baby's great. Dawn's still tired, the pills make her feel weary.'\n\n'And how're you bearing up?'\n\n'Oh, coping, you know,' he said with a sigh. 'But what I'm ringing for is the doctor has given her another month's sick note so I wondered if I should send it to HQ?'\n\n'Has welfare been in touch?'\n\n'Yeah, but to be honest her day out with Jen shopping for baby clothes did her more good. They mean well but...'\n\n'Yeah, I know.'\n\n'The doctors say the anti-depressants will kick in and the Diazepam does help her feel less anxious but it makes her feel numb too. As for the court case Jack, she says she wouldn't miss it for the world, so that's optimistic.'\n\nDylan heard the lump in his throat and imagined him holding back the tears.\n\nPutting the phone down, Dylan felt useless. In this situation there wasn't a thing he could do to help his old friend and colleague. Fancy, after trying so long for a child, the IVF and now this. Sometimes life just didn't seem fair.\n\nDylan needed a distraction. It was all too easy to get sucked into the sadness of others. He had been ignoring Liz in the press office and there seemed like no better time than the present to take the bull by the horns as he picked up his phone and called her.\n\nThe full facts spewed from his mouth of the two young men being subjected to a ferocious and callous knife attack in their own home. He released their names and he told Liz that Danny Denton had died at the scene, while disclosing that his friend Billy Greenwood was critically ill in hospital after receiving multiple stab wounds in the frenzied attack. He appealed for witnesses and, to reduce the public's fear, he told them this was an isolated, targeted attack. As usual he gave out the incident room telephone number and Crimestoppers contact number for any information that the public felt they could share.\n\nAnother day had quickly passed without success. Still no suspects were traced or eliminated \u2013 and now it was time for the daily debrief.\n\n'I've spoken to Mrs Forrester and made an appointment to see Bill Forrester tomorrow when he arrives home,' said Taylor Spiers.\n\n'Good, at least that's two suspects traced,' said Dylan.\n\n'Actually three, sir. Donald Harvey contacted me, and he's travelling north tomorrow to see me,' Taylor smiled.\n\n'Great. Was there anything that Linda Forrester could enlighten you with regarding the white lilies?'\n\n'No, she says they're a common flower and used daily at funerals. Hers are bought in from a local wholesaler that also supplies the supermarket, so there's not much chance of that action coming to anything,' she said. Taylor raised her brows from the paper she was reading and cocked her head at Vicky as she threw her a smug grin. Dylan couldn't help but notice.\n\n'But' she continued. 'I've also learned quite a lot today from the horticulturist. Even how to pronounce their name,' she said.\n\nTaylor rolled her eyes, 'Oh, please,' she muttered.\n\n'I didn't know this floral malarkey was so interesting,' she said. 'The experts are telling me that there are quite a few common species of the Lilium Candidum, bulbs and flowers of the lily plant are used for therapeutic purposes. Stargazer lilies are an ideal way to convey your condolences, and the modern funeral tributes, peace lilies, or Spathiphyllum, are very popular for that. Mind you, Lily of the Valley, also known as Mayflower, is poisonous.'\n\n'You sound like Alan Titchmarsh,' Taylor said, snidely.\n\n'But seriously,' Vicky continued, ignoring the DS's comment. 'They were fairly sure if the same lily had been used in all the incidents and because we have pictures and, even better, swabs of the pollen, we will be able to track down the source for them,' she said with a nod at Taylor.\n\n'Hold your hands out,' said Dylan.\n\n'What?' Why?' Vicky said holding her palms upwards for him; her brow furrowed and quizzical look.\n\n'Just checking in case you've got green fingers,' he said, checking the tips of her fingers. 'I think that perhaps you're the best person to see if there is anything of credence in respect of the lilies that might take us forward in that line of the enquiry,' he said, slapping her palms. 'Well done Vicky.'\n\n'Thank you sir,' she said, as her cheeks flushed high.\n\n'Okay, flower power or elbow grease, I'm not bothered \u2013 whatever it takes, as long as we find the people responsible. Another day tomorrow to chase our suspects,' he said with a sigh. 'Let's make tomorrow the day, everyone.'\n\nThere were still a lot of unanswered questions and tomorrow Dylan would go back and look at each incident in isolation. He was always conscious that something may have been inadvertently overlooked.\n\nI'm on my way, he texted Jen, as promised. He knew better than anyone that there were no quick fixes to any enquiry. And he knew that every hour that passed meant less chance of recovering evidence. Where the hell was Graham Tate? \n\n## Chapter 43\n\nThe day started on the positive note that two of the people sought would be seen.\n\nDylan was scheduled to go to Brian Stevenson's home and a nominated team was to execute the warrant that had been sworn out for them at the local Magistrate's home by the evening divisional detective, DS John Benjamin. DS Taylor Spiers would start the search with the rest of the team, however Dylan couldn't assign them specific tasks as he needed them to be available to go see Bill Forrester and Donald Harvey as soon as they got word they were back in the area. The three also needed to be ready and able to respond in the event Brian Stevenson was detained or Graham Tate returned home. Dylan was also mindful to ensure that none of the tasks were rushed due to the deployment\n\n'I want a thorough search,' Dylan told the team as he stood on a box so he could be seen and heard at the short briefing in the void of the police station, before they set off in convoy. 'Carpets rolled back, furniture and drawers pulled out. If anything is hidden, we need to make sure we find it.'\n\nThe nominated exhibits officer made the dining room table his temporary desk at Stevenson's home \u2013 a central point where people could bring him the items they had seized to be recorded with details of where they were found, by whom, the time, date and the said exhibit numbered for easy retrieval. Should a court case develop against anyone, then all the collated items would have to be disclosed to the relevant parties.\n\n'Make sure his rubbish bins inside and out are emptied and checked,' he told Taylor. 'Find me all his bank details if you can, John,' Dylan shouted as Benjamin turned to climb the stairs. Dylan looked at his retreating figure, a fixed and alert expression on his determined face.\n\n'There's a secured filing cabinet in his office, boss,' he called down within minutes. Dylan took the stairs two at a time.\n\n'Break the lock if you have to,' he called ahead.\n\nOnce items had been seized and recorded, there would be a careful sifting of the relevant items. This didn't stop the officers from noting details to make immediate enquiries if they felt it necessary. The search was now in full flow and Dylan watched his officers working quietly and diligently to accomplish their actions. Taylor's mobile rang.\n\n'Bill Forrester's arrived home,' Taylor yelled to Dylan.\n\nBill, Linda and Pam Forrester sat waiting for the officers on the sofa in the middle of their large antique-cluttered lounge. A suitcase on wheels stood in the corner with a set of golf clubs on a trolley next to it, Taylor noted.\n\nPam clutched one hand to her chest, the other to her belly and her mouth gaped when DS Taylor Spiers broke the news of Danny's murder.\n\n'Oh, my God,' she simply said, turning to her mother. Linda followed her daughter as she ran out of the room. Pam's footsteps could be heard running up the stairs and Linda's close behind. A door slammed shut.\n\n'I'm sorry Mr Forrester, but there is no easy way of imparting news of a murder,' said John.\n\n'I'd have hoped she'd be jumping up and down after what they put her through,' said Bill, his face pinched but his complexion ruddy. 'Pity whoever did it didn't do it earlier, they could have saved us a lot of heartache.'\n\n'I'm sorry to have to ask you this,' Taylor said, tentatively. 'But we need to verify your movements for the past forty-eight hours, for obvious reasons.'\n\n'Of course,' he said. He glanced down at his hands, clasped in his lap, and shook his head. 'I'm sorry,' he said. There was a moment when no one breathed. 'I wish I had the guts to do it, but I haven't; not even for my daughter. What kind of a man does that make me?'\n\n'We can't find Denton's mobile. It may be the murderer took it,' John said.\n\n'Oh no,' Bill Forrester groaned, his face in his hands. 'The pictures they took of Pam; they might still be on there? If they are put in the public domain who knows who might see them? This could push her over the edge.'\n\n'Well we presume it's the same phone, we don't know of him having another,' said John.\n\n'As if the attack on Pam wasn't bad enough, the thought that someone out there has those pictures of her naked is too painful to think about,' Forrester said, with tears in his eyes. 'Hasn't she, haven't we all been through enough?' he said, searching the officers' dour faces.\n\n'We are doing our best to trace whoever is responsible. There doesn't seem any logical explanation why anyone would take the phone \u2013 unless,' Taylor said.\n\n'Unless what?' Bill Forrester stared at Taylor and tried to read her face, it looked stressed. He stared into her eyes and froze for a good few seconds. 'Hold on a minute, you think I might have killed him don't you? Let me tell you, I'd do anything for my daughter \u2013 and I mean anything,' he said, his eyes bulging in their sockets. 'And to be honest I can't honestly tell you...' he said, gulping for air, 'how I'd react if I'd come across them. In fact,' he added, rising from his chair. 'I'd even go as far as to say I'd shake the person's bloody hand that did it.' He ran his hand through his hair and paced the room. John Benjamin held his hand up.\n\n'We can understand, Mr Forrester, how upset you are,' John said. 'But we're just doing our best to catch the killer and we have to eliminate anyone with a motive,' he emphasised.\n\n'Not if she thinks I did it you aren't. Can you even begin to imagine how we feel at the moment? Do you have a daughter that's been raped? Do you?' he said with venom. Taylor physically flinched at the emotion in his words.\n\n'Everybody is a suspect Mr Forrester until we find out who did it, and we will. Remember, we've spent years dealing with victims of crime so we do know how badly people feel. We really aren't immune to it all,' said John.\n\n'Of course,' Bill Forrester said, taking a seat once more. 'I'm sorry. It's just the thought of naked pictures of my daughter being out there. Will you let me tell Linda and we'll explain to Pam. She's very distressed as you can see \u2013 and who knows what this will do to her?'\n\n'Of course,' said John.\n\nTogether they sat and painstakingly went through Mr Forrester's movements over the past few days. John looked at Taylor's face. There was no doubt in his mind that they would be able to confirm his account of events as being true. Linda and Pam entered the room once more; the mother's arm around the daughter's shoulders protectively. Quietly, and without a fuss they sat back down on the sofa.\n\n'Do you know a Brian Stevenson who lives at the bottom of your road?' Taylor asked.\n\n'Yes, he's a customer of mine,' said Linda, looking surprised.\n\n'You don't think?' said Bill.\n\n'We have many people, who are subjects of enquiries at this stage,' John said.\n\n'Do you know if Denton and Greenwood knew him, Pam?' asked Taylor.\n\n'Not, really.' she whispered, glancing up at her mother. All was silent. The adults' eyes were upon her as she regained her composure and recalled a memory. 'They asked me about him once,' she said, wiping her tear-stained face with the back of her hand. 'I can't tell you anything else.'\n\n'Can't or won't?' asked Taylor.\n\n'No,' she sobbed. 'Really, I don't know any more.'\n\n'Tell me what you do know,' John said in a softer tone.\n\n'I was in the car with them one day. They'd given me a lift home from school. He cut them up or we cut him up at the junction. I can't remember which.'\n\n'Go on,' said John.\n\n'I said I knew who the driver was, or at least where he lived.'\n\n'And?'\n\n'And when they dropped me off outside our house, I watched them drive to his and stop outside.'\n\n'And when was this?'\n\n'I don't know,' she cried, as she turned to her mother for comfort.\n\nTaylor's mobile rang and made them all jump. She stood up, excused herself and walked towards the door to take the call.\n\n'Donald Harvey is at Harrowfield nick,' she said to John as she popped her head around the living room door. He nodded and rose to his feet. 'I'm sorry, we are going to have to go. Thank you for your time.'\n\nTaylor opened the passenger car door. 'What a nob,' she said.\n\n'Who?'\n\n'Forrester.'\n\n'He seems pretty genuine to me,' said John.\n\n'Typical man.' she said, flicking her hair back over her shoulder.\n\nJohn inhaled deeply.\n\nDylan was also on the move. Leaving his team industriously searching through Stevenson's home and personal belongings, he drove in the sunshine to Harrowfield Police Station.\n\nHis first stop was the Imaging Department. They had Danny Denton's mobile number, so he knew that there was a good chance they could get the service provider. Dylan had to know if it was switched on, being used, and if so where? A location would be a godsend at this moment in time. He desperately wanted to move forward with the investigation.\n\nHe wondered how Billy Greenwood was. No one had contacted him so he presumed he was still alive. Passing the hospital he had a sudden urge to go and see for himself and speak to Greenwood's medical team. He still didn't know much about the weapon that had been used to stab him other than it had been a knife. Was it double edged? What length was it?\n\nThe surgeon who stitched him up might be able to help, he thought, as he parked the car. Maybe if he went in on spec to introduce himself, he could have a quick word without having to make an appointment.\n\n## Chapter 44\n\nDonald Harvey had been on the south coast, visiting friends to update them on the death of his mother, he told Taylor and John. He seemed genuinely shocked when they informed him about the attack on Denton and Greenwood.\n\n'I'm sorry, if you want me to feel sympathy though mate, I can't. What goes around comes around, as my mother used to say. Have you locked Stevenson up yet?' he asked.\n\n'We're actually trying to locate his whereabouts at the moment. Any ideas?' asked John.\n\nDonald Harvey shook his head. 'He's absconded? He's done a runner, hasn't he?' he said, straightening up and looking into Taylor's eyes with an expression \u2013 as much as to say I told you so.\n\nTaylor nodded. 'We'll find him.'\n\n'Well doesn't that just say it all?' he said. 'And when you do, let's hope it's not too late to save another poor biddy \u2013 and you recover some of my mother's money too.'\n\nDylan's arrival at the door of the ward where Greenwood was put a smile on the face of the uniform officer guarding him.\n\n'You okay?' Dylan said, putting a hand on the officer's shoulder as he stood to greet him.\n\n'Yeah, it's alright here, sir. I'm being well looked after by the nurses,' he grinned.\n\n'I bet you are.' Dylan smiled. Any change?' he said, tilting his head in Greenwood's direction.\n\nNo sooner had he spoken than he heard a man's deep voice calling down the corridor from the nurse's station.\n\n'Would your friend like a cuppa tea?'\n\n'Hey Gus,' the uniformed officer called. 'Come and meet my Inspector, who's in charge of the investigation.' Dylan's face must have said it all. A male nurse was the last thing he expected after the officers comment.\n\n'Thrilled to meet you,' said the nurse, smoothing the blue plastic apron that protected his uniform as he walked down the corridor towards them. Dylan offered his hand.\n\n'White coffee, one sugar would be nice. Is the staff nurse about?' Dylan asked.\n\n'Yeah, I'll get her for you. You want a top-up?' he asked the officer as he took his empty cup.\n\n'No thanks mate,' he grinned. 'I'll be peeing all day. But thanks for the offer.'\n\nNever assume, Dylan thought to himself as he smiled at the male nurse. What did he always tell others? His golden rule, assume nothing.'\n\n'See what I mean, sir.'\n\n'Mmm... I'd prefer women myself,' he grinned.\n\nThe staff nurse appeared and Gus left to make the drink. She was a buxom woman with kindly eyes. 'Staff Nurse O'Grady, Inspector. Now how can I be helping you?' she said in a strong Irish accent as he held her soft, chubby hand in his.\n\n'Jack Dylan, I wonder if we can have a chat about Greenwood and his injuries?'\n\n'Dr Thomas is on his rounds but if you'd like to come along to my office?' she said throwing an infectious smile in Dylan's direction. 'We can have a little chat over that cuppa and I'll see if I can find a biscuit.'\n\n'I'll follow you then,' he said, gesturing for her to lead the way.\n\nStaff Nurse O'Grady flopped onto a chunky, low, cushioned seat in the staff room.\n\n'Blessed chairs, once I get into these buggers I've one hell of a job getting out,' she said. The telephone rang and, apologising to him, she leaned over the back of the chair to lift the receiver. The male nurse brought in Dylan's coffee and at the same time a young-looking female nurse came to the doorway with something in her hand. Seeing Staff Nurse O'Grady on the phone she waited, patiently. Dylan looked at her and smiled.\n\n'They used to say in my younger days that if you wanted to look busy you should walk around with a piece of paper in your hand,' Dylan said in a hushed tone. She giggled.\n\n'Everything needs a signature,' she said, as a rosy glow crossed her elfin face.\n\n'Protocol eh? How much more time would we have if we didn't have to fill in all the damn forms?'\n\nShe nodded in agreement. From where Dylan was seated he could see the hustle and bustle of the nurse's station beyond and it reminded him of the police enquiry office. The staff members were obviously busy going about their own personal duties and yet there was no panic. The overall atmosphere of the place exuded an ambience of peace and relaxation.\n\nHe had had occasion to investigate rogue nurses, and likewise rogue policemen. There was always one bad apple; the proverbial black sheep, but they were few and far between, he conceded. Staff Nurse O'Grady interrupted his thoughts as she beckoned the nurse over and signed the paperwork. She took a package from her hand. The nurse left with a backward glance and a smile.\n\n'Dr Thomas won't be long now... in fact.' Staff Nurse O'Grady cupped her ear and they both stopped and listened. Dylan could hear the heavy sound of a man's step walking towards the room, '... that's him now. Metal segs in his shoes, always gives him away.'\n\nDylan had expected a stooped, grey haired older man with half-moon spectacles on the end of his nose. How wrong could he be? Dr Thomas was a tall robust young man with a curly mop of blonde hair and ruddy cheeks. In fact Dr Thomas looked like a surfer. His handshake was such that Dylan thought he was about to dislocate his shoulder.\n\n'Mr Greenwood's nurse tells me you want to know about his injuries,' he said, perching on Staff Nurse O'Grady chair arm.\n\n'Yes please, if you've got the time,' said Dylan, taking his notebook out of his jacket pocket.\n\n'Well,' he said, thoughtfully, 'some injuries were superficial due to the fact that they hadn't penetrated deeply into the young man's body and those luckily missed vital organs and major arteries. However, others slipped through the rib cage and deflated his left lung. One caught the edge of his liver and spleen, which caused a vast amount of blood loss and pretty much a blood bath internally as well as externally.' He sighed.\n\nDylan looked up from his notes.\n\n'One injury went through his calf muscle right to the bone where we recovered a fragment of metal.'\n\nDylan's eyes lit up. 'Really?'\n\n'Really.'\n\n'From the weapon used?'\n\n'I would have thought so. Do you have the weapon he was attacked with?'\n\n'Not yet, but when we do that'll prove to be an excellent piece of evidence for us,' Dylan said with gusto. 'What state is he in at the moment?'\n\n'His vital signs are good. We've placed him on a life support machine to allow his body to deal with the injuries and the shock. He should survive however, he's likely to be left with some disabilities and what they'll be, we don't know as yet. He's still on our critical list and at this moment in time his life is in the lap of his God \u2013 if he has one.'\n\nStaff Nurse O'Grady crossed herself, got her rosary beads out of her pocket and kissed them. Dr Thomas smiled at her.\n\n'We all pray,' he said with a smile.\n\n'I know you'll think I'm being impatient and downright insensitive,' Dylan said. 'But what sort of timescales are we looking at before you take him off the machine, to see if he can hold his own?'\n\nDr Thomas screwed his face up in thought. 'Mmm...'\n\n'He may have seen his attacker or have an idea who it was, you see,' said Dylan.\n\n'I understand your frustration, but I'm afraid it's likely to be another fourteen days at least.'\n\nDylan's face grew glum. 'We also want to speak to him about a serious sexual assault and a couple of road deaths too, so when and if he pulls through he'll be arrested and taken from the hospital to the police cells. Until then, we'll have to guard him.'\n\nDr Thomas and Staff Nurse O'Grady looked at each other.\n\n'His future's not good whichever way you look at it, is it?' said Dr Thomas. 'But let us do our bit and if, or as soon as he's able, we'll gladly release him into your hands. Believe me, we need the beds, don't we Staff Nurse?' he said, standing up and offering his hand to Dylan. 'If that's all, I must be going. I've a clinic in a few minutes.'\n\n'Of course, thank you for your time Dr Thomas and Staff Nurse O'Grady,' Dylan said, handing Nurse O'Grady his cup that she placed on the table beside her.\n\n'Come on old girl,' grinned the doctor as he offered Staff Nurse O'Grady the use of his hand to help pull her out of the chair.\n\n'It'll come to you both one-day,' she groaned, as she took the hand gratefully.\n\n'Inspector,' she called out to Dylan as he headed out of the staff room. He took the few paces back down the corridor and put his head round the doorframe.\n\n'You'll be wanting this?' she said, handing him the package the nurse had brought her. Dylan frowned.\n\n'The piece of metal we found in Billy Greenwood's leg.'\n\n'Marvellous.' said Dylan with a smile. 'We'll need a statement. I'll get an officer here to take it.'\n\nStaff Nurse O'Grady smiled. 'It's already done, here,' she said. 'See how efficient we are.'\n\nDylan walked out into the fresh air. As he did so he saw the directional sign for the maternity department.\n\nGuess where I am? He texted Jen.\n\nThe mortuary?\n\nNope, he smiled. Give up?\n\nYes.\n\nThe maternity unit.\n\nYou're a bit early for that love.\n\nPassing the main entrance, Dylan caught sight of two women who looked as though they were about to give birth any moment, in their dressing gowns, sharing a cigarette. Not a good advert for rearing children, but who was he to condemn them. If that's the drug they needed to cope with their life, he wouldn't be the man to point the finger. How could he, a reformed smoker himself?\n\nHe reflected for a moment as he started the engine of his car. In his youth, when smoking was in fashion, it was advertised as much as chocolate. Every household had an ashtray or two and the ones in the CID offices were always overflowing with cigarette butts. The ring marks from coffee cups marked each and every wood-grained desktop that had scorch marks along the edge where cigarettes had been left to burn out. Ashtrays in the police cars were always full and everyone and everything smelt of smoke now he thought about it, but he hadn't noticed that they had until he'd stopped smoking himself, how strange.\n\nCigarettes were more available than biscuits in the office in the past and everyone always had a light, be it a lighter for the well-off or a match. Personally, he always used to smoke a cigarette last thing at night and one first thing in a morning. When the pressure was on at work the total of his nicotine fix could rise to sixty a day. He smiled as he remembered one of the greatest teachers he had ever had at Detective training school would smoke throughout his lesson. None of the students were allowed, mind, and by the end of the day the overhead projector resembled a birthday cake with a hundred candles of tab ends stood upon it.\n\nDylan was always reminiscing these days; it must mean he was getting old, he pondered. But what he didn't regret was kicking the habit, especially now they had a little one on the way.\n\nHe looked at the package on the seat next to him, put the gear stick into reverse and manoeuvred the car out of the parking space. His next job was to see this fragment of metal that could link the murder weapon to its owner, and he couldn't wait to get back to the nick.\n\nHis telephone rang. He cursed it as he pulled into a side road and stopped to answer it. 'Jack Dylan,' he growled.\n\n'Boss, John; Graham Tate's arrived back at his home. Our information tells us that he's drunk.'\n\nDylan grunted. 'Well, that was expected I suppose. Least we know where he is.'\n\n'I'm getting a team together to go and see him.'\n\n'I'm on my way to the nick. Keep me updated,' Dylan said, as he hung up.\n\n## Chapter 45\n\nIn the privacy of his office, Dylan sat at his desk holding the small plastic tube and stared at the coveted minute piece of metal recovered from Billy Greenwood's body. He could see very little. The fragment couldn't have been much bigger than a pinhead. Forensics would put this under the microscope to examine and photograph it. A blown up version of that picture would hopefully give him the start to a puzzle.\n\nHe could hear voices from the adjoining office and it didn't take long before the banter between Vicky and Lisa became a loud exchange.\n\n'How's it going, you two? Anything startling come from Stevenson's house?'\n\nThe room before long resembled a makeshift store of Stevenson's property in clear and brown bags of all shapes and sizes. Some looked full to bursting, others contained a single document.\n\n'There's been a lot of shredding going on,' Vicky said. 'And,' she said, coming into his office, leaning over his desk and looking into Dylan's eyes. 'He hasn't got a hamster that he needed bedding for.'\n\n'There's a lot of post that we brought with us and we're just gonna start to sift through it all,' said Lisa with a big sigh, as Dylan saw her empty a black bin liner full of unopened mail onto her desk.\n\n'What do you think he's shredded? Give me an example, Vicky?'\n\n'Well, in a pile next to the shredder were forms for investments, equity release papers, cheques. No cash though.'\n\n'He'll have taken that with him.'\n\nDylan's phone rang and he stopped her with the raising of his hand, to pick it up.\n\n'Boss, Graham Tate has barricaded the front door. We're now at the back of the house. The door is slightly open and it leads into the kitchen. We can see him through the gap and we're at a stand-off. He says he's turned the gas ring on and is threatening to strike a match.'\n\n'Put them down or I'll force entry and use the CS Spray,' Dylan heard a female shout.\n\n'Who the hell's that threatening him?'\n\n'Taylor,' said John.\n\n'Tell her to back off at once and get everybody away from the door as a matter of urgency.'\n\n'Taylor.' John shouted, so loud that Dylan thought the noise would burst his eardrum. 'The boss says out. That means now,' he screamed at the top of his voice. Taylor glared at her colleague but moved reluctantly.\n\n'What's the situation now?' Dylan asked, calmly.\n\n'Taylor's in the back garden and I've got uniform at the front stopping anyone coming near.'\n\n'Okay, let's get everyone away from the house \u2013 and that includes you. Get the road blocked at both ends.'\n\n'Taylor,' shouted John. 'Tell the people up-front to block the road.'\n\n'Where are you?'\n\n'I'm moving out of back garden now, but I could see him clearly through the partially open glass door from where I was stood. He's in the kitchen, leaning against the worktop, drinking from a bottle. He's definitely pissed.'\n\n'Okay, I'm on my way. In the meantime, make sure everybody keeps at a safe distance from the house. If he strikes a match or puts a light on you'll have an almighty explosion that might take more than his house. Get Control to get the uniform Inspector down there to evacuate nearby houses and get the fire brigade, ambulance and the gas board there too. Let's see if we can turn the bloody gas off in the street and hope he goes unconscious with enough of whatever he's drinking before he kills himself or anyone else. Be with you shortly,' Dylan said.\n\nA major incident was well and truly lying at Dylan's feet, thrown at him from afar like a hand-grenade minus its pin. He knew the press would love it and the TV would be there before him if they got wind of it. Driving at speed, Dylan was soon at the scene. All the emergency services were at the designated 'safe place' of a rendezvous point. He was relieved to see the gas board van.\n\nInspector Mark Baggs greeted Dylan. 'Jack, I've briefed ambulance and fire teams. They are happy to stand by should they be required. The gas board have been to the front of the house and turned the gas supply off, so hopefully, with his kitchen door open \u2013 which it still is I am told from an observation point \u2013 the gas should disperse quickly. The people we've evacuated are making their way to the community centre. They're not pleased, but are they ever?' he grimaced. 'At least they're safe.'\n\n'Good, thanks Mark. It's nice to know the scene is under control. It feels like a promotion board scenario doesn't it?' he smiled at the uniformed officer.\n\n'Your female DS is over there with the press and TV,' Mark Baggs said pointing towards Taylor.\n\nDylan glanced in her direction and shook his head. 'That woman should be in the PR department, not CID,' he said. 'No matter, I haven't got time to deal with her now, I'll have to see if my negotiating skills can get through to Tate first.'\n\n'The gas board personnel tell me they're not getting any strong readings of gas outside. He's all yours Jack. Good luck,' said Mark.\n\nDylan walked under the blue and white police taped cordon and he set off down the street. The smell of gas lingered.\n\n'I suggested she wait for you, boss,' John said, as he nodded in Taylor's direction. 'Can I come with you?'\n\nDylan nodded. 'There was no way Taylor is listening to me today,' he said, exasperation clear in his voice. 'She's been off on one all day. Like a dog on heat.'\n\n'Do you know what she's told them?' Dylan asked as the men reached the path together.\n\n'No, I heard her mention the recent murder and that's when I created some distance between us. I thought if she was digging her way into a hole then there was only room for one.'\n\n'Sensible chap. Okay, let's go and survey the situation.'\n\nThe two walked down the side of the house in silence.\n\nTaylor stood with her back to Dylan, preening, as she busily fed the hungry press. Dylan left her to it. He couldn't do anything to save her now. If she'd said anything untoward she would have to learn the hard way. He had a more pressing engagement with a suicidal, drunken man who might have already killed one person and seriously injured another.\n\nJohn followed Dylan. The kitchen door was still open, but the blind on the windows to the right of the door was down. They stood for a moment and listened. No sound came from within. With bated breath, Dylan peered carefully inside. He could see Graham Tate slumped on the kitchen floor with his back against the kitchen units. He looked unconscious. Near him, an empty bottle lay on its side.\n\nDylan pushed the door slightly with his fingertips; it opened easily, giving him a clearer view. Dylan thought he could make out what looked like a cigarette lighter hanging limply from Tate's right hand. The smell of gas seemed stronger in the room. Graham Tate wasn't moving, but a sudden jerk of alertness and he could strike the lighter.\n\n'Have you got some handcuffs with you John?' Dylan whispered.\n\n'Yeah, what're you thinking?'\n\n'Well, I can't negotiate with someone who's out cold. I'll go in quietly and try to grab that lighter from his hand. You follow me and try to cuff him at the same time.'\n\n'Sounds good to me.'\n\n'Only if it works,' Dylan grimaced as he inhaled deeply. 'Here goes.' On tiptoes and with bated breath, the two walked towards the drunken man. One flick of the lighter and they could all go up.\n\nEverything was deathly quiet. The floor was lino and the soles of Dylan's shoes could be heard squeakily peeling themselves off and on it as he walked toe to heel. He stopped and scowled. He looked down at his shoelaces; there wasn't time to take his shoes off.\n\nWith one leap, Dylan launched himself forward and grabbed the lighter. Tate stirred and mumbled something incoherently. John swung the handcuffs from his pocket and used every ounce of bodily strength to put Graham Tate on the floor and cuff him.\n\nThe two men glanced at each other, relief evident in their faces. Sweat was visible on the brows. Graham Tate was truly out of it as he lay face-down on the lino, his mouth open wide.\n\n'Perhaps, it's not just drink John. He might have taken something else. Get the ambulance crew here, will you?' Dylan said as he reached out to turn the knobs back to their off position on the cooker. His head was pounding and the palms of his hands were slick with sweat.\n\nThe paramedics were quickly in the house, their blaze of green suits a welcome sight. An out of breath Taylor Spiers appeared at the kitchen door. Putting her hand around the doorjamb she reached for the light switch.\n\n'STOP,' Dylan screamed reaching out to slap Taylor's hand away. John and the paramedics, who were down on their haunches, froze.\n\n'I was only going to put the light on so you could see better,' Taylor said. Her bottom lip trembled as she rubbed her pained hand vigorously.\n\n'Don't you realise that a little spark from that switch could still blow us all to smithereens? You stupid woman. Can't you still smell the gas? Open the blinds and the windows,' Dylan shouted, his heart still in his mouth.\n\nTaylor's hands were shaking as she pulled open the blinds. She would never, ever forgive Dylan for his embarrassing outburst.\n\n'I'm pretty sure it's probably just alcohol,' said the Paramedic. 'We'll take him to the hospital to run some tests though, just to be sure.'\n\nDylan nodded. 'Shall I go with him boss, for continuity?' asked John.\n\n'Yeah, do that. There are some nice nurses up there,' Dylan said with the ghost of a smile on his blanched face.\n\n'Really?' John said, 'very accommodating?'\n\n'Really,' Dylan nodded.\n\nDylan put his hand on the worktop to steady himself. There beneath his fingers was a note that read: I HAD TO DO IT. THERE IS NOTHING LEFT FOR ME IN THIS WORLD.\n\nDylan quickly pulled his hand back and pointed to the scrap of paper, 'Just be aware and seize it will you Taylor.'\n\nFollowing the ambulance staff John turned and looked at Dylan. 'The press are still outside, sir.'\n\n'Taylor, what did you tell them?' Dylan asked.\n\n'I just tried to keep them satisfied, sir, that's all,' she said.\n\n'I didn't ask you that. I said, what did you tell them?'\n\n'Just that we were investigating the murder of Danny Denton and we needed to speak to Mr Tate to eliminate him.'\n\nDylan let out his held breath. 'And that's all?'\n\nTaylor nodded her head.\n\n'For a moment there...' he dropped his head to his chest. 'Okay,' he said looking up, 'while we're in the house, let's get a team here and search to see if there's anything to connect Graham Tate to Denton or Greenwood. I'll see you back at the debrief.\n\n'Taylor, I've had to deal with the aftermath of someone simply switching the lights on, which caused a massive explosion and serious injury to one of my colleagues. My outburst was instinctive.'\n\nWalking back up the street he saw the local reporters with their cameras in tow.\n\n'What's the update Dylan?' called one.\n\n'Give us the story,' called another.\n\n'There isn't a story, yet,' he smiled, stopping to speak to them.\n\n'Alright, look, you're aware of the accident outside Mothercare a few weeks ago?'\n\nThe men and women of the press stood quietly.\n\n'That was Graham Tate's wife and son.' The observers nodded in unison. Their expectant faces reminded him of vultures waiting at a dying animal's side.\n\n'The car that killed them was reported stolen and the registered owner was found murdered a few days ago.'\n\nTheir eager faces were frozen in anticipation. 'Well, Mr Tate is understandably depressed and we just needed to eliminate him from our enquiries, which is why we came here today. On arrival, we found him unconscious.' A wave of moans waved through the crowd.\n\n'Let's face it,' Dylan grimaced. 'It's only one line of enquiry that's ongoing and there's no more to tell you at this moment in time. I honestly wish there was,' Dylan reiterated to their disappointed faces.\n\nStriding purposefully towards his car, he dialled Jen's number.\n\n'Today's briefing may go on longer than usual, love,' he said, which she instinctively knew meant yet another long and lonely night. \n\n## Chapter 46\n\nDylan updated the team in debrief regarding Billy Greenwood's injuries, the prognosis of his recovery and the securing of the piece of metal from one of his wounds. Although the piece of evidence was minute, he told them it was highly significant as it was more than likely part of the tip of the blade, which he knew would be an invaluable piece of evidence if the murder weapon was found.\n\nHe also updated everyone in respect of the suicide attempt after tracing Graham Tate, and John told the assembled group that the hospital staff had confirmed that he had taken a cocktail of drinks and drugs. He was still in ICU and as yet had not regained consciousness, which meant that he remained under constant watch due to his present state of mind. A suicide note was also recovered.\n\n'Is he in the same ICU as Billy Greenwood, John?' asked Dylan.\n\n'Yeah, but I've made uniform staff aware of who they both are and their history and they are making arrangements for him to be relocated to Leeds.'\n\n'Well, they're hardly likely to cause any trouble judging by the state of their health,' Taylor said, sarcastically. 'It would appear Bill Forrester can be eliminated from our enquiry too, sir, although I don't care for the man.'\n\n'Oh, come off it,' John snapped, 'the man only said he didn't feel any sympathy for the two who had just subjected his daughter to a violent rape attack.'\n\nTaylor glanced at John with a look that said it all. 'We also saw Duncan Harvey, whose whereabouts will also be verified I'm sure,' she continued.\n\n'Just for your info boss, a lady phoned in to the incident room this morning after your press release to say that someone had stolen the lilies she had fastened to the railings on the road about half a mile from Denton and Greenwood's flat.\n\n'Her son died at the spot some years ago and she always leaves white lilies there to mark the anniversary of his death, which happened to be the day before our two were attacked. She didn't know if it was relevant,' said Lisa.\n\n'I want her seen as soon as possible and a statement obtained. Find out where she bought them from. It could give us a source for lilies if nothing else.'\n\nVicky read out a list of items seized from Stevenson's house.\n\nDylan concluded the debrief by thanking everyone for their efforts. It was time for home; tomorrow would be another day to move the enquiries forward.\n\nJen was nervous. The fact her bump had measured 34.5 cm when it had measured 34 cm the week before, had concerned her midwife enough to schedule the imminent scan. Jen was pleased that Dylan was able to go with her. He'd told the office staff he wouldn't be in until after lunch. As they waited at the hospital, Jen squeezed his arm.\n\n'Thanks for being here with me. I'm so scared,' she said, as she slipped her hand into his. He noticed that her palm was a little sweaty, so he squeezed her hand tight.\n\n'Nervous? I'm excited,' Dylan said with gusto. 'Just think we wouldn't be having another scan if the Button wasn't measuring small. We're lucky to get to see him again before he's born.'\n\n'He?'\n\n'Whatever,' Dylan laughed. 'I don't care if Button is a he or a she as long as he or she are okay,' he grinned like a Cheshire cat.\n\n'l know and at thirty-seven weeks I've been really lucky haven't I, not to have had any problems?' she said. She licked her lips and stretched her back. 'It'll be okay. It's probably because his head is engaged or I was laid on the bed last week when she measured me and this week I was laid on the sofa.'\n\n'Exactly,' said Dylan. 'So enjoy the experience,' he smiled.\n\n'My mouth is so dry. Can you believe that when I've had so much water to drink?' Jen fidgeted in the uncomfortable hard hospital chair as she tried to get comfy with a full bladder. 'If they don't hurry up I'm going to pee my pants,' she whispered.\n\nDylan put his arm around her shoulders and squeezed her tight. 'We were fortunate not to have had to go through the dilemma of 'should we or shouldn't we' at our age, weren't we?' he mused.\n\n'And if we had, we'd have doubted whether we could afford to raise one?'\n\n'Best decision I didn't make,' Dylan chuckled as he patted Jen's bump.\n\n'He'll be fine. Just lazy like his old dad,' he chuckled.\n\nJen looked up at the clock as the door opened and a Radiographer stepped out, calling her name.\n\nThe lighting was subdued in the room where the scan was to take place. Jen was told to lie on the bed. She kicked off her shoes and sat on the side of the bed before raising her legs. She lifted her top up above her bump and her trousers below before eagerly looking towards the screen.\n\nJen lay perfectly still and Dylan sat beside her holding her hand tightly. He too scrutinised the blank monitor in anticipation before looking back at Jen and grinning.\n\nThe Radiographer chatted amiably as she squeezed clear gel out of a tube and into the palm of her gloved hand then she put more on the end of the probe before rubbing it onto Jen's tummy. They always warned her: 'This might be cold.'\n\nJen flinched as the ice cold jelly hit her stomach.\n\n'There's your baby,' she said, with glee as she rolled the ball like probe around Jen's stomach indicating with her spare hand its movements on the monitor.\n\nJen and Dylan looked at each other in amazement as every time they saw Buttons he seemed to have grown. Dylan's eyes unexpectedly filled with tears and he reached in his pocket for his handkerchief. The scan wasn't as clear as it had been previously but this time the baby did turn his face towards the camera. They saw him gulp whilst taking a drink. Jen and Dylan could have stayed there all day listening and watching their baby.\n\n'The images aren't as clear as there is a lot of tissue on the baby now,' explained the Radiographer. 'Do you want to hear the heartbeat?'\n\nDylan and Jen nodded together.\n\n'Would you like to know whether the baby is a girl or a boy?' The Radiographer asked.\n\nJen looked at Jack, 'Yes, please,' she grinned. 'We've resisted till now, but if it's okay with you Jack, I'd like to know.'\n\nDylan nodded with a smile.\n\n'You have yourselves a little girl,' she said. 'According to my notes and from what I can see.\n\n'But it can't be. She's a he,' said Jen, in amazement.\n\n'Dylan rose from his seat and hugged Jen to him. Jen let out a huge sigh of relief and tears ran down the side of her face and onto the pillow below. Dylan laughed at her with tears in his eyes.\n\n'Oh, that often happens.'\n\n'They said the baby was small.'\n\n'Don't worry, babies have spurts of growing. She's just fine.'\n\nThe Radiographer reeled tissue from a roll and wiped the gel off Jen's taut skin on her bulging stomach.\n\n'Not long now, eh?' the Radiographer said.\n\n'I don't want to go back to work,' Dylan said as he walked out into the warm sunshine. He turned his face to the sky.\n\n'Me neither,' Jen said, cuddling up to him.\n\nJen put her seat belt around her but couldn't look at Dylan \u2013 the flaming job always got in the way of everything.\n\nHaving dropped Jen off, he walked through the yard at the police station he took the treasured photograph of his little girl out of his pocket and placed it inside his wallet. He headed for the incident room while Jen walked to the admin block. He switched his mobile phone on. It beeped incessantly.\n\n'Boss,' he heard Taylor shout. The spell was broken.\n\n'Let me get in first,' Dylan shouted as he opened his office door and put the lights on. The fluorescent lamp juddered once or twice and then lit up the room. John and Taylor followed close behind him vying for his attention.\n\n'Stevenson's been traced to a Travelodge near Heathrow Airport,' John said.\n\n'He's booked in till tomorrow, so it's likely he's arranged an early flight,' Taylor added.\n\n'It's a single room, so presumably he's on his own and keeping a low profile,' said John.\n\n'Why the hell are we sat here talking? Have you informed the local nick? We need to get a team down there and I want the local lads to be aware,' said Dylan.\n\n'It's all arranged, sir. We're going in, in the early hours of tomorrow morning unless he tries to make a move first. We've got him under surveillance till then,' said John.\n\n'Good. You two happy to go down there with an exhibits officer and two uniform to do the arrest?' Dylan asked.\n\n'Two uniform?' Taylor asked with a furrowed brow.\n\n'They can cuff him and set off straight back here with him. I don't want anyone accusing us of trying to interview him en route. You can stay and do the search and the exhibits officer can register and bag the property.'\n\n'Sounds good to me,' said John.\n\n'Okay,' Taylor said.\n\n'So you'd better think about getting off home then. Get your head down for a few hours and I'll arrange with uniform for a plain car from the night shift to be here at twenty-two hundred hours. When you get there, arrange for the night porter to let you into Stevenson's room and that way you can surprise him. Remember he might be our murderer though, so leave nothing to chance.'\n\n'Okay boss, we'll keep you updated.'\n\n'Not too early though eh?' he laughed.\n\nAt one time Dylan would have worked till late arranging the details of the arrest himself, dashed home to pack a bag, lead the team south and brought the prisoner back to interview him himself. But not tonight, tonight he wanted to spend time with Jen.\n\nExperience had taught him he would be a lot fresher to deal with a prisoner when others had brought him in. It would be lunchtime tomorrow before he was safely ensconced in a cell in Harrowfield police station \u2013 and even then, Dylan knew Stevenson would no doubt want the eight hours' sleep that the Police and Criminal Evidence Act dictated he was entitled to. Of course it was wrong to interview someone when they were tired, he thought, tongue-in-cheek.\n\nJen couldn't believe he hadn't headed south with the team \u2013 her spirits rose.\n\n## Chapter 47\n\nStevenson's arrested without any problems. Uniform are on their way back with him. Just starting the search of his room \u2013 will speak before we set off back, came the text from Taylor.\n\n'That's a good start, Jen,' Dylan said, as he put his mobile phone on the kitchen table and sunk his teeth into a thick slice of toast and honey. 'Mildred's murderer is well and truly locked up.'\n\nJen looked at him with a wide-eyed smile as she picked up his empty porridge dish. 'I didn't know you knew who'd done it?'\n\n'Proving he did it, is well, mere detail,' he grinned, sheepishly as he rose from his chair and leaned towards her for a kiss. 'If only that was true.' She walked to the sink and dropped the dish into the soap suds.\n\n'So, it'll be another long day, then?' she said reaching for the fruit bowl. 'I'll put extra bananas in your jock box and make sure you eat them,' she said, wagging a finger at him.\n\nDylan grimaced.\n\n'Bananas are a good source of energy. Slow release of natural sugars. A lot better than pies \u2013 or even worse, a bag of crisps that has no nutritional value at all,' she said, mocking his vigorous dislike of anything good for him.\n\n'Speak when I can love, as usual,' he said, taking the sandwich box from her outstretched hand and placing it on the top of his overflowing briefcase.\n\nJen sighed as she watched him leave.\n\nForty-five minutes later, Dylan was in the incident room telling his staff that Stevenson had been arrested and John and Taylor were searching the hotel room he had been using.\n\n'That for me, Dennis?' Dylan asked, seeing the detective that was on light duties, who resembled The Hulk, walking across the room with a cup of tea in his good hand.\n\n'Just getting yours, boss, white with one sweetener isn't it?' he said, swivelling on one foot and retracing his steps back to the kettle.\n\n'Well done Dennis, I'm impressed.'\n\n'Yeah, you might well be,' he laughed, 'I'm still only just managing to negotiate the coffee powder on the teaspoon and into the cup without too much of a mess on the table, with this heavily bandaged hand.'\n\n'Hey, Bandit, mine and Lisa's are both white with one sugar, and you owe a quid for the tea fund,' Vicky called from where she sat at her desk.\n\n'A quid?' Dennis shrieked.\n\n'Yeah, and that's cheap. Tight arse,' she called. 'If you can't manage to get a quid out of your pocket I'll help?' Vicky laughed.\n\n'She's not joking either, mate,' Dylan said.\n\n'I can tell that by the look on her face,' Dennis said, fumbling in his pocket for a coin. 'This is victimisation of the afflicted,' he muttered.\n\n'All I can say is it's a good job Sgt Finch took the job at HQ training,' Dylan responded.\n\n'And I'm sure you had nothing at all to do with that eh, boss?'\n\n'Development Vicky, the man needed developing when it came to working in CID,' he chortled.\n\n'Ah, I miss Finchy though,' said Vicky. 'Even if he had to be bloody 'PC' about everything.'\n\n'Yeah, note to myself. Always ask around about people that I haven't worked with before, before agreeing to supervise them,' groaned Dylan.\n\n'His heart was in the right place,' said Lisa.\n\n'Yeah, till he produced a document listing all the unacceptable comments made by officers during the investigation we were on.'\n\n'Not the best way to win friends and influence people, I don't suppose,' said Dennis as he concentrated on getting the drinks-filled tray to the group without mishap.\n\nDylan's phone rang in his office. He hurried to pick it up.\n\n'Taylor.' he said, immediately as he held the phone to his ear.\n\n'Morning boss,' she yelled in order to be heard over the noise of the traffic. 'One alleged financial advisor nearly crapped himself this morning when we awoke him but he's not talking to us.'\n\n'He's probably still in shock.' Dylan found himself shouting back, needlessly. The office personnel stopped to listen and expectant faces stared at him from the incident room.\n\n'What did you say?' Taylor yelled.\n\n'Never mind, did you find anything on him?'\n\n'He had a large amount of cash and about two dozen gold rings in his belongings. There's also a few sets of keys and a Lloyds TSB debit card and credit card in the name of a Brian Stewart.'\n\n'A new ID?' Dylan pondered. 'Why would he have that? We'll give it straight to the financial team when you get back. With their contacts, they might get a quicker result than us.'\n\n'Can't hear a thing, sir. Look, we've done all we can here, so we're going to get some breakfast and then make our way back'.\n\n'Okay. Drive carefully,' he said, but the phone line was dead.\n\nA new identity? Rings? Brian Stevenson was becoming interesting. He strolled out into the CID office. 'We've got Brian Stevenson on his way and I want him to be under constant supervision when he gets here,' Dylan informed the office staff before shutting his office door. Dylan sat at his desk in the quiet; thinking. He picked up his phone.\n\n'Can you let me know when Brian Stevenson's in?' Dylan asked the Custody Sergeant.\n\nVicky burst into Dylan's office.\n\n'Boss, CID are being requested to attend a stabbing on the shopping precinct.'\n\n'What do we know?' he asked, putting the phone down with a degree of urgency.\n\n'Young lad has been stabbed in the back by a bloke. No apparent motive, according to witnesses. The bloke's legged it and the lad's being taken by ambulance to hospital.'\n\n'Get your coat, I'll come with you,' said Dylan grabbing his jacket. 'Dennis.' Dylan called. 'You're in charge of the office. Just answer the phones and keep scouring the McDonalds CCTV tapes,' he said, sweeping past him towards the door.\n\n'Okay, boss,' he said.\n\nDylan stared at the scene of the stabbing on the precinct for several minutes before entering the cordon. A crowd had gathered. Vicky spoke to uniform, who told her that the police had saturated the area, but so far the attacker hadn't been traced. Dylan lifted the police tape and walked into the inner cordon.\n\n'Do you want a suit sir?' a SOCO officer enquired, handing him a packet containing a disposable SOCO suit coverall and overboots.\n\n'Yes, let's not take any chances,' he nodded to Vicky who took one too.\n\nSuited up, Dylan padded over to the spot where the incident had taken place. He could see suited SOCO officers stooped on their haunches, carefully taking swabs of marks on the flagstones. Others dusted the window of the Next store nearby, but as far as Dylan could see there was nothing to suggest that anything sinister had taken place.\n\n'Get the CCTV tape seized. At least it should be on camera,' Dylan said to Vicky pointing to the camera above. 'Please God, let it have a tape in,' Dylan groaned.\n\n'Sir,' shouted a uniformed sergeant running towards the cordon, his hat under his arm. Dylan walked towards him. 'I have an officer in Union Street, who has found a bloodstained knife dumped in a waist bin,' he panted. 'Apparently a witness saw a man disposing of it. I've called for SOCO. And just to let you know I have a unit at A & E who will update me as soon as they've any information from the doctors regarding the victim.\n\n'A witness has told us that the man he saw had two knives on him. Seemingly the bloke just ran up behind the kid, stabbed him and ran off. Officers are getting statements from anyone who can tell us anything.'\n\n'Thanks Sarge, we'll just have a walk round to Union Street for a quick look at the weapon and then nip over to the hospital,' said Dylan.\n\n'Mmm. He's rather switched on isn't he?' Vicky said, thoughtfully.\n\n'He's certainly got everything covered,' Dylan said looking at Vicky with approval. 'But he's done nothing that you wouldn't have done.' Vicky screwed up her nose and pulled a face at Dylan. 'I know, I know, same old, same old. I should take my exams, don't go on,' she whined as they walked to the scene where the knife was discovered.\n\nDylan studied the implement carefully. It was rather like the knives butchers use, he observed. He'd get a closer all-round look at it once scenes of crime had photographed and placed it in the protective clear view 'sharps' tube.\n\nAt the hospital, the boy was being prepared for theatre, Dylan was updated via his radio. He and Vicky were on their way. Initial examinations showed that he had one stab wound to his back. The concern was how deep it was and if it had affected any major organs. The boy had been identified and his family contacted.\n\n'So Vicky, we've now got a stranger attack on a young lad and Billy Greenwood with a serious wounding that could have easily been a murder. Seize the boy's clothes when we get to the hospital and arrange for another detective to meet us there so that they can stay when we leave, for continuity.'\n\n'Sure,' she said, keying the CID's office number into her mobile.\n\n'Oh, and Vicky?'\n\n'Yes,' she said, as she ran after him up the path of the hospital entrance.\n\n'Take charge of the CCTV and get it copied as soon as, so we can view it.' Dylan said as got his mobile phone out of his jacket pocket and put it to his ear.\n\n'Brush and arse comes to mind.'\n\n'What?' he scowled in Vicky's direction. 'Dennis,' he said, turning his head to get the reception to hear his detective back at the office. 'Can you make some calls for me and find out who we've got in the hostels around here and who's been released back into the community recently. The stabbing of this young lad appears to be random. Have we got a name or description of the victim?' he went on.\n\n'No, but we will have once the statements are in,' said Dennis.\n\nDylan threw a look at Vicky as he held the hospital door open. 'Give Liz at the press office brief details of the incident and ask her to appeal for witnesses will you? I'll see you on the ward.'\n\nDylan stood at the nurse's station. Vicky joined him. 'The cells rang to let you know that Brian Stevenson has arrived and they're booking him in at the custody suite. He's still not speaking to us.'\n\n'Not even to confirm his name?'\n\n'Nope, he just nodded when they asked if he wanted the duty solicitor.'\n\nVicky walked over to the drink dispenser and held a cup under the machine. She sipped the cold water tentatively.\n\n'He's not going to roll over easy is he?' said Dylan.\n\n'When are murderers agreeable?' she said. 'Look at poor Dennis, who'd have thought he'd be attacked by a machete in Blackpool by an uncooperative child murderer.'\n\n'I'm just happy we've plenty to put to him when it comes to the interviews, which reminds me to get Dennis to chase up the identification of the silver carriage clock for me. I still want to know if the one in Mildred's photograph is the one recovered from Denton and Greenwood's flat and the very same one that Brian Stevenson says he had taken from his house. It's doin' my head in. I never want a flaming carriage clock.'\n\n'Detective Inspector Dylan?' said the nurse, hurrying towards them down the corridor.\n\n'Yes.'\n\n'I'm sorry to say that the young man just brought in with a stab wound has had an adverse reaction to the anaesthetic. He's now classed as critical. I'll keep you updated on his progress.'\n\nDylan looked up at the ceiling. 'That's all we bloody need,' he muttered.\n\n## Chapter 48\n\nDylan's phone flashed DS John Benjamin's name. Technology was bloody good these days. To know who was ringing before you picked the phone up was a godsend \u2013 sometimes. 'John,' he said on answering it.\n\n'We've broken down. We're on the hard shoulder off the M1 about eighty miles away from home,' John shouted.\n\nDylan could hear the high-pitched screech of a woman's voice in the distance amongst the whoosh of traffic, then he heard a door slam. It was quieter \u2013 John must have got into the car.\n\n'Taylor's onto Vehicle Fleet Management playing hell. The car's just been serviced according to the log book but I think it's the fan belt that's gone.'\n\n'Can't you use a flaming stocking,' yelled Dylan in exasperation.\n\n'A what?' John looked down at Taylor's trouser covered legs. 'I don't think.'\n\n'Oh, never mind,' said Dylan as he put his hand to his brow. 'Look, give me your exact location and I'll get a garage out to you.'\n\n'I've already arranged for the motorway cops to ferry us to the end of the motorway. Our lads are picking us up there as per Dennis.'\n\n'Good man. Make sure you get out and wait on the banking for them. Motorways are dangerous places,' Dylan said involuntarily shuddering as he remembered a job he'd once dealt with where a whole family had been killed by a heavy goods vehicle while waiting on the hard shoulder in their car after they'd broken down on a motorway.\n\n'Now you sound like my dad,' he said.\n\n'Mmm... thanks,' Dylan mumbled. 'But you wouldn't say that if you'd seen the carnage I'd seen.'\n\n'Yes, boss, sorry,' John said, in a more sombre tone.\n\n'Let me know when your arrival's imminent. I've gotta go mate, we've got a young lad been stabbed in the precinct and it's not looking good'.\n\n'Gang related?'\n\n'No, first reports suggest it's one man.'\n\n'Known to him?'\n\n'Initial enquiries seem to suggest it's a stranger.'\n\n'Gotta be a nutter then, surely?'\n\n'Time'll tell,' Dylan said. 'Never assume.'\n\n'See you soon, boss,' John said.\n\nDylan inhaled deeply as he walked back into the CID office.\n\n'How're you doing with the recent releases and the return to the care of the community, Dennis?' he asked.\n\n'Still compiling a list boss and then I've gotta run the names through the system. I thought there'd only be one or two but there are bloody loads.'\n\nJohn was right, Dylan conceded. It probably was somebody with mental problems who was out roaming the streets of Harrowfield. That's all Dylan needed, and if his victims were being chosen at random, God knew where he'd strike next?\n\n'Message for you, boss.'\n\nDylan looked up from his writing; pen in his hand.\n\n'Cells say the duty solicitor is from Perfect and Best who have been contacted and to let them know when you're ready to start interviewing,' said Vicky.\n\n'Have you heard from John?'\n\nVicky shook her head.\n\n'They've broken down. '\n\n'Shame,' she said, shrugging her shoulders.\n\n'Vicky,' Dylan growled. Vicky looked sheepish.\n\n'Just a thought boss,' she said, changing the subject before he gave her a lecture on how capable Taylor was as a DS. 'On the stabbing incident, if the young lad dies and I hope to God he doesn't, but if he does and it was due to the adverse reaction to something the hospital staff did, would it still be murder?'\n\n'It would be about causation. If he hadn't been stabbed he wouldn't be in the hospital. If he hadn't been taken to hospital then would he have died because of blood loss as a direct result of the stabbing?'\n\n'Probably,' she said with a frown.\n\n'So, you've got your answer then.'\n\n'We'd charge murder,' she said. Dylan nodded.\n\n'And the defence would have all the relevant case law out about causation to defend their client, but the bottom line in my book is, did the attacker, when he stabbed him, intend to kill him, and did he die as a result?'\n\nVicky nodded. 'Guilty, but hopefully the young lad won't die, eh?'\n\nDylan cocked his head and smiled wanly at his DC. The phone rang in the CID office.\n\n'Call for you boss. It's Sergeant Wilson from the hospital,' Dennis shouted. 'I'll put him through.'\n\n'I'll come in there,' Dylan said, rising from his desk and walking the few yards to the desk Dennis was sitting at. Dylan took the phone from him. His face looked serious. He sat down.\n\n'Sir, a few updates for you, first and foremost the young lad's stable.'\n\nDylan heard himself sighing with relief and his heart lifted.\n\n'The wound, they tell me, is about three inches deep but fortunately it's missed his vital organs and they've managed to stem the bleeding. His parents are here and are obviously distraught, but I've explained best I can what's happened. They tell me that their son had gone into town to the florist to collect flowers for his sister's birthday.'\n\n'And his name?'\n\n'Oh, yes, James Drinkwater, and he's fourteen.'\n\n'And his parents?' Dylan asked, pen poised as he grabbed a piece of scrap paper and sat down at a desk.\n\n'His parents are a Julia and George Drinkwater.'\n\n'His clothing?'\n\n'It's here,' Vicky whispered, pointing to evidence bags at her feet.\n\n'Vicky Hardacre has them, sir, I understand.'\n\n'Yes, she's just informed me,' said Dylan.\n\n'I've some statements for you so I'll drop them into your office within the hour.'\n\n'Brilliant, thanks for your efforts and see you soon,' Dylan said.\n\n'Sounds like I'd better get my lippy on if that gorgeous Sarge's coming,' said Vicky raising her eyebrow in an impish fashion. She winked at him and tottered towards the ladies. He shook his head and Dennis smiled at him knowingly. What was he to do with her?\n\n'Hey, never mind lippy where's the copy of the CCTV?' Dylan shouted, after her.\n\n'It'll be with you anytime now,' Vicky called over her shoulder.\n\nJasmine glided through the door. As she saw Dylan her brown eyes lit up and her thin face broke into a smile. The petite SOCO supervisor's long brown hair was tied in a high ponytail, which made her look younger than she normally did.\n\n'Boss, did you want to see the knife from the precinct incident?' she asked.\n\n'Please,' Dylan said, walking into his office. She followed close behind.\n\nDylan sat at his desk expectantly and she passed the sealed protective tube with the knife inside to him. Dylan looked at the prized object laid on his desk with interest.\n\n'I've swabbed it but surprisingly it doesn't appear to have any blood on it; the lab will confirm that for you though.'\n\nDylan picked up the tube and held it in the air, studying it intently.\n\n'Oh my God are your eyes that bad?' said Vicky, who had returned and was standing at his door. Her hair was brushed, her glossy lips puckered like she had just eaten something sour.\n\n'Cheeky mare,' Dylan said, glancing towards her.\n\n'Well, you know what they say you should've listened to them when they told you it would make you blind,' she chuckled. Jasmine blushed.\n\nDylan laughed. 'My sight might not be brilliant lady, but if I'm not mistaken the very tiny tip of this blade just happens to be missing. Jasmine?'\n\n'You don't miss much do you?' she said, 'and I'm convinced it's the knife that was used on Greenwood and killed Denton.'\n\n'No.' Vicky said, hurriedly walking towards Dylan to look for herself. Hearing the commotion, Dennis walked into the office doorway.\n\n'Ooh, wait on, I might have something that may help,' Vicky said, turning quickly and running into Dennis in her rush to get the magnifying glass out of her drawer.\n\n'I knew this useless Christmas present from my Nan would come in handy one day,' she said, fumbling around in her drawer.\n\nGathering around Dylan's desk, they all stared in amazement at the picture of the tip Jasmine produced.\n\n'Coincidence or what?' Vicky said, peering through the looking glass.\n\n'Well, fingers crossed that it can be proven later today?' Dylan asked, Jasmine who nodded in the affirmative. 'Let's stay on the positive and assume it is 'the' knife', but right now we need to find out who it belongs to before our man attacks anyone else. Let's prioritise anyone returned to the care of the community and early releases \u2013 and let's get that bloody CCTV Vicky pronto and see what this man looks like.'\n\n'Knife to the lab ASAP?'\n\n'Yeah, on its way now, sir,' Jasmine smiled, as she disappeared through the doorway.\n\nDylan looked out of his window. Avril Summerfield-Preston, the Divisional Administrator, was getting into her car, parcel in hand.\n\n'She's just going to visit Jen, she told me when I saw her just now in the loo,' said Vicky. Dylan grunted.\n\n'For goodness sake, can't the woman leave her alone she's supposed to be resting,'\n\n'Welfare check.'\n\n'Welfare my arse, she'll only go and upset her. Does Jen know she's going?'\n\nVicky shrugged her shoulders.\n\n'I better ring her to warn her,' Dylan said, picking up his mobile. The battery was dead. He took his charger out of his briefcase and was just about to plug it in when Dennis came charging into his office.\n\n'Boss, you might wanna have a look at this guy who has come back into the community recently,' Dennis said, going back to his chair in the office and turning his computer screen around towards his audience. 'Released on life licence at the beginning of last month,' he read.\n\n'Frederick Gladwin Wainstall, twenty-nine years old who was sentenced to life imprisonment at the age of eighteen for murdering his parents, who died from multiple stab wounds,' read Vicky.\n\n'He only served nine years. Nine bloody years and released on life licence which was revoked after wounding a stranger within weeks.' Dennis read out his voice getting louder and louder with ever spoken word. 'The weapon used; a knife.' Dennis looked up into the faces of those who had gathered round him. 'He's back out.'\n\nDylan continued read to about Wainstall feverishly over Dennis's shoulder. 'No wonder the incident doesn't ring any bells; it happened in Brighton,' he said.\n\n'I don't believe this, his parents were found with white lilies next to their bodies,' Vicky said quietly.\n\n'Okay we need to pull out all the stops. Let's get everyone looking for him. I want you to get hold of probation, prison, social services. We need an up-to-date photograph of him. What address have we got for him?\n\n'It looks like we have a madman on the loose who may just be looking for his next victim \u2013 and I for one don't want that to happen,' said Dylan.\n\nIt was like lighting a blue touch paper. There needed to be a sense of urgency throughout the building, in the town and villages surrounding Harrowfield. Dylan looked as a recent image of Wainstall sent by email from the prison. He printed it and carefully soaked up the man's features. He had a shaven head, clean-shaven face except for what looked like a small goatee beard on his chin. His deep-set dark staring eyes looked vacantly back at him.\n\n'Brian Stevenson's custody clock is running away with us, sir,' said the officer from the cells who burst into the CID office, only to be met by a group of silent people crowded around the photograph.\n\n'Yes, yes. DS Benjamin and DS Spiers will be with you shortly,' Dylan snapped.\n\nThe officer retreated out of the door leaving it swinging in his path.\n\n'Only trying to help,' he mumbled. 'If we don't tell them they shout at us. If we tell them they shout... Can't do right for doing wrong,' he grumbled as he made his way back to the custody suite.\n\n'Did we get a statement off the woman who rang in about the flowers being taken off the railings?' asked Dylan. Vicky and Dennis looked blank. 'Check. If not, let's get that done.'\n\nVicky nodded.\n\n'The McDonalds' CCTV, have you viewed that yet for around the time when Denton and Greenwood were in there?' Dylan asked Dennis.\n\n'No, not yet you told me to concentrate on prison releases,' Dennis said.\n\nDennis took the envelope from his tray with the CCTV video enclosed and slotted it in the machine. He looked at the monitor then back at Dylan with a startled expression upon his face.\n\n'Look, that's him; sat in the corner, the man in the wool hat holding the flowers,' he said\n\n'Let's get the video to Imaging and get it enhanced,' said Dylan, with more than a hint of urgency in his voice.\n\n'Traffic'll get it there at speed, Vicky.'\n\n'Traffic'll do what?' asked Sergeant Wilson.\n\n'My hero,' said Vicky.\n\n'What?' he asked, with a puzzled look on his face.\n\n'Oh, nothing, ignore her,' Dylan said. 'Get this to HQ will you mate ASAP. And take Hardacre with you. She's about as useless as a glass hammer to me at the moment,' he said quietly, winking at Sergeant Wilson. 'And she'll be able to fill you in on the way,' said Dylan.\n\n'Sure,' Sergeant Wilson smiled at Vicky.\n\n'That okay with you?' asked Dylan.\n\n'Is it ever.' she said grabbing her bag and rushing after Sergeant Wilson as he headed for the door with the CCTV footage in his hand.\n\n'And see if you can persuade her to take her bloody Sergeant's exams while you're at it.' Dylan called after them.\n\nSergeant Wilson raised his hand as he looked over his shoulder at Dylan.\n\nWithin the hour Dylan had viewed the CCT seized from the town centre precinct. It showed a man running around the corner onto the precinct. He stops, looks around. James Drinkwater emerges from the florist with a bunch of flowers in his hand. Suddenly, for no apparent reason the man begins to run after him, pulling two knives out of his coat pockets. He stabs James in the back with one, turns, and runs away.\n\n'He's wearing a wool hat,' said Dennis.\n\n'The witnesses got that right. But look at his footwear,' Dylan said pointing to the brilliant white training shoes the man was wearing on the screen.\n\nThey let the tape run, but it didn't show the attacker's face. With fumbling hands Dennis quickly swapped the tape for the CCTV tape recovered from Union Street where the knife had been found.\n\n'It doesn't get much better than that,' Dylan said, with a smile, as they viewed a clear picture of a man dropping a knife in the bin from where the officer had recovered it. He looked up directly into the camera. The man didn't quite have a goatee beard but what looked like a bad case of acne and unshaven hair on his chin.\n\n'It's Wainstall.' came the chorus of voices.\n\n'That's for sure,' said Dennis.\n\n'Let's get his picture printed off and get him found. Remind people he's dangerous and is likely to be in possession of a knife that he won't hesitate to use. We don't want any more stabbings'\n\nThe incident room telephone rang. Lisa answered it and listened intently. She put the phone down as if in slow motion.\n\n'Yes?' said Dylan.\n\n'The hospital, sir,' she said. All eyes were on Lisa's grave face. 'Billy Greenwood lost his fight for life a few minutes ago'.\n\n## Chapter 49\n\nDylan hadn't heard from Jen. His phone charged enough to have a signal, he turned it back on. It beeped a message. He didn't recognise the number. Taylor stumbled into Dylan's office door and dropped the evidence bags she'd been carrying.\n\n'Shit.' Dylan heard her cry.\n\n'More haste, less speed, don't they say?' said Dylan as he rose from his chair behind the desk. John opened the door and guided an unsteady Taylor inside.\n\n'You okay? Come in,' he said.\n\n'Flaming heels, they'll be the death of me,' she said, standing on one leg as she removed the offending broken shoe. Her concern only fuelled the cruel sting of embarrassment.\n\n'Am I glad to see you two,' Dylan said, with a sigh of relief as he looked at his dirty and exhausted DSs. Taylor dumped the bags of property seized from Brian Stevenson's hotel room on Dylan's desk, then fell unceremoniously into a chair.\n\n'You look just about all in.'\n\n'Nothing that a strong cup of coffee won't put right,' said John. 'You should have seen the hotel room, boss. It was like a haul from a jeweller's, plus sixty grand we reckon, in cash.'\n\n'How do you two feel about going into interview?' Dylan asked tentatively.\n\n'You're joking, aren't you? I can't wait to see what Stevenson's got to say for himself,' said Taylor. Her face was flushed and her eyes lit up with anticipation.\n\n'Me too, there's a lot for him to explain away,' added John. Dylan saw the bags that had formed under his eyes in the past few weeks and he knew he was feeling the strain of the enquiry.\n\n'I'm told it's Lin Perfect from Perfect and Best that's awaiting your call to attend to represent her client \u2013 so let's get cracking, shall we? Remember keep an open mind and don't accept the first thing that he tells you.'\n\nDylan intently watched the live stream footage of the interview on the monitor in his office. He could hear his heart beating with anticipation but as a higher tier trained interviewer he missed the face-to-face confrontation and psychological battle on a regular basis.\n\nThe two detective sergeants appeared before him on the screen and Dylan shuffled in his seat. He leaned closer to the screen. He saw Brian Stevenson sitting alongside his solicitor.\n\n'For the purpose of the tape,' John said. 'Please can you give me your name?'\n\nIn unfaltering, clear voices, the financial advisor and solicitor spoke their names clearly. The interview commenced. Dylan shook his head; he would never understand the reason for the caution. Why would anyone but the British put a suspect in an interview room, wanting them to admit to an offence and then spend time telling them that they don't have to say anything?\n\nFirstly, John went over Brian Stevenson's background before asking him to explain where he was going when they had found him in his hotel room and account for the large amount of money he had with him along with the numerous bejewelled rings.\n\nStevenson didn't answer any of the questions put to him. He stared at them, never blinking, never taking his eyes off them, never showing an ounce of emotion.\n\nTaylor was to play the friendly cop to encourage cooperation by Stevenson in building his trust in her as opposed to John, the aggressor. John pushed the issue of the murder of Mildred Sykes and the silver carriage clock.\n\nIt was obvious to Dylan that Stevenson didn't like the way John put things to him in a manner that he was made to face the facts. The response was still the same. The two detectives now knew that Lin Perfect had advised Stevenson not to answer questions put to him as he 'no commented' repeatedly. They were prepared however to ask everything that Dylan had planned for them to ask, giving him the opportunity to answer. If not, at a later stage, the solicitor could argue that her client would have replied if the questions had been put to him.\n\nThey meticulously asked every question. Dylan was pleased. Some questions that were put to Stevenson provoked a flicker of something in his eyes. Every now and then Stevenson ran his hand distractedly through his hair.\n\nFor the forty-five minutes duration of the tape, Stevenson managed to remain silent while under extreme pressure, which Dylan knew wasn't an easy thing to do. He didn't appear unduly fazed. They would take a thirty-minute break.\n\nFrom the confines of his office, Dylan saw Sergeant Wilson arrive in the incident room. He knocked at the door, Dylan bid him entry and he took a seat after placing the paperwork and exhibits from the hospital on Dylan's desk. Within seconds, Vicky entered with coffee for the men.\n\n'He deserves this, boss. He's been working ever so hard,' she said. Dylan smiled. Sergeant Wilson blushed.\n\n'Oh, have you got it bad girl?' Dylan laughed when Sergeant Wilson excused himself to go to the rest room.\n\nIn typical Vicky fashion, she brushed her long blonde hair over her shoulders with a flick of her hand and looked at Dylan through her fringe, smiling. On his return, Dylan gave them the update on Wainstall and a copy of his mugshot.\n\n'I'll get his description circulated on a bulletin on the intranet to all relevant areas for PCs and PCSOs to look out for him, boss. He shouldn't be that difficult to find if he's still out and about,' said Sergeant Wilson, looking at Vicky and smiling as he spoke.\n\n'We haven't found him yet though,' Dylan said.\n\n'Do you know, I think that CCTV footage is one of the saddest things I've ever seen,' said Vicky, emotionally charged. 'How could anyone stab a kid like that for nothing?' she said.\n\n'Looking at the tape, it's apparent he had two knives. One we've recovered, but the other? The likelihood is that he still has one with him, so be sure to remind everyone how bloody dangerous he is,' Dylan said.\n\nSergeant Wilson got up to leave. 'I'm on with it sir.'\n\n'Be seeing you soon, Sarge,' said Vicky. Sergeant Wilson nodded at Dylan and smiled fondly at Vicky.\n\n'Bit too obvious, mate,' whispered Dylan.\n\n'You think so?' she cringed, as she sat on the chair facing Dylan, swinging her legs. She sprung up, smiled and glided out of the office.\n\nDylan shook his head.\n\nTo give John a break and allow him to nip home and see the family, Dylan agreed to stand in for him on the second interview with Stevenson. A different face might get a different response from him, occasionally he knew it did. On impulse, Dylan grabbed the crucial exhibits recovered from the hotel room to take in with him.\n\nTaylor opened up the interviews after the usual caution. Stevenson once again sat staring at the detectives and didn't respond to the change of personnel.\n\nDylan sat quietly watching every twitch on Stevenson's face.\n\n'You were the last person to see Mildred Sykes alive according to her neighbours and on your own admission.\n\nYou took her a bunch of white lilies, didn't you?' said Taylor.\n\nStevenson didn't respond.\n\n'Mr Stevenson, the purpose of an interview is to ascertain the truth. If you have nothing to hide, I can't understand why you refuse to answer our questions,' she continued.\n\nTwo blank faces looked at Dylan and Taylor from the other side of the table. Lin Perfect made a note in her book. 'Inspector, it is my client's right to remain silent if he so wishes,' she said, raising her eyes to look at him.\n\nDylan cleared his throat. 'I understand that, and you will understand that it is my duty to put the allegations in order to him to give him the opportunity to respond,' he said. He turned his head to address Stevenson. 'So, do you agree you saw Mildred Sykes?' said Dylan. Stevenson stared directly into his eyes. 'Well?' said Dylan, raising his voice. The pair jumped. Taylor suppressed a smile.\n\n'You know I did,' said Stevenson, quietly hanging his head. Dylan was pleased he'd spoke, but hoped he would continue to do so.\n\n'According to reports handed to your solicitor,' Dylan said nodding in Lin Perfect's direction. 'It was about that time that she died. We know of no other visitors after you left. Your fingerprints are all over the house. Can you tell me why?' Dylan said eagerly. Brian Stevenson brought his hands up to his face and rubbed it vigorously.\n\n'What were you looking for?'\n\nIt was now or never.\n\n'We have paper evidence that tells us you'd already taken large amounts of money from her. Does the jewellery that's been recovered \u2013 for the purpose of the tape, DS Spiers is showing Brian Stevenson the rings they recovered from the hotel room Mr Stevenson was arrested in earlier today \u2013 belong to her?'\n\nStevenson glanced at the rings on the desk in the plastic bags.\n\n'Well, does it?' Dylan said impatiently.\n\n'Multiple questions, Inspector,' Lin Perfect interrupted.\n\n'Feel free to answer any of them, Mr Stevenson,' Dylan fired back. 'Start with your prints on her bedside drawers, eh?'\n\n'I helped her look for things,' Stevenson stammered.\n\n'What things?'\n\n'All sorts of things,' he said obviously agitated.\n\n'Like what?'\n\n'Look, I was just about her only visitor, her only friend, so if she needed anything, I'd help.' Stevenson said.\n\n'Friend? Is that what you call yourself?' Dylan stopped and checked himself before resuming the mask of the hardened detective. 'So, how did she get her head injury?' Dylan said in a quieter fashion.\n\nBrian Stevenson shrugged his shoulders.\n\n'Don't you see that's why you're sitting where you are? I think you should think very carefull about your situation, Brian.'\n\nThe room went silent. Dylan knew that neither Taylor nor he would break that silence. A minute passed. Dylan could almost see Brian Stevenson's brain working, considering his options. Stevenson looked sideways at Lin Perfect. She stared at him long and hard. It was the look of a parent to a child to behave, or else. She opened her mouth to speak and Dylan held his hand up to stop her. Stevenson turned to Dylan.\n\n'When I called to see her, she had already fallen and hurt her head. She refused to let me get any medical attention for her. She was a stubborn old thing, just like my mother used to be,' he said with tears in his eyes. 'I went back to see her the next day to make sure she was alright and took her the flowers to cheer her up but she was already dead. I was shocked, shaken,' he swallowed, 'afraid I would get the blame. That's why I haven't said anything before. I was frightened, old people die in their homes all the time don't they? So I thought it was best to let her be found by someone else other than me.' Stevenson said. He stopped talking momentarily. 'There was nothing I could have done for her.'\n\nDylan and DS Taylor Spiers remained silent. The tape purred on. By remaining quiet and listening, Dylan hoped Stevenson would continue.\n\n'She was undeniably dead. I was sure she was, otherwise I would have called for an ambulance,' he said, tears now rolling down his cheeks.\n\n'Do you know where she'd fallen?' asked Dylan.\n\n'I think she had fallen down the stairs,' he said, thinking aloud as he looked up at the ceiling and inhaled deeply. 'Yes,' he sniffed. 'I think that's what she said.'\n\n'And you didn't push her?' Dylan said.\n\n'No,' Stevenson said. 'No, I didn't push her.'\n\n'You understand we've got to ask the question.'\n\n'Yes, but I didn't,' Stevenson got a handkerchief out of his pocket and wiped his tearstained face.\n\n'Okay, then. Now, do you remember the silver carriage clock that we asked you about earlier?' For a minute Brian Stevenson looked bewildered by the question. He physically shook himself. 'Yes, yes I do. It was stolen from my house. That clock was the reason I knew my house had been burgled.'\n\n'If that's the case, why do we have a photograph of Mildred Sykes with that same clock behind her on her mantlepiece?'\n\nStevenson stared once more through the detectives and made no reply.\n\n'And can you explain why Mildred Sykes's fingerprints are on that clock?'\n\nStevenson's face blanched, but he made no reply.\n\n'Well?'\n\nDylan waited for a reply that never came. 'You robbed an old lady of her savings, her personal belongings and when you had bled her dry you battered her to death, didn't you? Her injuries were not as a result of a fall, as you would have us believe, but as a direct result of being hit over the head with a ferocious blow by you. It was the same system you'd used on Grace Harvey and I wonder how many more old people? It was unfortunate for you, wasn't it, that Grace's death was around the same time that Mildred was found, so you had to think of getting away and had obtained another name.'\n\nBrian Stevenson fidgeted for a moment, swivelled round on his chair and turned to face the other way.\n\n'You can turn your back. You can remain silent. What you can't do is change the facts, which are that you befriended, robbed and beat to death a defenceless old lady. You're nothing but a greedy, evil man,' Dylan spat.\n\nSuddenly Stevenson turned and opened his mouth, his eyes wide, his face contorted. Lin Perfect jumped up from her seat and moved quickly to DS Spiers' side. Stevenson threw his arms in the air. 'You know, nothing. They were nasty, bossy women, just like my mother and they expected everything from me, everything. Do you hear me?' His outburst stopped as suddenly as it had started and he sat down once, more facing the wall.\n\n'I think we need to have a break, Inspector, please,' Lin Perfect said, holding up her notepad in a shaking hand. She stood at the door like a caged animal hoping to be let out of the room, quickly.\n\nThe interview was terminated.\n\n'Donald Harvey was telling the truth,' Taylor said thoughtfully as she hurried behind Dylan on the corridor. 'I think I owe him one hell of an apology.'\n\nThat was the last thing on Dylan's mind as he went over what Stevenson had said \u2013 and, more importantly, what he hadn't said.\n\n## Chapter 50\n\nFlashing blue lights could be seen and sirens heard as he arrived back in his office. A note was pinned to his desk. Jen rang, can you ring her back, it said. Dylan brushed it aside and picked up his mobile phone. There was a message.\n\n  Avril Summerfield-Preston left her calling card. I was out walking with Dawn and Violet trying to get little Button to make her appearance. Aren't I the lucky one?   Speak soon. X.\n\n'Oh, I'm sure she'll catch up with you sooner or later, love,' he mumbled, as he tucked his phone in his pocket and smiled to himself.\n\n'Lisa,' Dylan called. 'I need a team briefing and I need it ASAP.' Lisa pattered into the office with a pad and a pen in her hand. 'We need to discuss the results of the interview with Stevenson and speak about need for the extensive work that will have to be done now, in respect of other elderly women that have died or any that are still alive and on his books, with a view to linking them to him.'\n\nLisa nodded in agreement as she took the notes in shorthand.\n\n'I need to identify the owners of the rings \u2013 and the only way to do that is if the relatives of the deceased, or his female clients who are lucky enough to still be alive, are able to help us. We'll need to find out the cause of death of any of his clients that have died.'\n\n'That's not going to be easy, sir.'\n\n'Not impossible though. The easiest way of course would be if he'd speak to us but that's unlikely based on his present behaviour and responses.'\n\nDylan stood before his team the next day. He was satisfied that Brian Stevenson had murdered Mildred Sykes after systematically stealing from her. He told them Stevenson had admitted being at her house, stating that he knew she was dead.\n\n'The fingertip marks inside the silver carriage clock casing along with Mildred's are his, fingerprints have confirmed it,' Vicky said.\n\n'Fantastic. We'll have another interview with him and then we'll charge him and get him remanded for Mildred's murder, which will allow us to continue our enquiries. Find out how his own mother died will you, Dennis?'\n\n'I'm waiting for you to get stuck into him again, boss,' said Taylor. 'Shall I arrange for the solicitor to be ready in half an hour?' she said looking at her watch.\n\n'Yeah,' said Dylan. John had arrived, looking suitably refreshed. Dylan put an arm around his shoulder and led him into his office, closing the door before Taylor could enter behind them.\n\n'Going well then boss?' said John. Dylan nodded.\n\n'At least we're going to be in a position to charge, whether he continues to speak to us or not. So far so good,' he sighed. 'But it would be nice if he bared his soul.'\n\nThere was a knock at the door. 'Ten minutes for the solicitor boss, I'm ready when you are,' Taylor said with a smile.\n\n'In that case Taylor, any chance of some coffee?' he asked.\n\n'I hope that won't spoil a celebratory drink later, sir,' she said.\n\nJohn pored over the notes that Dylan had given him. Updating him as to what needed to be talked about in interview was important at this stage. The time was ticking away on Stevenson's custody clock and they needed as much information from Stevenson as possible before they charged him.\n\nWhen she came back with the coffee, Dylan told Taylor that he had fully updated John, who would resume interviewing with her.\n\n'Oh, okay,' Taylor said with disdain.\n\nDylan was trying not to dislike her. Visually the woman was attractive, but unfortunately her personality didn't match her looks. She was moody, he already knew that, but he didn't like the way she thought that men couldn't or wouldn't be able to resist her. She had a lot to learn if she was going to continue working with Dylan because at the moment she didn't know him at all.\n\nHe texted the only woman in his life. Things going okay will be charging later so it could be a late one, don't wait up.\n\n'Boss, the blue lights, a short while ago,' said Vicky. 'They were speeding off to St Thomas' \u2013 a woman called on three nines about a bloke acting suspiciously in the graveyard. She'd been to put some flowers on her late husband's grave when she saw him taking flowers from the others.'\n\n'And,' Dylan said.\n\n'He had a knife in his hand.'\n\n'She obviously got away.'\n\n'Yes, but the description she gave our boys sounds like Wainstall.'\n\n'I wonder if the flowers were white lilies?' said Vicky. 'God, a goose has just walked over my grave,' she continued, rubbing her arms. 'How weird is he, eh? Helicopter has been scrambled; dogs have been called for, but nothing yet.'\n\n'He's one of the evil ones, Vicky, who needs to be back behind bars sooner rather than later.'\n\n'The lady wasn't wrong; the town centre CCTV control room have informed Control they had sighted a man fitting Wainstall's description carrying a bunch of flowers and heading towards the subway from Crown Street which leads under the ring road to the Midland Road area. Units have been deployed.' Vicky said.\n\n'There are four exits from that one, aren't there Vicky? One that takes you towards Pellon Lane as well as Gibbet Street, Crown Street and Silver Street?'\n\n'You're probably right. I wouldn't know the street names.'\n\n'Get us a radio switched on and we'll listen in to see what's happening.'\n\nVicky and Dylan sat quietly together in the CID office listening for developments. All units were in place with each exit covered, helicopter overhead and according to CCTV control he was still in there.'\n\n'Like a rat in a drainpipe boss. They must have him, they must,' said Vicky\n\n'What worries me Vicky is who else might be in there with him. He could have attacked someone or be attacking someone \u2013 and we have no way of knowing,' Dylan said, tapping his fingers on the desk. 'Come on, come on.' He picked up the phone. 'Control room, DI Dylan, regarding the incident in the subway. Can we get double crews to enter each entrance with care at the same time. I'm concerned that our suspect may have cornered someone in there.'\n\n'Affirmative,' the officer replied.\n\n'Vicky, get some car keys and grab that radio; we need to get down there.'\n\nThe phone rang. 'Boss, it's for you,' said Dennis covering the mouthpiece.\n\n'I'm not here,' he replied.\n\n'Do you want me with you boss? ' asked Taylor.\n\n'No, crack on with Stevenson \u2013 we need him sorting. Hopefully it will be over by the time we get there.' Vicky appeared with a pickaxe handle from behind her desk.\n\n'What the hell?' Dylan said.\n\n'I know we've got CS spray and that boss, but I don't want Edward Scissorhands cutting me, especially across the bloody chest. My stab proof vest doesn't fit me anymore.'\n\nDylan tutted. 'Come on let's go.'\n\n'But boss, Avril Summerfield-Preston wants to speak to you...' Dennis mouthed the words to him so she couldn't overhear.\n\n'If it's her, I'm long gone,' Dylan shouted as he strutted towards the door with Vicky in his wake.\n\nDylan's right hand was placed expertly on the steering wheel, while his left grasped the top of the pickaxe handle. 'Put that bloody pickaxe handle on the back seat will you before you take my eye out?' he said. She moaned.\n\nDylan looked at Vicky and they knew they shared the same thought. 'Hold on tight,' he said.\n\nThe nearest access for them was Pellon Lane.\n\n'Stand off situation, sir,' said the uniformed officer as they alighted from the car. 'Our man has a lady at knifepoint and is threatening to slit her throat.\n\n'I knew it. Don't take his threats lightly, he'll do what he says,' said Dylan, gravely.\n\nAs Dylan and Vicky strode down the subway, all Dylan could hear were their own footsteps and the echo of a dog barking which seemed to him as if it was bouncing off the cold, damp, tiled walls.\n\n## Chapter 51\n\n'You still got that pickaxe handle, Vicky?'\n\n'Right here boss, up my sleeve,' Vicky said.\n\nDylan smiled despite the dire situation. He could see before him a large black Alsatian straining at the end of a leash held by a dog handler as they turned the corner of the underground tunnel.\n\n'You better get the handle out. It might give the dog something to chew on,' Dylan grimaced.\n\n'Thought you liked dogs?' she whispered out of the corner of her mouth as she let the wood slip down the sleeve of her coat and into her hand.\n\n'I do, but not attached to my leg.'\n\nA group of officers stood in their line of sight. Shouting could be heard.\n\n'Let her go now. Do it now. Let her go!'\n\nDylan could see the backs of the uniformed personnel who wore stab-proof vests and slash-proof gloves. They were standing in an arch, each about ten yards from Wainstall. A couple of the officers brandished their batons were holding CS spray in their outstretched hands, but Dylan's attention was drawn to the terrified look on the lady's face.\n\nIt was apparent that Wainstall was holding her up by her hair in his left hand and Dylan could see he had a large bladed knife in his right hand, pointed at her throat. His eyes were dark and dead, like a shark's eyes. He towered over his hostage who was ashen-faced and gasping for breath. Wainstall didn't look like a man who had an ounce of compassion in him as he taunted the police with all the arrogance of the victor.\n\n'Come on,' he growled, brandishing his muscles. His lips curled tightly over his clenched teeth. 'Come on then. Come near me copper and I'll cut her fucking throat.'\n\n'My God,' Vicky said, her lip trembling and her voice shaking. The reality of the situation hit home with a force she hadn't felt before.\n\nDylan realised at that moment that he was the most senior police officer present and therefore in charge of the scene. The officers in attendance would expect him to take control.\n\n'I need a firearms unit immediately,' he told a uniformed officer.\n\n'At least then there'll be an option of taking him out if he makes a move to use the weapon on her,' he whispered to Vicky. 'Get me an ambulance on standby. The poor woman will already be in shock \u2013 and who knows who else will need it yet,' he said. Vicky nodded her head.\n\n'Step further away and to try silence that dog will you,' Dylan told the dog handler in a hushed tone. 'Take a few paces back, lower your batons and put your CS gas away,' he told the officers with a calm, controlled and quiet voice.\n\n'Give me two full-length riot shields,' he ordered. Now everything was urgent and Dylan was pleased his commands were being obeyed immediately and without question. Wainstall, Dylan knew, enjoyed using the knife and Dylan was aware that he could do so again, at any moment.\n\nFortunately, the shields were in the police transit van at the mouth of the subway. Dylan breathed a sigh of relief at the sight of the officer carrying them down the tunnel towards him. He didn't know how long he could hold Wainstall's attention.\n\nTaking the two officers with the shields to one side, he told them of his plan, which he tried to keep as near to a well-rehearsed public order training exercise as he could.\n\n'Flatten the armed man against the wall with the shields,' he said. 'Ensure the arm holding the weapon is outside the shields so he can be disarmed.'\n\n'Vicky, I want you to look after the victim once we've got her released. I'm going to try to negotiate the release of the lady, then you'll have a chance with the shields to try and contain him \u2013 and if that doesn't work, well we'll have to use the firearms,' he said. 'It's a life and death situation. Try to stay calm at all times.'\n\nDylan moved forward, between the two shielded officers, to within a couple of yards of Wainstall and his captive and with his outstretched hand he grabbed the wooden pickaxe handle Vicky was holding.\n\n'How the hell do you negotiate with someone hell-bent on killing?' he mumbled giving her a fleeting look. He needed to try, quickly, for the sake of the poor hostage.\n\n'Frederick, Frederick Wainstall what're you doing? Let her go immediately,' Dylan shouted with an authority that he believed Wainstall would be used to responding to.\n\nWainstall had a fixed smile upon his face as he looked towards Dylan.\n\n'What're you doing? You don't know this lady, do you? Let go of her now,' Dylan continued. Wainstall didn't move, just gripped the knife tighter and raised his arm as though to stab, as opposed to slash, his prey. There was an intake of breath and the woman appeared to moan and flop to the floor. Wainstall's arm jolted \u2013 and if he hadn't been holding her up by the hair before, he definitely was now.\n\nDylan could hear the sound of running footsteps behind him, which he knew would be the instant response firearms team. He knew Vicky would brief them and they would get themselves into a position to be able to fire, if required.\n\nIt wasn't long before Dylan saw the red dot of the laser sight from a firearm on Wainstall's forehead. Dylan exhaled \u2013 that reassured him. They were not only in position, but he and the other two officers were not blocking their view.\n\n'Wainstall.' Dylan shouted again, with vigour. 'Stop this at once. Can I call you Frederick, or would you rather I call you Fred?' he tried a different approach. At least while he was listening to Dylan, he wasn't using the knife.\n\n'You can call me Mr Fred,' he said, to Dylan's surprise.\n\n'Mr Fred, could you please let the lady go? You don't need to hurt her. Look how frightened she is. The poor woman has fainted,' Dylan said.\n\n'No way. You'll beat me. When I've got a knife nobody beats me or makes fun of me. Nobody,' he shouted, his voice rising into a scream.\n\n'But the lady hasn't made fun of you or beat you, has she?'\n\n'No, but she looks like my aunt \u2013 and she did,' he snarled, pulling her head back so he could see her face. 'She always beat me, till I got a knife.'\n\n'What about the boy in the street, Mr Fred? He didn't.'\n\n'Kids do. All kids. They make fun of me, but not when I have a knife,' he snarled.\n\n'I'm worried. He's agitated. Be ready to react,' Dylan whispered to the officers by his side. 'Pass it back to the firearms team to keep flashing the red dot in his eye. Here goes.'\n\n'Do I make you angry Frederick?' Dylan said. Purposely, he didn't call him Mr Fred, the name he had elected to be called. He could see the red laser dot flashing across Wainstall's eye and he knew it was annoying him, much to Dylan's delight.\n\n'It's Mr Fred to you,' Wainstall screeched.\n\n'But, I don't want to call you Mr Fred,' Dylan said.\n\n'You're fucking annoying me,' Wainstall shouted, lifting his right arm with the knife above his head once more in a threatening manner.\n\n'I don't make you angry, you're just an angry man,' Dylan shouted back.\n\nWainstall's hair fell over his face and he tossed his head back. He let go of his victim's hair momentarily to rub his left eye and she fell on her knees to the floor. Wainstall went to grab her.\n\n'Now.' shouted Dylan at the top of his voice as he surged forward with the two officers who held the shields. Vicky threw herself across the tiled floor to snatch the old lady, dragging her sideways and shielding her as best she could with her body.\n\nWainstall was squashed against the subway wall with the shields like a pressed flower. Dylan's reach with the pickaxe handle landed straight on top of Wainstall's head. The knife fell from his hand. The push behind the front three officers made their advance feel like Dylan was in a rugby scrum. Wainstall had been well and truly taken by surprise.\n\nThe knife was picked up off the floor, out of Wainstall's reach. Dylan stepped back to take a breath as the officers with the riot shields grappled with him on the floor. Wainstall kicked out like a mule, but he was outnumbered. His wrists were handcuffed and his legs bound. He wriggled with all the strength he could muster, trying to bite the officers who carried him out of the subway.\n\nHis piercing, sadistic laughter echoed through the tunnel and up and out of each exit with the breeze that emanated from the underground. As he was carried up the steps and into the sunlight Dylan could hear his voice and that of the officer shouting at him fading away.\n\nAll that was left in the tunnel were the whimpering sounds of the poor soul he had petrified. Dylan saw the elderly lady sat with her head bent as far as she could between her knees. Tears streamed down her face and she gasped silent sobs. Her back was safely against the subway wall, the contents of the handbag strewn across the floor.\n\n'Are you okay?' Dylan said gently as he bent down to her. She shook her head and her moan filled the air as she leaned her head back against the cold tiled wall. Vicky sat alongside her and held her tightly.\n\n'Just shocked, I think boss,' she said reassuringly. 'That was a close call.' Vicky let out a huge sigh and moved her hand to rub the lady's back reassuringly as she leaned forward once more. The paramedics arrived and lifted her to her feet. Slowly and reassuringly they walked her to the waiting ambulance. Around them, officers scurried quietly and efficiently collecting the contents of the lady's shopping bag.\n\n'Could someone go with her?' Dylan asked. 'Ensure her family are contacted will you and arrange to take a statement from her,' he said.\n\nA paramedic lifted Dylan's hand. Blood dripped from his fingers.\n\n'Ouch,' he said as he pulled it away.\n\n'Nothing broke,' she smiled as she wiggled his fingers, 'but it's a nasty cut...' she said. 'If it still hurts when the swelling's gone down,' she told him, 'then it might need an x-ray.'\n\n'You'll never hear the end of it from Dennis, boss,' Vicky said with a relieved laugh.\n\n'You've obviously recovered from the shock of it all,' Dylan said wincing as the paramedic tied on the bandage.\n\nThe local press had been at the subway's mouth taking pictures of Wainstall as he was carried out. They waited patiently to speak to Dylan.\n\n'He's an extremely violent man who didn't want to be arrested. I'll update you later,' he said. 'Yes, before you go to print,' he promised.\n\nDylan walked towards the team who were gathered beside the marked cars. 'Thank you,' he said, to the staff who had held the shields for him, and the firearms team.\n\nThere was a female stood at the fore that looked too young to be a police officer, let alone carrying a firearm. He was getting old, he conceded for the umpteenth time lately. He had nothing but respect for them. The intense training they did, their individual and team restraint they showed in life threatening situations such as this was admirable.\n\nDylan considered himself quite a calm individual but with a firearm in his hand he could think of many occasions in his career when he would have used it.\n\n'Vicky,' he shouted. She looked toward him as she stood at the open ambulance doors. 'Back to the nick please. I think we deserve a strong cup of coffee,' Dylan said as he climbed into his car.\n\n'If he'd gone to stab her, boss, do you think firearms would have shot him?' asked Vicky as she unceremoniously hurled herself into the passenger seat. 'Hey, you okay to drive?' she continued, without waiting for an answer.\n\nDylan shook his head. 'Of course. That's what they're there for Vicky, and I wouldn't have expected much of his head left if they have done.'\n\n'Urgh,' she shuddered. 'That's gross. Can't you just take me on a nice quiet enquiry next time,' she asked.\n\n'In this job?' he said raising his voice. He was quiet as they drove into the station yard.\n\n'Tell you what,' Vicky said. Dylan looked across at his passenger with a raised eyebrow. 'It's gonna be fun interviewing him though in't it?' she said.\n\n'I hadn't thought about that,' said Dylan.\n\n'Well you better have. He's like Mr Evil, never mind Mr Fred,' she said. 'He puts the willies up me.'\n\nDylan looked at her with both eyebrows raised this time as he put the car into reverse and negotiated his way into his parking space.\n\n'You know what I mean,' she chuckled, slapping his arm playfully.\n\n'Hey, look out \u2013 I'm injured,' he wailed.\n\n'Serves you right.'\n\n'What? I never said anything?' he said.\n\n'Maybe not, but all you blokes are all alike. I know what you're thinking.'\n\n'We're not all the same \u2013 far from it? Look at Mr Fred'.\n\n'Yeah, but he's sorted now.'\n\n'Not quite, but think how many lives as he's ruined in his life, so far? And fortunately the subway arrest worked out well, otherwise we could have had more bodies to deal with,' Dylan said.\n\n'Not with you in charge, boss,' she smiled.\n\n'It doesn't matter who's in charge, Vicky. When the negotiation technique works everything is fine, however when it doesn't the proverbial shit hits the fan, no matter what.'\n\n'I can think of some bosses who would still be considering whether or not to send anyone into the subway. Believe me, there's nothing worse than being stood around in a group waiting for a decision to be made,' said Vicky.\n\n'If you don't like it, you know what to do.'\n\n'I know, take my bloody sergeant's exam.'\n\n'Yes, and then you can make those decisions. You don't have to be in uniform long before you can come back into CID.'\n\n'You're right boss, as usual.'\n\nA knock came at the window. Dylan wound it down. 'John and Taylor are in interview with Stevenson, sir,' said Lisa. 'The monitor in your office is on for you to watch.'\n\n'Be right with you.' Dylan said, hurriedly getting out of the car.\n\n## Chapter 52\n\nDylan headed straight to his office; if he'd still been a smoker then the trail he'd have left in his wake would have resembled a smoking chimney. As it was, he had to be satisfied with a mouthful of chewing gum.\n\nHe knew how fortunate the woman in the tunnel had been. He didn't know how he would have felt if Wainstall had slashed her throat or the firearms team had taken off his head. Would he have felt like a failure? Would an investigation into the events have blamed him? Would the scenario be used as an example at training schools nationwide of how not to negotiate with a man with a knife? He shook his head to clear the paranoid, spiralling thoughts.\n\nStevenson sat in the interview room with his back to his interviewers.\n\nDylan could tell by DS Taylor Spiers and DS John Benjamin's faces that they weren't fazed by Brian Stevenson's actions, and after the formal introductions, they followed the structured interview plan. Systematically, they went through each item they had seized from his hotel room. This needed to be done to show the court at a later date that they had given him every opportunity to give an explanation as to how the jewellery had come into his possession.\n\n'Is one or more of these rings Mildred's?' asked Taylor.\n\nStevenson stared at the blank wall.\n\n'Is that why she wasn't wearing any rings when her body was found?' asked John.\n\nStevenson looked mannequin like as he sat perfectly still and made no comment.\n\n'Was she sat with her back to you when you smashed her skull in? Is that what you do when the people you prey on no longer have anything to give?' John said.\n\nStevenson made no comment but his shoulders rose and then dropped as he sighed, as if he was bored.\n\n'Are you sat with your back to us as a protest against the interviews or is it simply that you don't like to face up to what you've done?' Taylor said, with venom in her voice.\n\nStevenson swiftly turned, which made Taylor flinch. His eyes were bright and Dylan saw he took confidence from her reaction to his movement.\n\n'If you've got all the answers, why don't you charge me?' he said with a sneer.\n\n'Hardly the response of an innocent man, is it?' John said.\n\nHe turned away from them very slowly and was silent.\n\n'Damn,' Dylan said through gritted teeth.\n\n'Never been married have you?' said Taylor.\n\nHe didn't respond. Dylan could see the muscles in his neck tense. She continued the line of questioning.\n\n'Do you have some sort of fetish for elderly women, Mr Stevenson?'\n\nStevenson took a deep breath. Dylan saw Taylor steel herself for a reaction that never came.\n\n'Well, I don't see many men's names on the list of your clients. Neither are there any men's rings in this hoard of jewellery. Is there a sexual motive to your crimes? Is the theft of property to hide a more deviant side of your nature, Mr Stevenson?'\n\nThe room was quiet. Neither interviewer spoke for at least a minute.\n\n'I'm sure an innocent man would be protesting,' John said at last.\n\nDylan could see Stevenson hunch his shoulders and it reminded him of a cat that was ready to pounce.\n\n'Steady now, steady... wait for his reaction,' Dylan mumbled.\n\n'Was Mildred's murder sexual, Mr Stevenson?' Taylor said swiftly.\n\nThe questions were like darts piercing Stevenson's back and Dylan could tell he was feeling every single one. He turned to face the officers. 'One last time, she fell. She just fell. How many times do I have to tell you?'\n\n'Right, she fell,' said John.\n\nThere was another pause, 'I admit I stole some bits from her, but I found her dead at the bottom of the stairs. I never touched her.'\n\nDylan's skin tingled and he could feel his blood pumping through his veins. It was the breakthrough they were waiting for. The detectives never once let their professional mask slip.\n\n'You know that's not true Mr Stevenson. Her injuries are not consistent with a fall. Why are you avoiding the question of sex?' Taylor said, pushing the boundaries.\n\n'I have to challenge your line of questioning, officer. There has been no disclosure of any sexual assault or any suggestion of such to me,' said his solicitor, Lin Perfect.\n\n'Yes you're right. I'm simply trying to understand why the majority of Mr Stevenson's clients are female and elderly,' responded Taylor contritely.\n\n'Don't make me out to be a pervert,' Brian Stevenson said. 'You have no proof of that and I have nothing else to say,' he said with a new-found authority in his voice.\n\nTaylor and John tried to question him further but it was obvious that he was not going to speak to them anymore. Dylan ran a hand through his hair, sat back in his chair and forced the expelling air out of his lungs. The interview was terminated and Brian Stevenson could be seen on Dylan's monitor being escorted out of the interview room on his way back to the custody suite to be charged. He made no comment.\n\n'There's no way he's gonna make our job easy is there?' John mumbled to Taylor as they walked into Dylan's office.\n\n'No, and I'm sure Mildred isn't his only victim,' Dylan said.\n\n'At least we have him in custody, we just need to prove the charge now and focus on the file for the murder of Mildred Sykes to get him convicted and sentenced to life. He can always be brought back before the court if there were other charges proved afterwards.'\n\nThe incident room was buzzing. It was late. 'We off for a drink?' Taylor asked.\n\nLisa picked up the ringing phone. Her already tired face paled. 'Stevenson slashed his wrists in his cell, there's an ambulance en route,' she said.\n\n'What?' John said. 'I thought he was being watched? The boss is gonna go ape,' he said as he turned towards Dylan's office, where he could see his boss in animated discussions with someone on the phone.\n\n'The wanker. That'll cause an internal investigation, overseen by the independent body, which will be more of a priority than the bloody murder,' John groaned into his hands.\n\n'He may have just realised that he was looking at life inside,' she said. 'How serious is it? Do we know?' Taylor asked Lisa.\n\n'No,' she said, biting her lip.\n\n'It's ironic isn't it; the amount of people that will be scrambling to save a murderer's life now,' Vicky said.\n\n'And they'll probably save him? Only the good die young, don't they say?' Taylor added.\n\n'We'll be alright then,' Vicky said, looking at Taylor in a different light. 'I'm going to the cells. I want to know what's happening. You coming?'\n\n'They won't tell you anything,' said Taylor.\n\n'No, but I want to know if the bastard's going to live or die.'\n\n'I'd better go break the news to the boss,' John grimaced.\n\n## Chapter 53\n\n'Coffee, Boss?'\n\nDylan lifted his head from within his arms on the desk as John walked into his office, his hand wrapped round a mug of coffee. 'You're gonna need this,' he said, pulling a face as he placed the drink in front of him.\n\n'Now what's happened?' Dylan groaned. He could hear Vicky's loud raucous voice outside. He smiled weakly. You should be like the cats that got the cream.'\n\n'We were.'\n\n'Were? What's the bloody problem, it can't be that bad, surely?' he said, the smile on his face fading.\n\nTaylor knocked at the door, opened it and rushed in. Her face was flushed. 'He slashed his wrists,' she said, flopping down in the only vacant chair in the office.\n\n'What, how?' Dylan demanded. 'With what; I thought he was on suicide watch?' Dylan's face paled at the look on her face. 'How bad is he?' he continued.\n\nDylan and John looked at Taylor for the answers.\n\n'With a paper clip, believe it or not, the cells think he might have taken it from his solicitor's paperwork'.\n\n'So has he been treated and is he back in the cells?'\n\n'Yes. The wounds are superficial. Although there was a lot of blood it was a half-hearted attempt according to the staff downstairs.'\n\n'So what's up then?'\n\n'We thought,' John said, meekly ' you'd be fuming that a potential serial killer might have taken his secrets to the grave with him.'\n\n'Fate and luck always play a part in this game, you should know that by now. Come on you two,' he smiled at their serious faces and his normal pallor returned. 'I think we all deserve a drink, don't you?' The pair smiled, tiredly. 'Let's just find out what's happening to Wainstall first.'\n\nThe sight of relief on their faces told Dylan how much the case meant to them. At one time he would have gone mad, they were right to be concerned about telling him. Was he going soft in his old age?\n\nDylan picked up the phone and spoke to the Custody Sergeant regarding Frederick Wainstall.\n\n'Boss, he's loopy if you want my opinion,' he said. 'He's like a bloody animal. So much so, that I've had to call in the doctor to confirm that he's fit to detain and check his fitness to interview. For the time being I'm keeping him handcuffed.'\n\n'Safest way,' Dylan grinned. 'That'll keep you on your toes for a few hours. He's been deemed fit on both counts previously, but he's no stranger to being locked up so he might just be playing the game. Let's hope this time he's locked up once and for all.'\n\n'We'll see what the doc says.'\n\n'I'm going to arrange for him to be interviewed tomorrow morning. Give me a call will you, when the doctor's been?'\n\n'Will do boss. By the way before you go; he had a mobile phone on him and some bits of paper, and flowers, of all things, stuffed in his pockets. DC Hardacre has just been down for them and taken them away.'\n\n'Thanks Sarge,' he said as he heard Vicky's dulcet tones in the CID office outside.\n\n'Whose mobile is it then? Let me guess Denton's?' Dylan called out.\n\n'Well it's a Nokia sir, like Denton's,' she said. 'How good would that be if it was? Battery's flat,' she said, screwing up her face.\n\n'Handle it with kid gloves and get it checked for fingerprints on the inside, battery, sim card. The database should confirm it for us one way or another,' said Dylan.\n\nVicky stood by Dylan's open door.\n\n'Take it to the technical unit. By early tomorrow morning we should get a result.'\n\nVicky turned to obey his instructions. 'On second thoughts, get a motorcyclist from traffic to do it. You look all in.'\n\n'Yes, sir.' she said.\n\n'Right enough,' he said as he stretched. 'Give me half an hour to get the policy logs and reports done and I'll meet you in the bar for a swift one, eh?'\n\nThe office emptied as, one by one, the team headed for the pub. He noticed the jaded look on their faces when he caught up with them. They'd had two good lock ups \u2013 but the journey was far from over and they knew it. Dylan ordered a drink from the bar and when he turned, Taylor was behind him.\n\n'How many have you had?' he asked her. She stumbled towards him and into a table. He pulled her to her feet and steadied her. She leaned against him.\n\n'I've still got that bottle of wine in my fridge with your name on it, sir,' she said. 'If you want to take me home, sir?' she slurred.\n\nDylan sat her down on a chair, brushed the front of his suit jacket and looked around him.\n\n'Oh, don't be such a prude,' she said, her arms flying high above her head. 'You'll weaken. They all do eventually,' she whispered, in her drunken state.\n\nDylan leaned down to her. 'Taylor, let me assure you, I won't,' he said.\n\n'Oh, yes you will,' she said, raising her voice. 'You really will,' she giggled putting a finger to her lips.\n\nDylan leaned towards her and she leaned forward to hear him, her eyes glazed. 'Taylor, once and for all fuck off and pester someone else will you. It's never going to happen,' he said.\n\nShe jumped away. 'Assault,' she shouted, at the top of her voice. 'Just because you're a boss,' she slurred, 'doesn't give you the right to grope me,' she said, slamming her glass on the table and leaning heavily on the wall she made her way out of the bar.\n\n'Take her home Vicky, will you?' he said.\n\nAll was quiet. Dylan looked around him. He could feel a hot flush rising in his body and his hands felt clammy and warm around his cool glass. He would expect an apology from her tomorrow and he would deal with her outburst then. He put his drink down on the table and walked from the room. Things were going well for him. The last thing he wanted now was an immature female alleging he had assaulted her. Neither he, nor his team, needed the diversion.\n\nHe headed home. He was too tired to celebrate and needed the comfort of Jen's arms around him. Lying in bed next to her he told her about the day's events. As expected she told him off for going near a madman and advised him to make sure he dealt with Taylor properly. There was no room for trust with the woman, in her eyes.\n\n'Why would she do that?' Dylan asked.\n\nJen shook her head. Dylan was really naive where women were concerned.\n\n'Women's intuition,' she smiled. 'You'll ignore my advice at your peril,' she warned.\n\nDylan was asleep but Jen laid next to him awake for long into the night wondering how someone like Taylor Spiers would do such a thing. She knew that Jack Dylan was far from the type of man to grope a woman.\n\nShe was angry and her anger made her restless. Her legs involuntarily jumped and she pushed them out from under the covers. She couldn't lie on her back any more because of the size of her stomach and it was even becoming uncomfortable to lie on her side even with a pillow beneath the bump and in between her knees. No matter how much she was enjoying pregnancy, she now wanted it over. Eventually she dropped into a deep sleep.\n\n## Chapter 54\n\nDylan shared an early breakfast with Jen. It was warm and the air humid. The sun hadn't burnt through the morning mist but it was certain to be a hot day. He kissed Jen goodbye, patted her stomach lovingly, picked up his briefcase and walked towards the front door. Max followed.\n\n'Not this time fella,' Jen heard him say and she knew Max understood he was going without him. Jen stood at the sink watching the bamboo fountain. It had such a calming effect on her and she couldn't wait to sit out on the patio with Buttons in her pram.\n\nAll of a sudden she felt a stabbing pain in the region of her bladder. Not an unfamiliar pain when Buttons was feet down but now she knew the baby's head was engaged it alarmed her. She turned and headed to the bathroom. One thing she wouldn't miss when Buttons was born was nipping to the loo so often, she sighed, using the handrail as she dragged herself up the stairs.\n\n'These steps get steeper every day, I swear,' she groaned to Max. As she reached the top a cramp hit her and she clenched her stomach. Water started trickling down her legs. She turned to grab a towel from the airing cupboard \u2013 and as she leaned backwards to open the door she fell backwards with a crash.\n\nThe hot, humid air hit Dylan as he opened the car door and he stood still for a moment. He took off his jacket and threw it over to the back seat and glanced at the lounge window before he got inside. He opened the car windows and mopped his brow with his hanky before he turned the engine on.\n\nAvril Summerfield-Preston's car stopped to allow Dylan to enter the police yard. 'Where's that interfering old bat going so early in the morning,' he muttered to himself. He didn't bother to wave.\n\nThe CID office was quiet and he switched on the lights and unlocked his office door, leaving it open to allow air to circulate.\n\nPicking up his phone immediately he sat down behind his desk, he called the cells to find that Frederick Wainstall had been deemed fit to be detained by the force medical officer and had settled down to sleep through the night in his air-conditioned cell. Lucky bugger, Dylan thought as he tugged at his tie and opened the top button of his shirt.\n\n'He's been a model prisoner,' the detention officer said. It never ceased to amaze Dylan that when some aggressive offenders were finally imprisoned they were calm and rational, but Dylan imagined that being institutionalised meant normality to some people.\n\n'The prisoner has also been deemed fit to be interviewed, as long as a responsible adult is present along with his solicitor, sir,' the detention officer continued.\n\nDylan looked up from the paperwork on his desk and saw Taylor standing before him. He pointed to the chair opposite, inviting her to sit while he finished his phone call. From the glance he'd given her he couldn't read the expression on her face.\n\nHe could hear the team beginning to arrive in the CID office outside his own and he was pleased that she'd left the door ajar. Dylan put down the phone purposely slowly and brought his hands together on the desk before looking across at her.\n\n'Your outburst in the bar last night was uncalled for and totally unacceptable,' Dylan said in a calm, controlled voice. 'Do I make myself clear?' He continued, his voice rising. Taylor sat with her head bowed, which reminded Dylan of a naughty schoolgirl.\n\n'I'm sorry, sir it won't happen again,' Taylor mumbled into her chest.\n\n'You can be sure it won't. And if it does, I'll take it further. Do you hear?'\n\n'Yes,' she said in her strangled girly voice.\n\n'Right, get round to the court this morning with John and make sure the remand for Stevenson goes smoothly,' he said shuffling his paperwork. 'Any problems, ring me.' Dylan didn't look up but dismissed her as he picked up his pen and continued with the work set out before him.\n\n'Yes, sir,' she whispered and walked out of the room. It was important to Dylan that the team moved forward without distraction. Banter he could accept; lies he wouldn't.\n\n'Coffee for our hero?' Lisa hollered from his doorway. She still had her cardigan and handbag thrown over her arm. Dylan fleetingly looked into her open smiling face.\n\n'Love one, thanks,' he said gratefully.\n\n'We could do with you in every subway,' she laughed as she turned, pulled out her chair from under her desk and unlocked her drawer. 'The Council thinks they're great those subways but nobody dare use the bloody things, they daren't,' she said, talking to him over her shoulder. 'Toast anyone?' she asked.\n\nDylan stood up and got a five-pound note out of his pocket. 'Here, get toast for the office out of this and keep the rest for the tea fund,' he said.\n\n'Thank you, sir,' she said walking into his office briefly to collect the money from his desk. 'You sure?'\n\n'Certain, coffee and toast might just about get me through the day,' he said with a smile that didn't reach his eyes.\n\n'That bad eh?' Vicky said, as she passed Lisa on the way out. 'I hope Taylor apologised.'\n\n'Yeah, she did,' he sighed, as he picked a piece of paper out of the fax machine that was on his desk and scanned the text with his eyes.\n\n'It is Denton's mobile,' she said, taking a seat.\n\nDylan's face lit up and his eyes found hers. 'Yeah?'\n\n'Yeah, and it still has pictures of Pam Forrester on it.'\n\n'Tremendous.' Dylan said, bowing his head into his hands as if to pray. 'We now want some forensics on Wainstall's clothing. His shoes must be a favourite. We need just enough to nail him. Get the interview arranged for as soon as possible. Probation are sending someone over to act as the responsible adult,' Dylan said, lifting the fax that told him so.\n\n'Top man,' she grinned.\n\n'Sergeant Wilson?'\n\n'Yeah,' she grinned.\n\n'I'll ask Wainstall about the most recent events first. It'll make it easier for him to follow, hopefully.'\n\n'Okey, doke.' she said as she walked from the room. She stopped and turned. 'Guess what?' she said.\n\n'What?'\n\n'I've got a date.'\n\n'The Sarge?'\n\n'Yes,' she smiled.\n\nAvril Summerfield-Preston knocked at the brightly painted red door. There was no reply. Jen's car was in the driveway and the dog was barking so she must be home, she thought. She stood for a while and listened. There was no movement from within other than a constant yelp from the dog. Perhaps he was trapped?\n\nShe walked to the gate at the side of the house and tried the handle. It was locked from the other side. She reached over the top of the panels and her fingers traversed the wood. She stopped. There was a bolt. She hesitated. No, the last thing she wanted was an angry Dylan at her door \u2013 she'd been at the sharp end of his tongue before.\n\nShe walked away from the house and opened her car door. She saw the dog jumping up at the lounge window furiously leaping on the furniture within. He wasn't trapped then. But where was Jen?\n\nWainstall sat smiling at Dylan in his white, cotton, prisoner issue coverall in between his probation officer and solicitor. The interview room was for once a pleasant place to be as the air conditioning blew down on Dylan's face and he felt more comfortable than he had done all morning.\n\nHe and Vicky had spoken to Wainstall's solicitor and probation officer prior to coming into the room and they in turn had spoken to Wainstall so the charge didn't come as a surprise in the interview due to his delicate state of mind. After formal introductions and ensuring Wainstall's understood the charge, Dylan began.\n\n'Apart from being arrested for kidnap, threats to kill, possessing an offensive weapon and wounding; you are also under arrest for the murders of two young men, namely a Danny Denton and a Billy Greenwood. Yesterday, you held a woman at knife-point in the subway didn't you?'\n\n'Yes, I'd collected flowers,' he smiled around at them all.\n\n'Were you going to hurt the lady?' asked Dylan slowly and clearly.\n\n'Yes, and you hit me, didn't you?'\n\n'I did, but not with a knife.'\n\n'I like knives,' he replied. Yvonne Best, his solicitor, looked at him wide eyed. His probation officer didn't flinch.\n\n'Were you going to hurt the lady with the knife? Were you going to stab her?' Dylan asked.\n\n'Yes, and when she died I could give her the flowers.'\n\nVicky remained quiet.\n\n'There was a boy in town. You stabbed him in the back too, do you remember?'\n\nWainstall looked thoughtful but didn't answer.\n\n'Why? What had he done to you?'\n\n'Boys are bad, they laugh at me,' Wainstall scowled.\n\n'When you were arrested and brought here, you had a mobile telephone in your pocket that wasn't yours. It belonged to a man who was killed in his flat and his friend was stabbed there too when he was in bed. Do you understand what I'm telling you?' asked Dylan.\n\n'I took their phone after I'd stabbed them, and stabbed them, and stabbed them,' Wainstall said. His arm rose and fell as though he was carrying out the act. 'Dead, they can have flowers, lots of flowers,' he said.\n\n'What's your favourite flower?'\n\n'White lilies,' he said in a song-like fashion.\n\n'Why white lilies?'\n\n'Because you give people them when they die, my mother told me,' he said matter of factly. 'Death. That's what they mean, so that's what I do.' Wainstall started laughing. His laugh became frenzied and Dylan decided that he would have to end the interview. Wainstall was taken back to his cell.\n\n'Mrs Best, Mr Hirst,' Dylan spoke across the table inside the interview room. 'Do you really think that your client is fit to interview?'\n\n'According to the medical practitioner he is,' said Yvonne Best. 'Don't be fooled by his actions, Mr Dylan,' she said with a shake of her head. 'I've known this man a long time, and believe me, he is good at playing the dunce when he wants to. I'm satisfied he's fit to interview.'\n\nAvril walked back to the gate and took the bolt off. The gate opened easily and she pushed it open wide enough to pass through. This side of the house was free from the sun and the flagged area was dark and cold. She stopped at the end of the path and listened. As she entered the back garden she walked into a different world and the warm sunlight gave her a renewed confidence. The back door was open and she could hear the washing machine spinning merrily away. Breakfast hadn't been cleared away she noticed and the tea towel Jen had been using was lying on the floor by the door into the hallway.\n\n'Jen?' she called. The dog yelped. 'Jen' she called again as she went into the hallway. The noise from the dog was coming from upstairs. With trepidation she walked to the foot of the stairs. At the top she saw the dog standing, yelping. His tailed wagged furiously but he didn't attempt to come down.\n\n'Jen,' she called once more. She stopped to listen. Should she go? She tiptoed up one step then two. Max hopped from foot to foot but still he made no attempt to come towards her. Then she saw it. Jen's blonde hair was draped on the floor of the landing and flowed onto the top step. Avril rushed up the stairs. Jen moaned and tried to move.\n\n'Oh, my God,' Avril said as her hand flew to her mouth.\n\nTrembling from head to foot, she reached out to Jen's pale face. She was warm to her touch.\n\n'My waters,' Jen said in a laboured voice, without opening her eyes. Avril was already dialling for an ambulance.\n\nThe monitor showed that the baby was fine but Jen wasn't having contractions of note. 'I suppose a water birth is out of the question now?' Jen said to Avril who was smiling down at her. She'd never seen Avril so at ease before as she held her hand. She was pretty when she smiled.\n\n'I think because of the risk of infection that is most definitely not on the cards now,' the doctor said kindly. 'We'll start you off with a hormone pessary to soften the cervix but you can only have one because your waters have broken \u2013 as you will probably have guessed.'\n\n'Am I in labour?' Jen asked.\n\n'Yes dear, you won't be going home now until after the birth,' he said, patting her arm tenderly. 'I want to put a hormone drip into your arm in a while, so you're going to be wired up and you'll have to stay in bed then.' He walked from the room.\n\nJen turned to Avril. 'Jack? Please will you try to get hold of Jack for me?'\n\n'Of course,' she said, reassuringly. 'If he answers my calls, that is,' she said.\n\n'I know you two don't get on, but Avril, thank you,' said Jen. 'I don't know what I would have done without you.'\n\nAvril shook her head, and Jen could see that she was embarrassed.\n\n'Why did you come out to see me this morning?'\n\n'Oh, nothing for you to worry about, just a personnel check and to bring you a gift for the baby,' she said. 'Look, let me get Jack for you.'\n\n'Avril?'\n\n'I can't have children Jen. I know you think I'm a cranky old thing,' she smiled, nervously. 'But my work is all I've got. I'll never have what you and Jack have.'\n\n'But Hugo?'\n\n'Hugo only thinks about himself, Jen. He is far too selfish to want children,' she sighed. 'But at least he won't leave me.'\n\n'Well, I can never thank you enough \u2013 and, believe me, Jack will be just as grateful.'\n\nAvril raised an eyebrow.\n\nJen smiled. 'You should get to know each other, you're both as stubborn as each other.' she said. 'Oh Lord I think that's another contraction.'\n\nQuestions were being put to Frederick Wainstall thick and fast in the second interview but he didn't tell them any more than they already knew and Dylan knew the interviews were going nowhere. With a heavy heart and a banging headache Dylan reached into his pocket for his handkerchief. His phone vibrated. Damn, he should have turned it off and he did so immediately with an apologetic nod.\n\nDylan reached for the paracetamol as soon as they got back to the office. Vicky slumped in her chair in the CID office, both were exhausted.\n\nLisa took the call that came into the office. 'Wainstall's shoes have tested positive for blood and the wooden handle knife recovered from the bin did too,' she said. Dylan breathed a sigh of relief. Forensics would in due course identify whose blood it was. 'Another positive indication sir, is that the initial comparisons showed the piece of metal recovered from Greenwood's body appeared to match the knife blade in a perfect fit.'\n\n'You're required at the hospital, sir,' shouted Vicky. 'Jen's gone into labour.'\n\nDylan's head was in a spin. Did he have time to charge? No, there was too much paperwork remaining to do.\n\n'Get a pen, Vicky. I want you to charge him for me. Nothing is going to stop me from seeing Buttons born,' he grinned, his face aglow.\n\n'Buttons?' she said.\n\n'Oh, yeah, the baby's name we've given her, you know,' he said with a flush to his cheeks.\n\n'You, big old softie,' she teased.\n\n'Just charge him, will you. Attempted murder, murder, threats to kill and then charge him with the double murders in a week's time if I'm not back.' Dylan grabbed his keys and ran to his car. Vicky followed him.\n\nGrace and Winston had been knocked down and a catalogue of events had followed in which Denton and Greenwood had been the catalyst \u2013 but right now he was going to see the start of a life for a change.\n\nJen was in agony and Avril Summerfield-Preston was right by her side.\n\n'What the hell are you doing here?' Dylan asked.\n\n'Jack, don't. If it hadn't been for Avril I would still be laying on the floor at home. She got an ambulance... please. Argh,' she cried out.\n\n'But why?'\n\n'I bought you a present for the baby. Is that okay?' Avril said, with tears in her eyes. 'And further to your belief that I don't earn my salary I do follow my job description to your annoyance to the letter and Jen was due a visit.'\n\nJen squeezed Jack's hand tightly and started panting furiously. 'Oh, no, another... argh,' she screamed again.\n\n'I think my job here is done and I wish you both well,' she said.\n\n'She's six centimetres dilated,' the nurse told the doctor.\n\nJen shook uncontrollably. 'I'm freezing,' she said to Dylan through chattering teeth.\n\n'Her temperature's shot up to 39.8,' the nurse continued in her assessment as she wrote on the chart hung at the bottom of Jen's bed.\n\n'Infection,' the doctor said looking at Dylan in a serious manner. Dylan caught a glimpse of himself in the mirror over the doctor's shoulder and saw the eyes of his victim's families looking back at him. Is this what it felt like for them when they waited for every word to come out of his mouth to update them on their loved ones?\n\n'Take the drip down and wrap her in ice packs, nurse,' the doctor demanded.\n\nDylan didn't have time to think, as a sponge and a bowl of cold water was thrust in his hand to mop Jen's brow. He could hear Buttons' heart racing on the monitor.\n\n'It's just hit 190 beats per minute,' Dylan said in amazement.\n\n'I want a caesarean section, please,' Jen begged. 'I just want the baby out, now,' she screamed.\n\n'The baby is safe enough and it is so much better for you if you can avoid having a major operation. Look,' the doctor took Jen's hand in his and sat beside her on the bed as a contraction subsided. 'Trust me, please. We'll try to proceed as we planned and I'll give you an epidural.'\n\nDylan stood next to Jen mopping her brow when she allowed him. She tossed and turned her head on the pillow rubbing her cheeks that now looked red and sore. The nurse gave her the gas and air apparatus for pain relief, but she was too weak to hold it. The doctor could see she felt everything as he internally examined her. By the early hours of the morning Jen was ten centimetres dilated and started to push.\n\nThe doctor tried desperately to get the ventouse on the baby's head because it was lying slightly skew-whiff, but it proved impossible.\n\n'Prepare her for theatre, nurse,' said the doctor much to Dylan's disbelief. Dylan's heart was in his mouth and he prayed. He prayed so hard. He thanked God for what he had and begged him not to take it away from him. He even promised to be nice to Avril from now on.\n\n'Jack, don't worry,' Jen told him in her drug-induced state. 'I'm not... I just want to see Buttons now.'\n\nDylan kissed her forehead and held as her best he could in his arms.\n\nThe spinal injection seemed to take ages to take effect from the mid-chest down. Then there was a cry and Buttons was out in the big wide world. Boy did the baby howl.\n\n'You've got a beautiful little girl,' the nurse said as she handed Buttons to Dylan. Jens eye's filled with tears as she saw her two favourite people in the world together for the first time.\n\n'This is what matters, darling. Nothing else,' Dylan said through his sobs.\n\nJen started laughing through her tears. 'Until the next murder,' she said.\n\n'And Jack, make sure you send Avril an update and flowers from me. No...from us all.'\n\nJack nodded. 'Hello, little Maisy,' he said to his daughter with tears spilling down his cheeks.\n\n# About the Authors\n\nCarol and Bob Bridgestock were both born and lived in West Yorkshire until they relocated to the Isle of Wight in 2003. Between them they have a staggering 47years employment with the police, Carol being a member of the Civilian support staff and Bob being a Senior Police Officer.\n\nAs a career detective Bob worked in the CID at every rank. For over half of his service he was a senior detective, retiring at the rank of Detective Superintendent.\n\nAs a Senior Investigative Officer (SIO) in charge of homicide cases he took command of some twenty-six murder investigations, twenty-three major incidents including shootings and attempted murders and over fifty suspicious deaths and numerous sexual assaults, some of which were extremely high profile in his last three years alone.\n\nIn 1988 Carol commenced working for the Police as a member of the support staff in the Administration Department. As a supervisor she received a Chief Constable's commendation for outstanding work for her determination and drive creating a poster competition for an Autumn Fall Crime initiative.\nWe hope you enjoyed reading White Lilies and would be thrilled if you would post a book review for it online.\n\nIf you would like to know more about Caffeine Nights books and authors sign up for our newsletter from the following link.\n\nhttp:\/\/eepurl.com\/u_DyD\n\nSearch for other titles from\n\nCaffeine Nights Publishing\n\nMore Information can also be found at: www.caffeine-nights.com\n\n","meta":{"redpajama_set_name":"RedPajamaBook"}}
+{"text":" \nThank you for downloading this Simon & Schuster ebook.\n\n* * *\n\nGet a FREE ebook when you join our mailing list. Plus, get updates on new releases, deals, recommended reads, and more from Simon & Schuster. Click below to sign up and see terms and conditions.\n\nCLICK HERE TO SIGN UP\n\nAlready a subscriber? Provide your email again so we can register this ebook and send you more of what you like to read. You will continue to receive exclusive offers in your inbox.\n\n## CONTENTS\n\n* * *\n\nForeword by Jessica Smith\n\nIntroduction: Life After Buffy by Christopher Golden\n\nSEASON 1\n\nWelcome to the Hellmouth\/The Harvest (Episodes 1.1 and 1.2)\n\nAngel (Episode 1.7)\n\nProphecy Girl (Episode 1.12)\n\nCATCHING UP WITH THE CAST AND CREW\n\nAnthony Stewart Head\n\nJulie Benz\n\nErika Amato\n\nSEASON 2\n\nLie to Me (Episode 2.7)\n\nWhat's My Line? Part One (Episode 2.9)\n\nWhat's My Line? Part Two (Episode 2.10)\n\nInnocence (Episode 2.14)\n\nPassion (Episode 2.17)\n\nBecoming, Part One (Episode 2.21)\n\nBecoming, Part Two (Episode 2.22)\n\nCATCHING UP WITH THE CAST AND CREW\n\nJames Marsters\n\nJuliet Landau\n\nCynthia Bergstrom\n\nSEASON 3\n\nLovers Walk (Episode 3.8)\n\nThe Wish (Episode 3.9)\n\nAmends (Episode 3.10)\n\nThe Zeppo (Episode 3.13)\n\nThe Prom (Episode 3.20)\n\nGraduation Day, Part One (Episode 3.21)\n\nGraduation Day, Part Two (Episode 3.22)\n\nCATCHING UP WITH THE CAST AND CREW\n\nHarry Groener\n\nJane Espenson\n\nDouglas Petrie\n\nSEASON 4\n\nHush (Episode 4.10)\n\nThis Year's Girl (Episode 4.15)\n\nWho Are You (Episode 4.16)\n\nSuperstar (Episode 4.17)\n\nPrimeval (Episode 4.21)\n\nRestless (Episode 4.22)\n\nCATCHING UP WITH THE CAST AND CREW\n\nGeorge Hertzberg\n\nMarc Blucas\n\nJames C. Leary\n\nTodd McIntosh\n\nLOOKING BACK: INTERVIEWS OVER THE YEARS\n\nAlyson Hannigan\n\nNicholas Brendon\n\nCharisma Carpenter\n\nDavid Boreanaz\n\nSeth Green\n\nRobia LaMorte\n\nArmin Shimerman\n\nKristine Sutherland\n\nEmma Caulfield\n\nAlexis Denisof\n\nElizabeth Anne Allen\n\nMarcia Shulman\n\nJoss Whedon\n\nSEASON 5\n\nNo Place Like Home (Episode 5.5)\n\nFamily (Episode 5.6)\n\nFool for Love (Episode 5.7)\n\nThe Body (Episode 5.16)\n\nThe Weight of the World (Episode 5.21)\n\nThe Gift (Episode 5.22)\n\nCATCHING UP WITH THE CAST AND CREW\n\nClare Kramer\n\nAmber Benson\n\nDavid Fury\n\nSEASON 6\n\nBargaining, Part One (Episode 6.1)\n\nBargaining, Part Two (Episode 6.2)\n\nOnce More, with Feeling (Episode 6.7)\n\nTabula Rasa (Episode 6.8)\n\nNormal Again (Episode 6.17)\n\nVillains (Episode 6.20)\n\nGrave (Episode 6.22)\n\nCATCHING UP WITH THE CAST AND CREW\n\nTom Lenk\n\nAdam Busch\n\nDanny Strong\n\nDrew Z. Greenberg\n\nSEASON 7\n\nHelp (Episode 7.4)\n\nSelfless (Episode 7.5)\n\nConversations with Dead People (Episode 7.7)\n\nShowtime (Episode 7.11)\n\nStoryteller (Episode 7.16)\n\nChosen (Episode 7.22)\n\nIt Didn't End in Sunnydale: The Official Post-TV Seasons\n\nWhere Are They Now?\n\nIn Memoriam\n\nFinal Thoughts from the Creator of Buffy: Joss Whedon\n\n\"Restless\": A Path to Premonitions, Teleplay Written and Directed by Joss Whedon, Additional Commentary by Paul Ruditis\n\nAbout the Author\n\n## FOREWORD\n\n* * *\n\nBy Jessica Smith\n\nInto every generation new Buffy the Vampire Slayer fans are born.\n\nIt's 2017, and we've found ourselves in a world full of endless hours of television. Thanks to the Internet, with its streaming sites and instantly downloadable content, we're overwhelmed with options for how to spend our time consuming media. It's amazing that any show is able to hold the spotlight for long. And yet Buffy the Vampire Slayer has accomplished this very feat for twenty years. Twenty years!\n\nIf you check your social media sites, chances are someone you follow is talking about Buffy, whether reminiscing about it or watching it for the first time. For seasoned fans, it's gratifying to see Buffy enjoy such longevity. And for the people just discovering the show, it's exciting to enter into such a large group of passionate people. It makes you wonder: How has Buffy captured our imaginations for so long?\n\nMultiple reasons come to mind, many of which Buffy has been hailed for since the first season. Buffy was one of the first series to portray a main female character as a powerful action hero who has to save the day\u2014a role that was typically reserved for men. The show mastered the structure of having individual plots within an episode while following a larger arc throughout the season. It made the struggles of its characters relatable and heartbreakingly real, despite being set in a world filled with the supernatural.\n\nOne of the best parts of Buffy is its range. Ask me about the funniest episode I've ever seen, and I might say \"Tabula Rasa\" or \"Superstar.\" The saddest? \"The Body,\" or \"Becoming, Part Two.\" Buffy displays this on a smaller scale as well, bringing the laughs and tears all in one episode, such as in \"Once More, with Feeling.\" (Will I ever be able to forget the look on Willow's face when she realizes she wrenched Buffy out of Heaven? Probably not.)\n\nIn an interview for the first Watcher's Guide, Joss calls Buffy \"the most personal work I've ever done.\" For a lot of people, it's the most personal thing they've ever watched. Getting to the bottom of Buffy's popularity isn't brains, children. It's emotion. It's the feeling you get when you hear the theme song. It's cheering the characters on when they succeed and crying along with them when they fall (which is a lot of season six, let's be honest). It's watching an unlikely hero slaying real-world problems in the form of terrifying (and ridiculous) monsters and knowing that while Buffy is saving lives in Sunnydale, she's saving some of us, too.\n\nIn this twentieth-anniversary collector's edition Watcher's Guide, you'll find the series episode highlights, from fan favorites and pivotal plot points to episodes that challenged the genre itself, such as \"Hush\" and \"The Body.\" Interspersed between the seasons are exclusive, never-before-seen interviews with some of your favorite cast and crew as they look back at their time on Buffy. In the middle of the guide we've included an \"intermission\" of interviews collected from the original Watcher's Guides, in which actors discuss auditioning for Buffy, favorite moments on set, and more. (Keep an eye out for fun facts in there too, and find out if Elizabeth Anne Allen [Amy Madison, part-time witch, part-time rat] likes cheese.) Wrapping up the collector's edition is a special bonus from the third Watcher's Guide\u2014the complete teleplay to the episode \"Restless,\" with comments from Paul Ruditis, who uncovers how this one episode foreshadows the seasons to come.\n\nIn putting this Watcher's Guide together as an ode to our beloved Buffy, we hope to have given you a reason to revisit this amazing show. Thanks for reading!\n\n## INTRODUCTION: LIFE AFTER BUFFY\n\n* * *\n\nBy Christopher Golden\n\nIt's difficult to remember with any real clarity what the pop cultural landscape was like before the arrival and the popularity of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. One can point to the landmark television series Hill Street Blues and note that the multilayered, interwoven-POV ensemble drama did not really exist before that Steven Bochco cop show came along. It's simple work to examine Shawn Ryan's post-Buffy FX cable series The Shield and examine the way in which it inspired other cable networks to invest massively in the leap of faith necessary for a story arc that spans the entire run of a series. But to really appreciate the influence of Buffy the Vampire Slayer requires a first step many are unwilling to take: brushing aside their assumptions.\n\nBefore Buffy even made its debut, millions of potential viewers and loads of critics had already dismissed the series based on topic and title alone. A television series about a high school girl named\u2014of all things\u2014Buffy, who happened to hunt and kill vampires . . . there's a fundamental absurdity to the idea that was part of the plan all along. At his best, Joss Whedon's genius is about subverting the expectations of his audience. But even Whedon never could have anticipated how profoundly his cult hit on the fledgling WB network would impact pop culture and the basic building blocks of the global television market.\n\nOf course, Buffy Summers did not leave her mark only on television. Her influence has extended to feature films, comic books, and book publishing in general, including the massive worldwide phenomenon of Twilight.\n\nOn television, however, Buffy effectively erased the line\u2014really, the wall\u2014that had previously existed between genre material and the presumption of quality. There had been series before that were embraced by critics, various Star Trek series as the best examples, but Buffy shattered preconceptions in large part because it broke so many rules. Was the show a drama or comedic fluff? Was it a high school soap or a horror series? Most fundamentally, were we supposed to take this strange chimera of a show seriously?\n\nThe answer to that last question was a resounding yes. Viewers, critics, and even (in huge numbers) academics took Buffy the Vampire Slayer very seriously indeed. People named their children after the characters. The slang popularized in the series\u2014even the cadence of the characters' vocal patterns\u2014infiltrated modern language. At universities around the world, scholars began to write papers and teach classes about the philosophy, structure, and impact of the series. Hundreds of scholarly books and articles have been written about the show\u2014and that's just from the academic side. There are many thousands of articles out there dissecting every bit of minutiae from the show's history, not to mention the lives of its cast and crew.\n\nWhen Buffy took off, fans gathered in dedicated online forums and at conventions around the world in a community that redefined modern fandom for generations. That fandom centralized in a posting board called The Bronze\u2014after the Sunnydale club where the characters hung out. In the virtual Bronze, fans would gather to discuss the series, often with the creators and cast themselves. Joss Whedon dropped by frequently, and most of the writers and cast members showed up from time to time to interact directly with the fans. In the days before social media, this pure and direct contact was unlike anything fans had experienced before. The people on The Bronze were from all over the world, and they didn't just talk to one another about Buffy. They built a community that spawned lifelong friendships, weddings, cross-country moves, and an annual Posting Board Party in Los Angeles that was routinely attended by the people who were creating their favorite show week after week.\n\nAsk a hundred Buffy fans what it was, precisely, that inspired such adoration for the series, and you're likely to get a hundred different answers. Yet many of those answers will be threads in a single philosophical fabric woven with purpose and intent by Joss Whedon and his staff. From its opening moments, the series embraced people who had felt isolated or misunderstood. It presented a powerful female role model who was confused, reluctant, and full of doubt, yet courageous and determined and fiercely loyal. Perhaps most importantly, it presented a decisive young woman who became a leader alongside male characters who never doubted her strength, intelligence, or ability to lead (or, if they did, their hesitations were not gender based).\n\nPop culture had presented us with empowered female protagonists before\u2014Ellen Ripley and Sarah Connor come immediately to mind\u2014but the entire mythology of the Slayer revealed feminist roots. Millions of girls saw in Buffy evidence that they were capable of finding their own paths, making their own choices, and making a difference. Authors, screenwriters, producers, directors, and studio executives were inspired to follow Buffy's lead for a variety of reasons, ranging from artistic to social justice to mercenary motivations. The series' acceptance of characters who would normally have been ignored or presented as outsiders resonated broadly.\n\nWhen sweet and shy Willow Rosenberg, Buffy's closest friend and a major player from the very beginning of the series, begins to realize she is gay, falls in love, and eventually comes out to her friends, the character was not only bending the norms of prime-time television at the time\u2014she was breaking them. There had been gay characters before, of course, but never a long-established character going through such a personal epiphany in a real and human way. When Willow finally kissed her girlfriend, Tara Maclay, on camera\u2014in a moment of shared grief and compassion\u2014it seemed to many viewers that the promise of the series had been fulfilled. In a show filled with monsters and magic and fantastical creatures, the love and pain of human beings was presented with more openness and sincerity than on many shows that prided themselves on their \"gritty\" reality.\n\nThe series that so many had been unwilling to take seriously when it debuted\u2014that so many would still be unwilling to take seriously today\u2014changed the face of television. It inspired people and changed lives. In many cases, as reported to so many members of the cast and crew, it saved the lives of people who considered taking their own.\n\nIn a broader sense, Buffy the Vampire Slayer changed modern television in its entirety. Scan through the offerings of the past decade and you will see the show's influence everywhere, even if you don't notice it at first. The \"new\" version of Doctor Who would likely not exist if not for the success of Buffy. Rose Tyler and the Christopher Eccleston Doctor would fit very comfortably in the world of Buffy, Angel, and Spike. The list of television series owing a massive debt to Buffy the Vampire Slayer is exhaustive, far beyond the actual spinoff series, Angel. Series like Charmed, Supernatural, Grimm, and The Vampire Diaries might never have been greenlit had Buffy not come first, but monsters are not a necessary ingredient to have benefited. It's impossible to watch Veronica Mars, Alias, Pretty Little Liars, or Heroes without seeing the DNA of Buffy. The same could be said of series from foreign shores, like the UK's Being Human and Misfits. There are so many more.\n\nThe creation of season-long arcs and the use of \"Big Bads\"\u2014central villains around which those season arcs revolved\u2014came to prominence thanks to Buffy the Vampire Slayer. But one of the strongest and most lasting influences of Buffy is the use of the \"found family\" or \"chosen family.\" Buffy had Giles, Willow, Xander, Cordelia\u2014and more as the series progressed. Angel had Cordelia, Wesley, Gunn, Fred\u2014and, again, more. Taking a group of people who are close friends or allies and giving them a shared enemy, building a web of relationships around the hub of a crusade or mission, has become the basis of many successful TV series, including Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., The Flash, Arrow, Supergirl, Quantico, and Whedon's own Dollhouse and Firefly.\n\nTwenty years after it debuted, as the new Golden Age of Television has produced one extraordinary narrative after another, it would be easy to forget just how groundbreaking a series Buffy the Vampire Slayer really was, but its global influence and success are impossible to deny.\n\nNot bad for a former cheerleader who burned down her high school gymnasium.\n\n## SEASON 1\n\n### Welcome to the Hellmouth\/The Harvest\n\nEpisodes 1.1 and 1.2\n\nWRITTEN BY: Joss Whedon\n\nDIRECTED BY: Charles Martin Smith (Ep. 1.1) and John T. Kertchmer (Ep. 1.2)\n\nGUEST STARS: Mark Metcalf as the Master, Brian Thompson as Luke, David Boreanaz as Angel, Ken Lerner as Principal Flutie, Kristine Sutherland as Joyce Summers, Julie Benz as Darla\n\nWITH: Mercedes McNab as Harmony\n\n#### THE PLOT THICKENS:\n\nBuffy Summers and her mother, Joyce, have moved from Los Angeles to the suburb of Sunnydale, California, and Joyce drives Buffy to her first day at the prosaically named Sunnydale High School. On that first day, Buffy meets a new world of people who will have a profound effect on her life. Principal Bob Flutie says that he believes in clean slates and won't hold the fact that she burned down her previous school's gymnasium against her. Cordelia, popular girl on campus, gives Buffy a test for her \"coolness factor\" and extends the hand of friendship\u2014until Buffy starts to hang out with Willow, a horribly shy computer nerd, and her friends Xander and Jesse. Giles, the school librarian, not only knows that Buffy is the Slayer but has been assigned to be her Watcher.\n\nLater that night, Buffy meets the mysterious Angel, who informs her that Sunnydale is located on the Hellmouth, a focal point of demonic activity of all sorts that attracts vampires like moths to a flame, and that she needs to be ready for the Harvest. Buffy ignores both Giles and Angel, hoping to return to some semblance of a normal life after her experience with vampires in LA.\n\nIn the catacombs underneath the town, the vampiric Luke awakens the Master so he will be ready for the Harvest. The Master, a very old, very powerful vampire, has been trapped underneath Sunnydale for sixty years, ever since his attempt to open the Hellmouth was foiled by an untimely earthquake. The time is right for the Harvest, which will give him the power to break free.\n\nLuke sends vampires out for food, and Jesse is captured, although Buffy saves Willow and Xander\u2014and also realizes that she must fulfill her duties as Slayer, or people will die. She goes to rescue Jesse, with some unwanted help from Xander, only to find that Jesse has been turned into a vampire. Xander and Buffy escape and then must stop Luke, who serves as the Master's vessel and is attacking the Bronze. With assistance from Giles, Willow, and Xander, Buffy kills Luke and several other vampires (Xander winds up inadvertently staking his old friend Jesse), though Darla survives.\n\n#### QUOTE OF THE WEEK:\n\nCORDELIA: \"It's in the bad side of town.\"\n\nBUFFY: \"Where's that?\"\n\nCORDELIA: \"It's about half a block from the good side of town. We don't have a whole lot of town here.\"\n\nThe high school used for external and some internal scenes in the series is Torrance High, the same school used when the Beverly Hills, 90210 kids were still in high school.\n\n#### LOVE, SLAYER STYLE:\n\nXander's first sight of Buffy causes him to crash into a railing while skateboarding, and he gamely attempts to flirt with her. Angel and Buffy meet and are immediately at odds, thanks to his being overwhelmingly cryptic.\n\nAccording to Joss Whedon's script, the Master's real name is Heinrich Joseph Nest.\n\n#### BUFFY'S BAG OF TRICKS:\n\nBuffy carries a stake and uses several random items (tree branches, pool cues, and the like) as substitute stakes. She beheads one vampire with a drum cymbal. At the climax, she unpacks her supplies from a trunk with a false bottom, which include several stakes, vials of holy water, garlic, and crosses.\n\nBrian Thompson, who plays Luke, also later appeared in both \"Surprise\" and \"Innocence\" as the Judge.\n\n#### CONTINUITY:\n\nViewers of the movie Buffy the Vampire Slayer might be confused at the repeated references to Buffy burning the gym down, since that didn't happen in the movie. The solution is simple: Joss Whedon has spun this series off of his original movie script for Buffy, which did indeed have Buffy performing a touch of necessary arson on the gym. Two previous Slayers\u2014Lucy Hanover in 1866 Virginia and an unidentified woman in 1927 Chicago\u2014are mentioned in an opening montage, thereby extending the Slayer lore, although neither reference is to be found as such in Whedon's screenplay, nor in any other episode.\n\nBuffy has the first of many prophetic dreams (\"Prophecy Girl,\" \"Surprise,\" \"Innocence\"). Joyce's parting words to Buffy as she drops her off are to extract a promise not to get kicked out of this school, a promise she will wind up breaking a year and a half later (\"Becoming, Part Two\"). Angel acts as if he's never seen Buffy before, which belies the flashback in \"Becoming, Part One.\" The Master's first attempt to open the Hellmouth was in 1937; his next will be in \"Prophecy Girl.\"\n\n#### FROM THE ORIGINAL TELEPLAY:\n\nThe following exchange was cut from the \"Welcome to the Hellmouth\" script because of the length:\n\nMR. FLUTIE: \"Oh! Buffy! Uh, what do you want?\"\n\nBUFFY: \"Um, is there a guy in there that's dead?\"\n\nMR. FLUTIE: \"Where did you hear that? Okay. Yes. But he's not a student! Not currently.\"\n\nBUFFY: \"Do you know how he died?\"\n\nMR. FLUTIE: \"What?\"\n\nBUFFY: \"I mean\u2014how could this have happened?\"\n\nMR. FLUTIE: \"Well, that's for the police to determine when they get here. But this structure is safe, we have inspectors, and I think there's no grounds for a lawsuit.\"\n\nBUFFY: \"Was there a lot of blood? Was there any blood?\"\n\nMR. FLUTIE: \"I would think you wouldn't want to involve yourself in this kind of thing.\"\n\nBUFFY: \"I don't. Could I just take a peek?\"\n\nMR. FLUTIE: \"Unless you already are involved . . .\"\n\nBUFFY: \"Never mind.\"\n\nMR. FLUTIE: \"Buffy, I understand this is confusing. You're probably feeling a lot right now. You should share those feelings. With someone else.\"\n\n### Angel\n\nEpisode 1.7\n\nWRITTEN BY: David Greenwalt\n\nDIRECTED BY: Scott Brazil\n\nGUEST STARS: Mark Metcalf as the Master, David Boreanaz as Angel, Kristine Sutherland as Joyce Summers, Julie Benz as Darla\n\nWITH: Andrew J. Ferchland as the Anointed One, Charles Wesley as Meanest Vamp\n\n#### THE PLOT THICKENS:\n\nAfter hovering on the periphery for several episodes, Angel's secret is finally revealed: he's a vampire. This realization does not come until he and Buffy admit their feelings for each other and share their first kiss. At first this leads Buffy to think that Angel's past actions are part of a plot to set her up for a fall, especially after she finds her mother in Angel's arms with bite marks on her neck. (In light of Angel's actions in the later half of the second season, this is an even more reasonable assumption.)\n\nSoon enough, Buffy learns the whole truth. Angel was \"sired\" (vampire language for turning a human into a vampire) by Darla 240 years before. Eighty years ago, he tortured and killed a Romany woman, and her clan put a curse on him: they restored his soul. He became a vampire with a conscience, a unique creature among the undead. Darla's attempts to bring him back to the Master's fold fail, and she winds up on the wrong end of a stake wielded by Angel.\n\n#### QUOTE OF THE WEEK:\n\nXander, laying it out for Buffy after Angel's vampirism is revealed:\n\n\"Angel's a vampire. You're a Slayer. I think it's obvious what you have to do.\"\n\nIt took an hour and a half to apply Angel's vamp face to David. One of his favorite parts of being a vampire was the weird yellow contact lenses.\n\n#### LOVE, SLAYER STYLE:\n\nThe Angel\/Buffy relationship goes into full bloom here, starting with his spending the night in her bedroom (though he is, as she says, a perfect gentleman), continuing to their first kiss, and ending with another kiss that, thanks to Buffy's crucifix necklace, leaves a burning impression on Angel's chest. Their continued insistence that \"This can't ever be anything\" rings hollow even as they say it, more so in light of where the relationship does actually go.\n\nMeanwhile, a hint of the future with Cordelia and Xander comes in an early scene on the dance floor (\"Boy, that Cordelia's a breath of vile air\"), and Willow continues to moon for Xander to Buffy, though Buffy's repeated urges for Willow to actually say something are met with vehement refusal (\"No, no, no, no. No speaking up. That way leads to madness and sweaty palms\").\n\n#### BUFFY'S BAG OF TRICKS:\n\nGiles trains Buffy in both quarterstaffs and a crossbow. She uses the latter on Darla (piercing her in the stomach rather than the heart), and tries but fails to use it on Angel (the impression being that her shot went wild on purpose).\n\n#### CONTINUITY:\n\nThe Master has begun training the Anointed One (\"Never Kill a Boy on the First Date\"). Buffy invites Angel into her home for the first time (\"Passion\"). Angel describes Darla making him and his cursing at the hands of the Romany, both later dramatized in \"Becoming, Part One.\"\n\nAngel's duster was from Hugo Boss and cost $1,000.\n\n### Prophecy Girl\n\nEpisode 1.12\n\nThe first season finale, \"Prophecy Girl,\" is the payoff to the promise of the early episodes. Throughout a season made up of mostly excellent monster-of-the-week stories\u2014complete with teen-angst metaphors and life lessons\u2014the Master lurks in the background as the show's first Big Bad. As we learn to love these characters and their relationships, the Master's presence in Sunnydale makes him Buffy's personal bogeyman. When he escapes from his subterranean prison . . . well, we all saw that coming, but nobody figured he'd actually manage to murder Buffy in the process. Xander proves his mettle by seeking her out and resuscitating her, Cordelia actually joins forces with the classmates she's despised for so long, the Hellmouth opens underneath the Sunnydale High library, Buffy beats her bogeyman\u2014killing the Master\u2014and nothing is ever the same again. More than anything, that last bit is the true hallmark of the series. Joss and his team allowed their characters to be forever altered by the things they experienced, keeping the series in a constant state of evolution.\n\nWRITTEN AND DIRECTED BY: Joss Whedon\n\nGUEST STARS: Mark Metcalf as the Master, David Boreanaz as Angel, Kristine Sutherland as Joyce Summers, Robia LaMorte as Jenny Calendar, Andrew J. Ferchland as the Anointed One\n\n#### THE PLOT THICKENS:\n\nOn the eve of the prom, Giles translates a rather devastating prophecy in The Pergamum Codex: \"The Master shall rise and the Slayer shall die.\" Several portents\u2014noticed by Giles, Jenny Calendar, and Buffy\u2014point to the Master finally freeing himself from his imprisonment. Giles tries to keep the prophecy from Buffy, but she overhears him discussing it with Angel. Though at first she rejects both the prophecy and her continuing as the Slayer (\"Giles, I'm sixteen years old\u2014I don't want to die\"), the news of two students' deaths at the hands of vampires on school grounds makes her realize her duty, and she goes after the Master. Angel and Xander follow her, arriving in time to find Buffy drowned and the Master free. Use of CPR revives Buffy, and she, Angel, and Xander return to Sunnydale High to find that the Hellmouth is opening\u2014right under the library\u2014despite the best efforts of Giles, Jenny, Willow, and Cordelia. Buffy confronts the Master once again, and this time he is the one who dies. \"We saved the world,\" says Buffy at the end of it all. \"I say we party.\"\n\n#### QUOTE OF THE WEEK:\n\nThis is said by Willow, the Master, and Angel to Buffy at various times; Buffy's mother bought her the dress to wear to the prom:\n\n\"By the way, I like your dress.\"\n\n#### LOVE, SLAYER STYLE:\n\nXander finally comes out and expresses his feelings for Buffy in the form of a labored attempt to ask her to go to the prom with him. Buffy turns the offer down, not feeling that way about Xander, prompting a snide comment about how one has to be undead to get her attention. (\"I don't handle rejection well. Funny, considering all the practice I've had.\") Later on, Xander recruits Angel to follow Buffy in going after the Master (\"You're in love with her,\" Angel says, to which Xander replies frankly, \"Aren't you?\").\n\nXander practices his pickup line to Buffy on Willow, which is some comfort for her, though not enough for her to accept his post-Buffy's-rejection offer of the two of them going to the prom.\n\nThe moment Willow discovers the corpses of Kevin and his friends in the audio\/visual room is a major turning point for the character. From that point on, Willow becomes more proactive about her involvement with the Slayer. In that moment, she grows up.\n\nBoth Willow and the Master compliment Buffy on her dress, but the final exchange (Angel: \"I really like your . . .\" Buffy: \"Yeah, yeah. It was a big hit with everyone.\") was added during production and was not in the original script.\n\n#### POP-CULTURE IQ:\n\nXander, upset by Giles's maddening reserve, referring to the emotionless cyborg characters on Star Trek:\n\n\"Calm may work for Locutus of Borg here, but I'm freaked and I intend to stay that way.\"\n\n#### CONTINUITY:\n\nThe Master's imprisonment finally comes to an end, with the help of the Anointed One, and he makes his second attempt to open the Hellmouth (\"Welcome to the Hellmouth\"). For the second time, but not the last, Buffy has a prophetic dream (\"Welcome to the Hellmouth,\" \"Surprise,\" \"Innocence\"). Buffy and the Slayerettes finally realize that the vampire they killed in \"Never Kill a Boy on the First Date\" wasn't the Anointed One. Jenny reminds Giles of her help in destroying Moloch (\"I Robot, You Jane\") when she tries to pry some solid information out of him. Since \"Witch,\" Cordelia has passed driver's ed and obtained a car. Unlike other vampires, the Master's bones remain intact upon his death, which proves important in \"When She Was Bad.\"\n\nThe massive demon coming up out of the Hellmouth at the end of \"Prophecy Girl\" had to be frightening, but the budget didn't allow for computer-generated images. The masterminds at Optic Nerve ended up making tentacle \"costumes.\" Each of the tentacles has a human being inside, manipulating it from within.\n\n#### FROM THE ORIGINAL TELEPLAY:\n\nThe following scene, right after Buffy has turned down Xander's request that she go to the prom with him, was cut from this episode's script because of length:\n\nXander bails, wandering off under the archway. Buffy sits by herself on the bench, bummed.\n\nWhich is when the hail of pebbles starts.\n\nThe first few get Buffy's attention, tiny hard pellets hitting the ground around her. She stands as more start coming down.\n\nPeople\u2014including Buffy\u2014all run for cover as the real shower starts. Buffy stands under the archway, watching the hail come down.\n\nANGLE: XANDER\n\nWalking away, not near Buffy. He hears:\n\nSTUDENT (O.S.): \"Check it out! It's raining stone!\"\n\nXander looks back over his shoulder.\n\nXANDER: \"Figures.\"\n\n## CATCHING UP WITH THE CAST AND CREW\n\n### ANTHONY STEWART HEAD (RUPERT GILES)\n\nYou'd been a working actor for many years before Buffy came along, and you've appeared in many roles in the years since. In between was this thing, Buffy, that made you instantly recognizable to millions of people around the world. Personally and professionally, was that a blessing or a curse?\n\nANTHONY: \"A huge blessing. One of the weird things about my career is that I have a number of shows that have that kind of strange mystique about them. What I find remarkable is when young kids come up to me and they say it's Buffy that they know me from. I think, How? You weren't even alive. But of course the show has just gone round and round and round; it's been cyclical the way it's been on Netflix, it's been on FX, it's been on a number of channels. And young people keep picking up on it because it's so relevant to growing up and to finding your place in the world. But there's also Merlin, and there's Manchild to a certain extent, then there's Little Britain. There's a number of appearances I've made\u2014even the one appearance on Doctor Who has been resonant.\n\n\"Before Buffy, I was known on both sides of the Atlantic for the [Taster's Choice] coffee ad. And it sort of\u2014it didn't close things down here, but it did sort of limit what I was being seen for in terms of TV and film, because it was sort of the young romantic hero, and it was a sixty-second commercial. What Buffy gave me the opportunity to do was nothing I'd ever done before, which was to actually play a character role. And I saw it immediately. When I saw it on the page, I thought, This is perfect. It's exactly what I want, because at the time I wasn't particularly character actor stuff. I am now, strangely\u2014but I was sort of the young romantic lead, and that can be limiting, and the whole thing that Buffy gave me was this complete new trajectory in my career.\n\n\"In terms of being a blessing or a curse, there was a moment when the BBC were making noises [of interest in Buffy]. I asked the [Fox] television international sales department how we were doing selling it to England, because one English actor long ago said, 'The worst thing about doing an American show that doesn't get shown in your home country is that you basically disappear.' This particular actor was in something that ran for seven or eight seasons, so when he went home, nobody knew him at all. That doesn't happen so much now. Things have changed, and most shows are seen internationally. But back in the day, when I first started on Buffy, if a show wasn't successful on American TV, if it hadn't made at least two seasons, it wasn't seen in England.\"\n\nAs I understand it, and please correct me if I'm wrong, during your tenure as a regular on Buffy, you lived a transatlantic life, working in LA but still calling the UK home. Was it a relief\u2014and how much of an adjustment was it\u2014when you no longer had to split your time like that?\n\nANTHONY: \"It was a double-edged sword. Buffy was the best job; it was just perfect. But at the same time, I was away from my family, as you point out. And my kids were very young when I started and basically because of the [Taster's Choice] commercial limiting things that I was available for, that was when Sarah, my partner, said, 'Look, you've always wanted to work in America; this is your opportunity, because the commercial is just as successful in the States as it is in England, and they have a much freer kind of attitude about commercials.'\n\n\"These days it doesn't matter at all, but at the time I had such a high profile in the commercial that it was a bit limiting here. So she said she would be a single mum and that I should go out and see what I could find. And bless her heart, I didn't really think about what that meant and she really was a single mum; she was basically looking after the two girls from four and six or maybe even younger, three and five. Every time I got six days clear . . . nothing shorter because [. . .] they would just be getting into the groove of me being back home and then I'd have to go again. So six days we found was the minimum, and the production side of Buffy was very, very generous. If I looked at the episode and saw that I was only in two or three days out of the eight, I'd sort of add up the week and go, 'Look, is there any way of shooting that end so that, you know . . .' And they'd look at it and they'd try, and sometimes it didn't work, but more often than not Gareth, the producer, was brilliant.\n\n\"We also made use of holidays\u2014we'd turn up in the States for three weeks. For two weeks we'd just be hanging out on the beach and doing our stuff, and then the third week I'd start work and the girls would join me. The crew and the cast were just lovely, so welcoming. It was really a family affair. Such a lovely crew. That largely came from Joss, because Joss was very welcoming, and when the girls sort of came on set, they were allowed to sit and watch the monitors. I think [my daughter] Daisy was allowed to say 'Action' at one point. And they used to hang out with me in my trailer, and Alyson was like a big sister, Sarah Michelle was like a big sister to them. They loved the girls. The girls were so easy to have around the set, extremely polite, you know, they didn't run around making noise. They were cool, really cool. It's no surprise that they are such brilliant actresses as they are, because they've been around it for so long that it's sort of in their bones.\n\n\"In terms of adjusting when I got back, no it wasn't a huge adjustment at all. I basically said to Joss at the end of the fifth season\u2014because I'd thought I had a five-season, five-year contract, and it was a seven-year contract. Oops!\u2014and I said, 'Look, dude, I don't know if I can do another two years as a regular. What's the chances of me leaving and going home?' Bless him\u2014he said, 'I'd rather not lose you completely, but would you consider being a recurring rather than a regular?' So in season six I did something like eight episodes, and in season seven I did more\u2014I did about fourteen. But just having that wiggle room, as they say, meant that I wasn't sort of going from the American way of life straight back into England. It was a perfect way of shoehorning my way back into life here. And also I did Manchild\u2014I think that began in season six anyway. But, yeah, it was a relief to be home.\"\n\nYou've had all sorts of roles before and after Buffy, including on Manchild, The Invisibles, Little Britain, and the 2017 ShondaLand series Still Star-Crossed. Which role would you hope Buffy fans would track down and watch, if they haven't seen it?\n\nANTHONY: \"There's one show called Free Agents that I did for NBC. They made eight episodes and they only screened four, I think. Nearly worked. It was just getting into its groove when they canceled it, unfortunately, but I think the British version of it\u2014which I did with Sharon Horgan and Steve Mangan\u2014is brilliant. I play a very outrageous character. If you have sensitivities, you probably shouldn't watch it. And oh God\u2014Manchild. I love Manchild. I think the Americans tried to remake it. The idea was fiftysomethings who have all the boys' toys. The idea basically was, by the time you can actually afford all the stuff that you dream of as a man, you actually are too old to own it. It was very funny, but I think for some reason the Americans thought it was embarrassing, having fiftysomethings doing this, so they made it forty-somethings, which is a completely different ball game.\n\n\"The thing that I'm doing now I sincerely hope is a success, the ShondaLand series, is from a book called Still Star-Crossed. . . . I play Lord Capulet, and it's basically about what happens after Romeo and Juliet die. It's set in Renaissance Italy, when the political climate was very, very active. There was lots of stabbing in the back and betrayals and all the rest of it. It's about two warring families, the Montagues and the Capulets.\"\n\nYour middle name has vanished and reappeared in credits over the years. I've always wondered why. Care to elaborate?\n\nANTHONY: \"Basically, that's a union thing. When I first went over to the States, when I joined the Screen Actors Guild, I found out that there was another Tony Head, who at the time was largely a musical actor. And I think he was in The Wire. I asked if I could make it Anthony S. Head, but he said no. If the roles were reversed and he was here [in the UK], I would appreciate his need for me to be completely different. Anyway, bottom line is, in America I'm Anthony Stewart Head, and in England I'm Anthony Head. I'm presuming I will be Anthony Stewart Head for [Still Star-Crossed].\"\n\nYou've been recording music almost as long as you've been acting. It's been a couple of years since your latest album, Staring at the Sun. What's next for you on the music front?\n\nANTHONY: \"Taking time out to make music is sort of [difficult]. When I'm home, it's relatively full-on. We've got lots of animals, and my partner has put life on hold while I go off to film. So when I come back, I throw myself wholeheartedly into whatever's needed. But I have been working on something while I was in Spain, which I'm still tinkering with\u2014and I will be tinkering with a lot\u2014which is a version of Macbeth with music. It's not a musical. It's something that I started doing when I was in class at the Beverly Hills Playhouse with Milton Katselas. You would get up and do scenes, and there were times when I didn't have time to rehearse with someone else, so I thought, I know, I'll just do a Shakespeare scene or something. And I started off with Richard III: 'Now is the winter of our discontent.' But I found it was quite interesting to just add little lines of contemporary music to offset the verse. Not all the way through, good God, but just occasionally point up a line by finding something which was relevant in some way. And there was a point when I was doing Richard II and someone said, 'Oh, are you gonna put music to it?' and I thought, Oh, I wasn't going to, but actually now you mention it, all right. There was a song, which made me very emotional, which I used to put on in my car, called 'Highway Highway' by Stephen Allen Davis. If you don't know it, you should check it out. It's on the album, I did a cover of it. It's a beautiful, beautiful song, and it's about going off in two different directions, and it used to make me cry. So I thought\u2014I dunno, at one point I was climbing across the audience, and I started singing, and it had an extraordinary emotional resonance.\n\n\"Anyway, long story short, I also did a little piece of Macbeth, and it's a part that I'd always been interested in. There's an angle on it that I have that I've always wanted to do. And it's set in a period where the music is incredibly creative. So being able to refer to the stuff that was going on, and also have incidental music, and maybe a soliloquy or so being sung. Don't know yet\u2014still playing with it. But I've been in talks with someone who runs a theater in the West End. It's definitely an experimental show, and I'm sure all the purists will say, 'Why, why do you have to mess around with Shakespeare?' Well, you don't. Shakespeare works really well on his own, but I'm sure he would appreciate the occasional little bit of, let's try this, let's see what we can do. And it may end up just that I do all the music and then go, 'No it's not gonna work,' and we'll just do it as a straight piece. But that's what I'm working on.\"\n\nYour daughters, Emily and Daisy, are both actresses, marking the third generation of Heads to go into the family business. Have they always known they wanted to act?\n\nANTHONY: \"Absolutely. Well, Emily always did. Daisy was always brilliant but wasn't motivated that way necessarily from the beginning. Emily used to write little plays, as kids sometimes do. And they'd sort of go off and rehearse, and then they'd put it on in the front room and we'd all sit and watch. And Daisy would reluctantly be coerced into doing it, and she would insist on everybody turning away, looking in the other direction, when she was on, because she didn't like us all looking at her. Thankfully that no longer exists, because she does really, really well. Both of them are wonderful and completely different. One of the moments that I was most pleased . . . They did a show called Doc Martin. I think they both went up because the agent was told they were looking for two sisters. In the end they got there and [learned that] no, these are two completely different characters. And they booked Emily, and then they came back and said they could not get Daisy out of their heads. They would try and make it work. And it did. And a number of people had no idea that they were sisters. It was great, absolutely great, the fact that they could play in a show, not playing sisters\u2014because they'd done a couple of things where they were sisters.\n\n\"Basically, [they were] ten and twelve [when] they asked if they could do it professionally, because their ballet school had suddenly started putting some of the students up for things like Harry Potter and The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, and all those\u2014Peter Pan\u2014there were lots of films at the time, suddenly that was the fashion. And they asked if they could do it professionally. I said maybe just do it at school and then go to drama school, and Sarah said, 'Back in your box. You have no clue whether they're gonna want to do it when they're twenty-five, but you can be sure that when they're forty and they didn't do it, you were the one that got in their way.' And I have actually met someone who that happened to, that their mother basically stopped them.\n\n\"Not that I would have stopped the girls from acting, but Sarah's point was also that it's a real test of fire. You find out a lot about yourself and about presenting yourself, and it would pay off somewhere down the line if they chose to do another career. But I think it was the second, or maybe even the first interview that Daisy went to, she booked a really great TV show with a dear friend of ours, Aaron Taylor-Johnson. A great show, and she was great in it. [Emily and Daisy] know how it is. It's not like one has to say it's a hard business, because they've seen me have to deal with rejection, have to deal with getting a job and then literally just before the job's about to go, it gets canceled for lack of funds or something, and you have to deal with the disappointment. So they know what the gig is. But they're both doing really, really well, I have to say. I'm very, very proud of them.\"\n\nYou and your partner, Sarah Fisher, have been deeply involved in animal-welfare issues. What are the charities and organizations you're focused on now, and what message would you like to give your fans about animal welfare?\n\nANTHONY: \"The one thing I would say to people about animals is, don't assume that we know what an animal is thinking. For some strange reason, we always latch on to animals being stubborn, [animals being] deliberately cantankerous. Sarah's just written a book about donkeys. Donkeys have a tendency to suddenly stop, and that's nothing to do with being naughty or being stubborn. That's because, in that moment, they are overfazed. There's just too much information, and the only way they can deal with it is to stop still until they're ready to deal with it. And part of what Sarah does . . . all of her work is about observing and then working with the animal. I think she's called an animal behavioral consultant. But by and large, a lot of animals have some sort of tension patterns going on in their body because of either fear or the memory of fear, or pain\u2014pain is a huge one. We always think that animals can just ride through pain, and actually quite often they do, but it can affect the way they respond to what we're asking them to do.\n\n\"But, what charities? Loads. Loads and loads and loads. From big organizations like Battersea Dogs & Cats Home and Dogs Trust to very small organizations like Dogstar in Sri Lanka. We have a thing called 'Cool to Be Kind,' which Sarah brilliantly invented. It's cool to be kind to animals. Basically we offer animal welfare organizations and shelters the opportunity to sell some wristbands, which have 'Cool to Be Kind' and four little animal prints on them. Most of them don't have the finances to be able to initiate merchandise, because it costs money to actually supply merchandise, and if they have a very small area that they cover, it's just not cost-effective. So we send them a starter pack of wristbands, which they sell for three euros or so. Of course, that may change now after Brexit. But they then can choose to do what they want with the profits. Sometimes they just keep it, and that's the end of that, but more often than not they reinvest it, they buy more bands at cost and sell them again at the retail price, and therefore they make a profit, again and again. It's perfect. When I'm working with people with a high profile, I ask them if they'd like a band, and then I photograph them with it on. For instance I did a radio show with Benedict Cumberbatch and the day after we put that up on the Facebook page, we didn't have enough bands to go around. It's the power of profile. It's very simple and very effective.\"\n\nSo much time has passed. What are your favorite behind-the-scenes memories of your time on the series?\n\nANTHONY: \"So many. There was one moment that I will always remember, which I think was on 'Passion.' There was a phone call between Giles and Willow, where he tells her that Jenny Calendar is dead. Michael Gershman, our director of photography, who directed that episode, asked them to put a landline, a telephone connection, between us so that I was really talking to her. I was watching the monitor, and it was heartbreaking. Alyson was spot on, and it was so emotional.\n\n\"On the more humorous side, there was the episode\u2014I can't remember what it was called\u2014when I'm a Fyarl demon, driving around in the Giles mobile with Spike\u2014with James. It was great stuff, with him slagging me off. There was a scene where I have to chase someone down the street. They originally had me in slippers, and I said no, surely, can't we do something that's sort of like cloven feet? And I ended up designing them, and I think props made them in the end. Basically they were a pair of high heels, with a hoof at the front part and you couldn't really see the heel part, and I think you only actually see them once, when I tread on some kid's toy in a back garden. But there was a moment when I was walking across the car park and Nicky [Brendon] said, 'Show me a bit of Frank-N-Furter,' because I played Frank in Rocky Horror. So I did, and suddenly the Fyarl demon was swinging his hips. Because I'm, I don't know, bizarrely comfortable with a pair of heels.\"\n\nEveryone says that working on a long-running TV series is a lot like high school, with circles of friends and then those people you wish you'd hung out with more. Who do you wish you'd hung out with more?\n\nANTHONY: \"I hung out with everyone, pretty much. I spent a lot of time with Nicky, and Alyson, and Emma. Couldn't really spend much time with Sarah Michelle\u2014I've spent a lot of time since, whenever I visit\u2014but, because she was working all the time. Hung out with David, hung out with James. Hung out with Seth a bit\u2014I mean the bottom line is we all stayed really friendly. I always look them up when I go [to LA]. And Joss.\n\n\"Joss used to do these Shakespeare readings on Sundays. It started off when Kai, his wife, went off to do a sabbatical in Japan to do an architecture course, and he just thought, What should I do? All right, let's do some Shakespeare readings. And they turned into musicals. He'd get his music books out, and then James brought a guitar, and so the musical was born. We used to hang out a lot, and I have really fond memories. I have some really, really good friends because of it, and I will always look on them with great fondness.\"\n\nWhat are you working on now, and what does the future hold for Anthony Head?\n\nANTHONY: \"I'm waiting to see if the Shonda show gets picked up. [Ed. note: It did!] I'm fascinated\u2014we've watched an edit of the pilot, which is changing because we shot some more stuff. And we watched rough assemblies of the second and third episodes. Quite astonishing, quite astonishing stuff. Beautiful. It's all on location. We're shooting in Spain for Renaissance Italy, because there's an enormous amount of extraordinary architecture in Spain. It's a beautiful country and there are large, vast untouched plains and forests and all sorts of stuff. Watching the three episodes I now have, I'm absolutely blown away. It's absolutely stunning.\n\n\"And, as I said, I'm working on this play idea. I've also got three or four things that I've written that I finally decided to see if I can get some interest in, just because it would be nice to be in control of something, to have written something that I'm in.\"\n\n### JULIE BENZ (DARLA)\n\nMany of the actors who appeared on Buffy and Angel had their real breakout roles with either show, but you'd already had several recurring roles and numerous guest spots before you appeared as Darla in the pilot of Buffy. Do you still feel the role was a breakout for you?\n\nJULIE: \"Yes, definitely! I had been kicking around in Hollywood for a bit, working mostly on sitcoms. Darla was my first dramatic, multidimensional, complex character.\"\n\nYou've had a very successful career post-Whedonverse, including significant roles on series like Dexter, Hawaii Five-0, Desperate Housewives, Defiance, and No Ordinary Family, and appearances in films and many other series. What role are you most proud of? Which would you point Buffy fans to if they wanted so see something very different from Darla?\n\nJULIE: \"Rita from Dexter is the complete opposite of Darla and a role I am very proud of. Also Robin from Desperate Housewives\u2014she was pure joy to play!\"\n\nYou started ice-skating at the age of two and competed in the 1988 junior ice dancing US Championships. An injury at age fourteen kept you off the ice. Do you look back on that now as a blessing in disguise, or would you rather have been skating all along?\n\nJULIE: \"It was definitely a blessing, which I actually recognized at the time. I started skating before I could even fully speak. It was just something we did in our family. I knew in my heart I wasn't going to ice-skate forever, but I didn't know what else I was going to do. I knew I loved performing. My injury forced me to explore other outlets for performing, and that's how I discovered acting. It was really a confluence of circumstances. I got injured and then met my manager, Vincent Cirrincione (who is still my manager thirty-one years later), within the same year. Had I not gotten injured, I doubt I would be where I am today!\"\n\nYou speak the first words in the Buffy pilot, and yet Darla was originally intended to die in that episode. Looking back now, what stands out to you about the process of being cast as Darla\u2014about the audition or your first look at the script, or both?\n\nJULIE: \"I was a big fan of the movie, so when I was offered the role of Vampire Girl #1 in the pilot presentation, I took it even though I knew I was gonna die right away. I was still a struggling actress at the time, so I was just hungry to work. And Joss's passion and energy for the project was infectious! I remember once the show went to series and we reshot the pilot, Vampire Girl #1 was given a name . . . but I was still supposed to die. We were filming my death scene on set when Joss came up to me and said, 'We decided not to kill you. You're gonna be back next episode. And then we're gonna kill you.' This went on for a few episodes. It was exciting and fun for me as an actress, but I never thought Darla would develop and become such a pivotal part of the story line.\"\n\nFor a character who only appears in five episodes of Buffy, Darla looms large. Even when she appears on Angel\u2014for twenty episodes\u2014her history with him casts a long shadow over both series. And yet the writers killed your character over and over again. Do you think they knew each time they'd be bringing you back, or is Darla just that irresistible?\n\nJULIE: \"Joss and the writers wrote a great character. . . . She was irresistible! And the great thing about the show was that you could die and come back over and over and over again. Except I never expected it. Every time I was killed, I thought it was final and that I would never be back again. I remember being sad on set one day when we were shooting one of my many deaths and everyone (cast and crew) were like, 'You'll be back next week!' And they were right! Darla was always brought back\u2014to my surprise!\"\n\nHow often do you get recognized in public? Do you enjoy it, or do you want to hide?\n\nJULIE: \"I'm often impressed when someone recognizes me, because I never recognize anyone! I've always had great fan experiences and I appreciate them. I remember when I was ten years old I asked a famous ice-skater for an autograph and she refused. It devastated me. It took so much courage on my part to ask her. I was crushed. I don't ever want to make anyone feel that way.\"\n\nSo much time has passed. What are your favorite behind-the-scenes memories of your time on the two series, particularly Buffy?\n\nJULIE: \"My favorite moments were with David [Boreanaz]. We had a natural chemistry and mutual respect from the very beginning. Working with him was easy and fun. We would be shooting these very intense, emotional scenes, and as soon as the director yelled cut we would start laughing. He was my rock throughout Darla's journey. I always felt safe with him.\"\n\nEveryone says that working on a long-running TV series is a lot like high school, with circles of friends and then those people you wish you'd hung out with more. You were only on five episodes of Buffy, but twenty of Angel. Who do you wish you'd hung out with more?\n\nJULIE: \"Everyone! My first few episodes of Buffy were tough because I was dealing with the contact lenses and the prosthetic makeup. They created the vampire makeup on my face. At that time, the process was long, tedious, and uncomfortable. I became allergic to the chemicals that were being used, and the removal process was very painful. Add in the fact that I could barely see because of the contact lenses . . . needless to say, I didn't get to spend a lot of time bonding with the rest of the cast. Plus, I mostly only worked with Sarah and David.\"\n\nOverall how would you characterize the influence of your time on Buffy and Angel on your life?\n\nJULIE: \"For me, working on Buffy and Angel was like attending the most amazing graduate school for acting. Every week I was challenged emotionally and physically. I was buried alive, had to ride a horse through fire, had to sing (and I'm not a singer!). The writers pushed the boundaries, and I loved every minute of it! We were encouraged to make strong choices with our characters, and we were always supported by amazing writing. Darla was a once-in-a-lifetime role, and I am filled with gratitude that I was chosen to bring her to life.\"\n\nWhat are you working on now, and what does the future hold for Julie Benz?\n\nJULIE: \"I am currently filming Training Day for CBS with Katrina Law, Drew Van Acker, and Marianne Jean-Baptiste. And if you think you know what the future holds for me, I'm all ears!\"\n\n### ERIKA AMATO (LEAD SINGER OF VELVET CHAIN)\n\nYou started your career as an actress in an episode of Quantum Leap, but all the while, you were performing as a musician, singing and writing songs with your band Velvet Chain, which became something of a big deal in the LA club scene. What was life like pre-Buffy for you and the band?\n\nERIKA: \"I was actually on Quantum Leap before I even met Jeff Stacy (my husband and co-founder of Velvet Chain). I was doing the typical aspiring actress thing: auditioning, taking classes, doing plays here and there, and booking the occasional TV or indie film role. After about a year of that, I met Jeff through a friend of mine who was singing backup in his band, and we started dating immediately. That old band featured a male lead singer (Jeff wrote all the songs, though), and I joined the band as a backup singer who occasionally sang lead. After only a few months of that configuration, we dissolved that band and started a new one with me as the only singer, and renamed ourselves Velvet Chain. We made a demo, immediately started getting booked in clubs all over LA, and started to develop a really good following.\"\n\nHow did Velvet Chain's appearance (performing onstage at the Bronze) in the episode \"Never Kill a Boy on the First Date\" come about?\n\nERIKA: \"That came directly from the music supervisor, John King, who had become a fan of ours. He saw us play back in early 1996, really liked us, thought we'd be a good fit for the show, and asked us to come on. Our episode was actually the third one ever shot (although it was the fifth one to air), and nobody knew whether or not the show was even going to be successful, much less become such a phenomenon! At the time, we were told the show was a mid-season replacement. And it was on The WB. I mean, who knew it would be such a hit? We shot the episode something like six months before it ever even got released! But as soon as I tuned in to watch our episode when it aired in 1997, I knew we were a part of something special.\"\n\nAfter that episode, your music also appeared on the official soundtrack for the series, a one-two punch that gave Velvet Chain a new level of exposure. What impact did it have?\n\nERIKA: \"It had a huge impact. Just being on the show gave us a ton of exposure. We went from playing the great small clubs in the area to some of the biggest and most famous venues in LA\u2014like the world-famous Troubadour, the Key Club, and House of Blues. Coincidentally, we'd been signed to an indie label just before our episode of Buffy aired, so when we went out on tour in support of our album (Warm), we were able to build off that national exposure, which was great. (And it certainly gave us great stuff to talk about in radio interviews at the time!) And then getting selected to be on the official soundtrack album was an even bigger boost. Plus, by that point, the show had been airing internationally, so we were selling albums worldwide. It was all really great stuff. Plus, I was a huge fan of Garbage at the time, so the fact that our tracks were right next to each other on the album was really special to me. We'll always be super grateful to Joss for personally pushing for us to be on that album.\"\n\nAlthough Velvet Chain certainly wasn't the only band to have their music get the spotlight on Buffy, you and the band seemed to be embraced by the Buffy fandom with more enthusiasm than most. Why do you think that happened?\n\nERIKA: \"I think it was probably due to a combination of factors. I'd like to think it was primarily due to the music, but I also know that the fact that the cast really liked us and developed a friendship with us and would come to our gigs in Hollywood didn't hurt! (We were even the official entertainment at the show's season two wrap party. Fun stuff!) I was also very active on all the various incarnations of the posting board and made some really good friends among the fans. Plus, I wore some pretty cool outfits. I think it all contributed!\"\n\nWhat are your favorite memories, all these years later, of your interactions with the Buffy fans?\n\nERIKA: \"There are so many! I really loved performing at the PBP (Posting Board Party) at the Hollywood Athletic Club. . . . I got to meet so many people IRL that I only knew from their online handles. And I'm still friends with a bunch of them\u2014they even come to see me in my theater productions! We also participated in a couple of conventions, which were really fun because we got to be 'famous.' You know, signing autographs, posing for pictures, etc. But I think my favorite memory may be when we crowdsourced the fans on the posting board to give us general ideas for our James Bond\u2013style Buffy song. That was super fun. (I'm aware that the song seems kind of lame to people who don't get the tongue-in-cheek tone, but the folks who do get it, love it. And for what it's worth, it's got a fantastic bass line!) And side note, to this day, when new people find out that my band was on Buffy, they freak out. The show's fans are the best.\"\n\nWere you a fan yourself, and was it strange to appear as\u2014essentially\u2014yourself?\n\nERIKA: \"Well, as I mentioned earlier, we were on the third episode ever shot, so I wasn't a Buffy fan beforehand\u2014the show didn't even exist yet! But yes, as soon as I saw our episode, I knew it was a great show, and I started watching it every week. As for it being strange . . . yes! Not so much seeing myself onscreen as 'myself' (we'd shot some Velvet Chain videos already, etc.), but the strangest part was having to lip-synch to myself\u2014but wait, it gets weirder\u2014in silence! See, during filming, they would start rolling our track so that we could get a sense of the tempo, but then they'd turn it off so that they could record the dialogue for the scene. And I'm just up there onstage, lip-synching in a vacuum, hoping that I'm at least somewhat close. That was just bizarre. I was very grateful to see that I actually did a pretty good job!\"\n\n9\/11 had an enormous impact on you and was directly responsible for your decision to focus on pursuing roles in the theater. How did that shift come about, and how did you put that decision into action?\n\nERIKA: \"Very long story short: my dad worked in the building directly across from the Twin Towers and took the train in to the World Trade Center every day. For about twelve hours on 9\/11, I had no idea whether he was alive or dead (thankfully, he was fine), but if he hadn't been running late (not at all typical for him), he would have been one of the victims crushed in the PATH train below the towers. And yeah, he was okay, but what about the over three thousand people who were killed? And what about their families and friends? Anyway, that day served as an epiphany for me, and I realized that life is just too short to not go for your dreams with everything you have. I came to the conclusion that I absolutely didn't want to hold down a day job anymore, and I had a gut feeling that I could make a living in musical theater (something which I'd been resisting for various reasons), so I immediately picked up a copy of Backstage, auditioned for something, booked it, and quit my full-time job at Bloomingdale's. And I haven't had a day job since!\"\n\nYou've won numerous awards for your stage performances Off-Broadway and in regional theater, and you were a part of the national tour of Flashdance the Musical. What has been your favorite stage role thus far?\n\nERIKA: \"That's actually a tough question. . . . I've been fortunate enough to have played some of the greatest roles in musical theater, and I've loved so many of them for different reasons. I loved playing The Witch in Into the Woods because the songs are amazing, I adore Sondheim, and it's a real diva-style role. I loved doing Velma Von Tussle in Hairspray because that's just the most joyous, fun show and that role is hilarious and a real blast to play. I adored being Maria in The Sound of Music because it's one of the most iconic roles in musical theater, the songs are all American classics, it was my very first Equity role (i.e., the role with which I joined Actors' Equity Association, the union for professional stage actors in the United States), and every night a gaggle of little girls would swarm me at the stage door and make me feel like a Disney princess. And there are so many more . . . but I think my most rewarding stage experience was when I voiced the role of the Bad Fairy in the original musical Sleeping Beauty Wakes, which was co-produced by Deaf West Theatre and Center Theatre Group in Los Angeles. I spoke and sang for deaf actress Deanne Bray in addition to playing my own supporting role (speaking, singing, and signing ASL for myself). It was the biggest challenge of my career\u2014and I was nominated for an Ovation Award for it, which was cool!\"\n\nWhat are you up to now, and what does the future hold for Erika Amato?\n\nERIKA: \"Well, literally right now [December 2016], I'm performing all over New York and New Jersey as a professional a cappella singer, plus I'm singing in a few Christmas concerts as a soloist. As for the future, I'm waiting to hear about a few projects for which I'm in contention (two regional theater productions and a national tour), but even more importantly, Jeff and I are planning to release a new Velvet Chain album sometime in 2018! Keep an eye out for our soon-to-be-launched fund-raising campaign!\"\n\n## SEASON 2\n\n### Lie to Me\n\nEpisode 2.7\n\nWRITTEN AND DIRECTED BY: Joss Whedon\n\nGUEST STARS: Robia LaMorte as Jenny Calendar, James Marsters as Spike, Jason Behr as Billy Fordham, Jarrad Paul as Diego, Juliet Landau as Drusilla\n\nWITH: Julia Lee as Chanterelle, Will Rothhaar as James\n\n#### THE PLOT THICKENS:\n\nAfter observing Angel talking to a strange, attractive woman, Buffy starts moping\u2014right until the arrival of Billy Fordham, \"Ford\" to his friends. Buffy's former crush and best friend for many years back at her old high school, Ford says he's transferred to Sunnydale High. In due course, Ford reveals that he knows that Buffy is the Slayer. A suspicious Angel has Willow check up on him, and they discover that he hasn't actually transferred and that he's part of a club that worships vampires and wishes to become like them. Ford's plan is to give Spike the Slayer in exchange for becoming a vampire\u2014a preferred alternative to dying of a brain tumor, which is his expected fate. Buffy, however, manages to turn the tables on him and prevent the club members from being massacred by Spike and Drusilla.\n\nThe entire episode continues to turn on the theme of lies, and the title becomes particularly valid in the poignant conversation at the episode's end between Buffy and Giles, as she asks him to lie to her, to tell her that everything will be all right.\n\n#### QUOTE OF THE WEEK:\n\nAngel, describing to Willow how Buffy has changed his life:\n\n\"Things used to be pretty simple. A hundred years, just hanging out, feeling guilty. I really honed my brooding skills. Then she comes along.\"\n\n#### LOVE, SLAYER STYLE:\n\nBuffy is jealous when she sees Angel with Drusilla and latches on to Ford as soon as he arrives, even hanging around with him to the exclusion of Angel at the Bronze. Later, though, she finally comes out and admits that she loves Angel.\n\nJenny and Giles go on their second date, which Jenny keeps a surprise; it turns out to be a monster truck rally.\n\n#### CONTINUITY:\n\nSpike has one of his vampires steal the du Lac manuscript from the library (later used in \"What's My Line?\"). Buffy learns of Drusilla's existence; Giles had believed her killed in Prague (\"School Hard\"). Willow points out to Angel that he's acted jealous in the past (\"Some Assembly Required\"). Willow has also upgraded from a desktop to a laptop since \"I Robot, You Jane\" (\"Passion\"). Angel details how he tortured Drusilla and made her insane before he finally changed her into a vampire (\"Becoming, Part One\").\n\n#### FROM THE ORIGINAL TELEPLAY:\n\nThe following line of Angel's was cut from this episode for length:\n\n\"Yeah, I eat too. Not for nutritional value\u2014it just kind of passes the time.\"\n\n### What's My Line? Part One\n\nEpisode 2.9\n\nWRITTEN BY: Howard Gordon and Marti Noxon\n\nDIRECTED BY: David Solomon\n\nGUEST STARS: Seth Green as Oz, James Marsters as Spike, Eric Saiet as Dalton, Kelly Connell as Mr. Pfister, Bianca Lawson as Kendra, Saverio Guerra as Willy, Juliet Landau as Drusilla, Armin Shimerman as Principal Snyder\n\nWITH: Michael Rothhaar as Suitman, P. B. Hutton as Mrs. Kalish\n\n#### THE PLOT THICKENS:\n\nIt's Career Week at Sunnydale High School, which just drives home to Buffy that she can't possibly have a normal life. She proceeds to mope for some time, leading Angel to invite her to a skating rink. It cheers her up\u2014right until she is attacked by a huge biker-dude type who is wearing a ring that identifies him as part of the Order of Taraka, a group of supernatural assassins. Three have been sent after Buffy by Spike, who doesn't want any distractions from curing Drusilla. The method for doing so is in the du Lac manuscript that had been stolen from the Sunnydale High library, which Spike eventually translates. Angel's attempt to find out what is going on is interrupted by a woman who attacks him and locks him in a cage until sunup. The same woman then attacks Buffy, who has taken refuge from the assassins in Angel's empty apartment, and identifies herself as \"Kendra, the Vampire Slayer.\"\n\nThe hold of the plane in which Kendra arrives was constructed on the set and later turned upside down and redesigned as a sewer tunnel.\n\nThe ice rink where Angel and Buffy skate in this episode is, in real life, a place called Iceland, which is located at 8041 Jackson Street, in Paramount, California, about twenty-five miles from the actual set of the show.\n\n#### QUOTE OF THE WEEK:\n\nXander:\n\n\"It's a statistical impossibility for a sixteen-year-old to unplug a telephone.\"\n\n#### LOVE, SLAYER STYLE:\n\nAngel is waiting in Buffy's bedroom when she returns from slaying, saying he's worried; she tells him, \"You're the one freaky thing in my freaky world that still makes sense to me.\" They also make out at the skating rink (observed by Kendra, leading to the new Slayer attacking the old one at the episode's climax).\n\n#### POP-CULTURE IQ:\n\nXander, to Cordelia, referring to the crime-busting kids who hung around with that famous cartoon Great Dane, Scooby-Doo:\n\n\"You wanna be a member of the Scooby Gang, you gotta be willing to be inconvenienced now and then.\"\n\n#### CONTINUITY:\n\nThe truth of the du Lac manuscript stolen from Giles in \"Lie to Me\" is revealed. Oz and Willow finally meet (\"Inca Mummy Girl,\" \"Halloween\"), as both are chosen as recruiting fodder for a computer-software megacorporation in Seattle (never identified by name) during Career Week. Willow's fear of frogs is first mentioned (\"Killed by Death\").\n\n### What's My Line? Part Two\n\nEpisode 2.10\n\nWRITTEN BY: Marti Noxon\n\nDIRECTED BY: David Semel\n\nGUEST STARS: Seth Green as Oz, James Marsters as Spike, Saverio Guerra as Willy, Bianca Lawson as Kendra, Kelly Connell as Mr. Pfister, Juliet Landau as Drusilla\n\nWITH: Danny Strong as Jonathan Levenson\n\n#### THE PLOT THICKENS:\n\nKendra and Buffy call a truce and realize that the former truly is a Slayer. When one Slayer dies, another is activated, and Buffy did die, however briefly. To Buffy's chagrin, Kendra seems more dedicated, more studious, and seems to get along better with Giles\u2014but she also has had no life to speak of, and is long on duty but short on passion.\n\nMeanwhile, Angel has been rescued from his cage by the slimy bartender, Willy, who hands him over to Spike. The two other Tarakan assassins attack, one going after Xander and Cordelia at Buffy's house, the other shooting at Buffy in school.\n\nAs the Slayers figure out for themselves, the ritual to restore Drusilla to full health requires the presence of her sire\u2014Angel. Brutal questioning of Willy by Buffy and Kendra reveals the location of the church where the ceremony will be performed, and they attack. Buffy manages to end the ceremony before Angel is drained of all life, then literally drops a church organ on Spike's head while the church burns around them. With the bad guys defeated and Angel saved, Kendra heads back home. But Drusilla has survived the church burning and rescued Spike\u2014and she's stronger than ever. . . .\n\n#### QUOTE OF THE WEEK:\n\nBuffy, getting her dander up:\n\n\" 'Cause I've had it. Spike is going down. You can attack me, you can send assassins after me, that's fine. But nobody messes with my boyfriend.\"\n\n#### LOVE, SLAYER STYLE:\n\nWhile trapped in Buffy's basement by one of the assassins, Xander and Cordelia get into a knock-down, drag-out argument that culminates in a kiss, followed by a heartfelt \"We so need to get out of here.\" An attempt to redistance themselves at the climax fails miserably, and they wind up in each other's arms again, following yet another nasty argument, thus setting the tone for their relationship.\n\nOz and Willow make the first steps toward their eventual relationship, as Oz saves Willow's life from one of the assassins, then proceeds to flirt with her while discussing animal crackers.\n\nBuffy tells Kendra to watch the movie on her flight home unless it's a \"movie with a dog in it and Chevy Chase.\" This is a reference to Funny Farm, a 1988 movie starring Chase that Gellar had a small, uncredited role in.\n\n#### POP-CULTURE IQ:\n\nBuffy, admonishing Kendra to not go off half-cocked, referring to one of the title characters in Mighty Morphin Power Rangers:\n\n\"Back off, Pink Ranger!\"\n\nBuffy, once again admonishing Kendra, referring to the legendary movie hero:\n\n\"It's a little more complicated than that, John Wayne.\"\n\nThe \"Pink Ranger\" line has additional significance beyond being a standard Buffy pop-culture reference: Sarah Michelle Gellar's stunt double, Sophia Crawford, used to play the Pink Ranger on Mighty Morphin Power Rangers.\n\n#### CONTINUITY:\n\nKendra's activation as the Slayer apparently happened after Buffy died in \"Prophecy Girl.\" Drusilla tortures Angel prior to the ceremony, reminding him of what he did to her (\"Lie to Me,\" \"Becoming, Part One\"). When Xander reveals that he and Cordelia encountered an assassin that is literally made of maggots, Buffy asks, \"You and bug people, Xander\u2014what's up with that?\" (\"Teacher's Pet\"). Spike and Drusilla have their roles reversed at the end of the episode, as Spike is badly injured and Drusilla is at full strength.\n\n#### FROM THE ORIGINAL TELEPLAY:\n\nThe following exchange was cut from the opening of this episode's script for length:\n\nKENDRA: \"Your English is very odd, you know.\"\n\nBUFFY: \"Yeah\u2014it's something about being woken by an ax. Makes me talk all crazy.\"\n\nWillow wears a backpack that has a little lion poking its head out from under a rainbow.\n\n### Innocence\n\nEpisode 2.14\n\nWRITTEN AND DIRECTED BY: Joss Whedon\n\nGUEST STARS: Seth Green as Oz, Kristine Sutherland as Joyce Summers, Robia LaMorte as Jenny Calendar, Brian Thompson as the Judge\n\nSPECIAL GUEST STARS: Vincent Schiavelli as Uncle Enyos, James Marsters as Spike, Juliet Landau as Drusilla\n\nWITH: James Lurie as Mr. Miller, Carla Madden as Woman, Parry Shen as Student, Ryan Francis as Soldier\n\n#### THE PLOT THICKENS:\n\nAngel's soul is again lost, and he has reverted to the same old vampire he was prior to the Romany curse. Spike and Drusilla are thrilled to find their sire back in the saddle, and invite him to join them in destroying the world with the Judge. Buffy, meanwhile, knows only that Angel has disappeared, and the Slayerettes are no closer to finding out anything useful about how to stop the Judge.\n\nWhen Buffy finally finds Angel, he is standoffish and dismissive of her feelings. Then he attacks Willow at the school, though Xander and Buffy manage to drive him off. Jenny, under pressure from Buffy, reveals that she knew about the curse, that it was removed, and that she had been sent to Sunnydale to keep an eye on Angel. She takes Buffy to her uncle, but Angel has gotten there first and killed him. Xander, meanwhile, comes up with a plan: to use a missile launcher, a weapon that is made, not forged, against the Judge. It works, but Buffy finds it impossible to kill Angel when she confronts him.\n\n#### QUOTE OF THE WEEK:\n\nWillow, insisting, along with Xander, that they go after Angel and Buffy, who have not checked in since their attack on the Factory:\n\n\"My God! You people are all\u2014 Well, I'm upset, and I can't think of a mean word right now, but that's what you are, and we're going to the Factory!\"\n\n#### LOVE, SLAYER STYLE:\n\nAngel and Buffy obviously are on the outs; indeed, Angel is disgusted with the way he acted around the Slayer and is determined to hurt her in much the same way he hurt Drusilla before he turned her into a vampire. His initial foray is a textbook example of the Insensitive Male After Sex, culminating with, \"I'll call you.\" He also starts his campaign to come between Spike and Drusilla (\"Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered,\" etc.).\n\nXander and Cordelia are caught kissing by a devastated Willow. (\"It's against all laws of God and man!\") Xander's attempt to explain that it doesn't mean anything falls on deaf ears, as Willow realizes that \"You'd rather be with someone you hate than be with me.\" Later, Willow asks Oz if he wants to make out with her, which he politely declines, knowing that she's only doing it to get back at Xander; the maturity of this response charms Willow.\n\nThe Giles and Jenny coupling comes to a screeching halt with the revelation of Jenny's true reason for being in Sunnydale.\n\nOften the scripts will contain some wry humor even in the stage directions. In the script for this episode, Joss Whedon wrote, \"A couple of soldiers pass. Xander suavely nods to them. They nod back and pass without comment, because they are extras.\"\n\n#### CONTINUITY:\n\nBuffy continues to have prophetic dreams (\"Welcome to the Hellmouth,\" \"Prophecy Girl,\" \"Surprise\"). Xander's memories of his transformation into a soldier remain intact (\"Halloween\") and allow him and Cordelia to successfully break into an armory and make off with the missile launcher, and also allow Xander to instruct Buffy in its use.\n\n#### FROM THE ORIGINAL TELEPLAY:\n\nThe following exchange was cut from this episode's script for length:\n\nGYPSY MAN: \"You! Evil one!\"\n\nANGEL: \"Evil one? Oh, man, now I've got hurt feelings.\"\n\nGYPSY MAN: \"What do you want?\"\n\nANGEL: \"A whole lot. Got a lot of lost time to make up for. Say, I guess that's kind of your fault, isn't it? You Gypsy types, you go and curse people, you really don't care who gets hurt. Of course, you did give me an escape clause, so I gotta thank you for that.\"\n\nGYPSY MAN: \"You are an abomination. The day you stop suffering for your crimes, you are no longer worthy of a human soul.\"\n\nANGEL: \"Well, that pesky little critter's all gone. So we can get down to business. . . . Don't worry, it won't hurt a bit . . . after the first hour.\"\n\nThe multiplex\/mall set was in a closed Robinsons\/May department store on South Grand Avenue in Los Angeles. A moat was built around the set to catch the water from the overhead sprinklers.\n\nAnother Whedon stage direction, regarding Xander and Cordelia kissing: \"They haben der big smootchen.\"\n\n### Passion\n\nEpisode 2.17\n\n\"Passion\" will always be the episode in which we learned Joss Whedon was not messing around. Prior to the tentative, adorable courtship between Giles and Jenny Calendar, it would have been hard to imagine any new character joining the core group of Scoobies, but Jenny truly seemed to belong. She had her own dark secrets and regrets and was in the process of trying to make up for them\u2014choosing her new friends and her new love over familial loyalty. When Angelus chases her through Sunnydale High School after dark and murders her, the shock wasn't only that a character we'd come to love might die . . . it was that on this series, anything might happen. With Jenny's death, it was clear that nobody was safe. And when Angelus stages Giles's apartment to make it appear that Jenny has prepared a romantic evening for the two of them . . . only to use a trail of rose petals to lead Giles to the discovery of Jenny's corpse, our hearts broke right along with his.\n\nWRITTEN BY: Ty King\n\nDIRECTED BY: Michael E. Gershman\n\nGUEST STARS: Kristine Sutherland as Joyce Summers, Robia LaMorte as Jenny Calendar, James Marsters as Spike, Juliet Landau as Drusilla\n\nWITH: Richard Assad as Shopkeeper\n\n#### THE PLOT THICKENS:\n\nBuffy wakes up to find a charcoal drawing of herself sleeping left on her bed by Angel, and Willow finds her fish dead in an envelope in her bedroom. At their behest, Giles searches for a spell that will uninvite the vampire from the Summers and Rosenberg residences. The spell comes from Jenny, meant as a reconciliation gesture. Angel, meanwhile, plays the stalking ex-boyfriend role on Joyce, complete with mention of the fact they made love, which leads to a rather difficult conversation between Joyce and her daughter.\n\nMeanwhile, Jenny is working to try to translate the spell that would return Angel's soul to him. Late one night, she finally does so, saving the file to a disk and printing it out. However, Angel has learned of this project, thanks to a prophetic vision from Drusilla, and destroys Jenny's computer and the printout, and brutally kills Jenny. He then places the body in Giles's bedroom, setting the place up with champagne and flowers, making it all the more devastating when Giles finds the corpse. The move backfires rather spectacularly, as Giles firebombs the Factory and manages to do some serious damage to Angel before the vampire gets the upper hand. Luckily, Buffy shows up and proceeds to pound on Angel, though she is forced to cut it short in order to save Giles from the fire.\n\nDirector Michael Gershman is also the series's director of photography. The first two seasons of Buffy were shot on super 16mm film stock.\n\n#### QUOTE OF THE WEEK:\n\nSpike, criticizing Angel's methods:\n\n\"You're supposed to kill her, not leave gag gifts in her friends' beds.\"\n\n#### LOVE, SLAYER STYLE:\n\nJenny has a few heartfelt conversations with Giles (\"I know you feel betrayed.\" \"Yes, well, that's one of the unpleasant side effects of betrayal\"), even admitting she loves him. Despite Buffy's anger at Jenny, the Slayer does encourage Jenny to try to reconcile with Giles, because he misses her, even if he won't admit it. Her death puts Giles in full \"Ripper\" mode.\n\nThe Angel-Drusilla-Spike triangle gets worse. Dru gets Spike a puppy that she names Sunshine, which makes Spike feel like he needs to be fed like a child, and Angel's jokes about Spike's wheelchair-bound condition grow crueler.\n\n#### POP-CULTURE IQ:\n\nXander, on Giles's course of action following Jenny's murder, referring to the title of a Russ Meyer movie:\n\n\"If Giles wants to go after the fiend that killed his girlfriend, I say, 'Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!' \"\n\n#### CONTINUITY:\n\nThe Slayerettes cast a spell that uninvites Angel from the Summers house (\"Angel\"), the Rosenberg house (\"Lie to Me\"), and Cordelia's car (\"Some Assembly Required\"). When Buffy warns her mother about Angel possibly coming around, Joyce remembers him as \"the college boy who's tutoring you in history\" (\"Angel\"). Using a computer program, Jenny manages to re-create the spell that originally cursed Angel (\"Angel,\" \"Surprise,\" \"Innocence\"), but the only copy is on a disk that falls between her desk and a cabinet, where it remains until \"Becoming, Part One.\" At the end of the episode, Willow becomes the substitute computer-science teacher, a post she winds up retaining for the balance of the school year (\"I Only Have Eyes for You,\" \"Go Fish,\" \"Becoming, Part One\"). The Factory, which has been vampire headquarters all season (\"When She Was Bad,\" etc.), is destroyed by Giles, which will lead Angel, Spike, and Drusilla to take up residence in the mansion (\"I Only Have Eyes for You\").\n\n#### FROM THE ORIGINAL TELEPLAY:\n\nDuring the sequence just after Jenny is killed, we hear Angel in voice-over while we watch through the window of Buffy's home as the phone rings and she and Willow learn of Jenny's death. What follows is the dialogue the viewer can't hear:\n\nWILLOW: \"So was it horrible?\" (referring to \"The Talk\" between Buffy and her mom)\n\nBUFFY: \"It wasn't too horrible.\" [phone rings] \"Hello?\"\n\nGILES (ON THE PHONE): \"Buffy?\"\n\nBUFFY: \"Giles! Hey, we finished the spe\u2014\"\n\nGILES (ON PHONE): \"Jenny . . . Ms. Calendar . . . she's been killed.\"\n\nBUFFY: \"What . . .?\"\n\nGILES (ON PHONE): \"It was Angel.\"\n\nBUFFY DROPS THE PHONE.\n\nWILLOW: \"Buffy?\" [She picks up the phone] \"Giles?\"\n\nGILES (ON PHONE): \"Willow. Angel's killed Jenny.\"\n\nWILLOW: \"What? No . . . oh . . . no . . .\"\n\nJOYCE: \"Willow! My God, Buffy! What's wrong? Has something happened?\"\n\n### Becoming, Part One\n\nEpisode 2.21\n\nWRITTEN AND DIRECTED BY: Joss Whedon\n\nGUEST STARS: Seth Green as Oz, Kristine Sutherland as Joyce Summers, Max Perlich as Whistler, Bianca Lawson as Kendra, Julie Benz as Darla, James Marsters as Spike, Juliet Landau as Drusilla, Armin Shimerman as Principal Snyder\n\nWITH: Richard Riehle as Merrick, Jack McGee as Doug Perren, Nina Gervitz as Teacher\n\n#### THE PLOT THICKENS:\n\nThe construction of a new housing project has unearthed the sarcophagus of Acathla, a demon that was turned to stone by a knight. Angel makes off with the sarcophagus and wishes to use the demon to bring about Hell on Earth, destroying everything. Meanwhile, Buffy and Willow discover the backup disk that Jenny Calendar had made with the translation of the spell to restore Angel's soul. Though Xander thinks re-cursing Angel is a mistake and Giles thinks Willow isn't ready to channel that kind of magick, Willow prepares to cast the spell.\n\nKendra reappears with the sword blessed by the knight who imprisoned Acathla, and a warning from her Watcher that something awful is about to happen. Angel's first attempt to make that something awful happen fails, and so he lures Buffy away from the library so Drusilla can lead a raiding party to kidnap Giles. That raid leaves Willow comatose with a nasty head injury, Xander with a broken wrist, Giles kidnapped, and Kendra slaughtered. Buffy returns to the library just in time for Kendra's dying breath\u2014and the arrival of the cops, accusing her of the murder.\n\n#### QUOTE OF THE WEEK:\n\nSpike, less than impressed with Acathla's sarcophagus:\n\n\"It's a big rock. I can't wait to tell my friends. They don't have a rock this big.\"\n\n#### LOVE, SLAYER STYLE:\n\nIn one of the episode's many flashbacks, Angel gets his first look at Buffy when Merrick first tells her she is the Chosen One, and it's obviously love at first sight.\n\n#### BUFFY'S BAG OF TRICKS:\n\nShe is given a sword by Kendra to stop the demon, and Kendra also gives Buffy her favorite stake, which she has named \"Mr. Pointy.\"\n\n#### POP-CULTURE IQ:\n\nBuffy mispronounces Acathla as \"Alfalfa\" (likely referring to the Little Rascals character) and \"Al Franken\" (referring to the comedian\/writer\/actor\/politician).\n\n#### CONTINUITY:\n\nThis episode is festooned with flashbacks that detail important events in the lives of the characters: Darla turning Angel into a vampire (\"Angel\"), Angel torturing Drusilla (\"Lie to Me\"), Angel being cursed by the Romany people (\"Angel,\" \"Surprise,\" \"Innocence\"), and Buffy's first learning that she is the Slayer (\"Welcome to the Hellmouth\"). The disk with the spell to restore Angel's soul is rediscovered (\"Passion\"), though Willow's attempt to cast it is interrupted; her next chance comes in \"Becoming, Part Two.\" Angel's diversion of Buffy to get at the Slayerettes mirrors the similar stunt executed by the Anointed One and Absalom in \"When She Was Bad,\" of which Angel reminds Buffy.\n\n#### FROM THE ORIGINAL TELEPLAY:\n\nThe following line was cut from the script for length:\n\nWHISTLER: \"There are three kinds of people that no one understands: geniuses, madmen, and guys that mumble.\"\n\n### Becoming, Part Two\n\nEpisode 2.22\n\nWRITTEN AND DIRECTED BY: Joss Whedon\n\nGUEST STARS: Seth Green as Oz, Kristine Sutherland as Joyce Summers, Robia LaMorte as Jenny Calendar, Max Perlich as Whistler, James Marsters as Spike, Juliet Landau as Drusilla, Armin Shimerman as Principal Snyder\n\n#### THE PLOT THICKENS:\n\nBuffy runs from the cops before they can mistakenly arrest her for Kendra's murder. She later goes to the hospital to learn that Xander's wrist is broken but fine and Willow's still in a coma. Whistler shows up and tells Buffy she has to know how to use the sword, but his importuning falls on frustrated ears. Spike then approaches Buffy with a proposal: a temporary alliance against Angel in exchange for Spike and Drusilla's being allowed to leave Sunnydale. Reluctantly, Buffy agrees. Meanwhile, Willow awakens from her coma and insists on trying to cast the spell again, and Angel is physically torturing Giles for information on how to awaken Acathla, which the librarian is handily resisting. However, Giles breaks when Drusilla creates the illusion of Jenny Calendar in his mind. Angel learns that his blood must be used to open the portal to Hell\u2014and, as Buffy learns from Whistler, only Angel's blood can subsequently close it. She goes to the mansion, determined to free Giles and kill Angel, and unaware\u2014through Xander's omission\u2014that Willow is attempting the ritual again. With Spike's help, she does fairly well, but Angel manages to open the portal anyhow. When the curse takes effect and Angel's soul is restored, Buffy realizes that she has to impale the man she loves and send him to Hell in order to close the gate. She does so, and then departs from Sunnydale on a bus, leaving only a note for her mother.\n\nJoss Whedon's stage directions this time around included, \"Yes, it's sunrise. Sue me.\" Sunrises and sunsets are almost impossible to film because they are so brief and difficult to schedule, much less capture on film.\n\nExterior shots of the mansion were filmed in a residential neighborhood on a hill. The crew had to get special permission to drive a 6,000-pound crane on the street, and all filming had to be wrapped by 10 a.m. This is called the \"taillights at ten\" rule.\n\n#### QUOTE OF THE WEEK:\n\nAngel, describing Giles's immediate future:\n\n\"I want to torture you. I used to love it, and it's been a long time. I mean, the last time I tortured someone, they didn't even have chain saws.\"\n\n#### LOVE, SLAYER STYLE:\n\nXander admits he loves Willow just before she awakens from her coma\u2014so, naturally, the first thing she does upon awakening is call for Oz. Drusilla is able to use Giles's grief over Jenny Calendar's death to her and Angel's benefit. The re-souled Angel and Buffy exchange a passionate kiss and declare their love for each other right before she is forced to stab him.\n\nThe Factory set was torn down to make room for the mansion set on a Buffy soundstage.\n\n#### BUFFY'S BAG OF TRICKS:\n\nShe uses the sword Kendra brought for her.\n\n#### CONTINUITY:\n\nThe police talk to Joyce regarding Buffy's possible involvement in Kendra's death, referring to her history of violence. After a vampire attacks Joyce, Buffy is forced to finally tell her mother that she is the Slayer\u2014a concept Joyce has understandable problems facing. When Joyce asks Spike if they know each other, Spike reminds her that she hit him with an ax (\"School Hard\"). Spike's speech on how much he likes the world and doesn't want to destroy it (\"Billions of people walking around like Happy Meals with legs\") belies his actions with the Judge in \"Surprise\" and \"Innocence.\" Buffy is expelled by Snyder, making Buffy two-for-two regarding high schools (\"Welcome to the Hellmouth\"). More hints regarding the apparent conspiracy among the authorities in Sunnydale are dropped via a phone call Snyder makes to the Mayor (\"School Hard,\" \"I Only Have Eyes for You\"). Spike and Dru leave Sunnydale the way they came in: driving in a fast car (\"School Hard\"). Again Angel is cursed with a soul (\"Angel,\" \"Surprise,\" \"Innocence,\" \"Becoming, Part Two\"), but Buffy has to send him to Hell regardless.\n\nTo put himself in an \"agonizing\" frame of mind, Tony Head chopped chili peppers into small bits and popped them into his mouth before every take of Giles's torture scene.\n\n## CATCHING UP WITH THE CAST AND CREW\n\n### JAMES MARSTERS (SPIKE)\n\nYou've got a new Web series called Vidiots. What is it, how was it born, and what kind of feedback are you getting?\n\nJAMES: \"Vidiots is the story of two fools who travel the world, one of whom is named James Marsters. They travel first class, stay in four-star hotels, live the celebrity rock-and-roll lifestyle, have fans, make films and television, and perform rock concerts, but all they really want to do is get back to the hotel and play video games.\n\n\"I travel with a man named Mark Devine, who helps me with my table at conventions, and at the end of a long day, we like to go and play video games. Mark is the funniest man I know. He is also really horrible at video games\u2014he just gets slaughtered. He constantly has me in stitches when we play together. He cracks great jokes, but then his reaction to defeat is fabulous. I thought it would be great to film this happening, because there are a lot of Web shows about gaming, where the person is a great gamer\u2014which always makes me feel like less than a great gamer\u2014and they try humor. They may be great gamers, but they fail at comedy.\n\n\"So I thought it would be kinda fun to flip that on its head and be terrible at gaming, but really good at comedy. So we started filming this and it was going really well. We were playing Assassin's Creed: Unity in Paris and the game is set in Paris. We had the curtains drawn on a beautiful spring day, and we were playing this video game, and I said to Mark, 'We're idiots. We're pretending to be in Paris, but we're actually here. We should turn the video game off and go look at the actual city.'\n\n\"Those two ideas made the show, this combination of An Idiot Abroad with funny video gaming. I don't know if you know the series An Idiot Abroad with Karl Pilkington and Ricky Gervais, but it's a really funny show. Vidiots is just two stupid Americans, walking around the world, really a lot going over their heads, and then watching them video game. And then also the 'backstage with the celebrities' element.\n\n\"The reaction we have been getting has been outstanding\u2014 people are loving it. And the most important one was my wife, who actually said, and I quote, 'I know I have said in the past that you play too many video games. I was wrong.' That makes the whole endeavor worthwhile right there.\"\n\nLooking back now, what stands out to you about the process of being cast as Spike, your audition or your first look at the script, or both?\n\nJAMES: \"I was in a new relationship, and I was feeling very sexy. That part of the relationship was going really well. My confidence level was sky high. I think that played a large part. Also, at that time I was a very proud stage actor who had no respect for film acting whatsoever. Which I think also helped. I remember doing Shakespeare monologues in the audition room in front of the other actors in order to shove in their faces that they were in the presence of a 'real actor,' and I was sure that they would quail in the face of my ability. It took me a couple of years in Hollywood to realize that almost all the tools that I had learned from stage acting didn't apply in any way to film. All I was probably doing in that audition room was proving myself to be insane in front of the other actors. I wasn't actually intimidating anyone.\"\n\nBut it worked.\n\nJAMES: \"It worked because I was confident, I was cocky, so I was really in character by the time I walked into that room.\"\n\nAt some point you had to realize just how crazy the fans were about Spike. Do you remember when you became aware that the character was really working?\n\nJAMES: \"I remember recognizing that the character was working for myself. I've done a lot of characters, and sometimes you feel like, This is kinda working. This is okay, but there are other times when you think, This one is really clicking. This one kicks ass. And I remember Spike being one of those characters that from the very first scene I played I thought, Holy crap, this is really working well, and when I saw the first episode, I said, 'Yep, I knew it. This is kicking ass.' That's on a personal level or an artistic level. At that point, I would've been very surprised if the character hadn't been really popular. That sounds like more cockiness, but it's not. I've produced a lot of plays and I've directed plays, and you can be sitting there on opening night thinking, This one's gonna hit. This is gonna get great reviews. You're watching it, and you just know.\"\n\nAt some point you began to attend conventions and you must have recognized that Spike was as popular or even more popular than some of the core characters.\n\nJAMES: \"I remember going to the Posting Board Party (thrown by the people who ran the Buffy forum The Bronze). The first one I attended was at the American Legion Hall in Los Angeles, and it was insane. There was so much excitement in the room that I was afraid for my safety. I had been in a situation like that once before, when I was seventeen, and people were surrounding me and people were trying to rip at my clothes to get a piece for themselves.\"\n\nWhat were you doing at seventeen that caused people to tear your clothes off?\n\nJAMES: \"It was a production of Godspell for the International Thespian Society convention, which happens every two years at Ball State in Muncie, Indiana. Every two years all the drama nerds from around the country congregate in Indiana. There are, like, two thousand high school drama nerds who go there, and they cast a play from around the country to perform only at the conference. That year it was Godspell, and they cast me as Jesus. In high school circles it's a big deal to be in that. You do one performance in front of two thousand people and that's it. Within the confines of Ball State University, I was like Justin Bieber at his height. It was a madhouse, and I had to have security\u2014the whole cast, we had to have security at all times. People would break into our living quarters and steal stuff. People would bust into bathrooms and try to look at our junk. We had to eat separately, and after the show was performed, the audience just swarmed onto the stage before we could get off, and I remember being surrounded and people were trying to rip at my costume to get a piece of it. . . . It was the strangest thing.\"\n\nThen you moved from that, in which there are a finite number of people who could possibly recognize you from that performance, to being on television every week, where it's shown all over the world. There's nowhere to go, at that point, where you might not be recognized anywhere, at any time. How did your life change when it really happened, when that celebrity really hit?\n\nJAMES: \"I hid from the world. I was not comfortable with that level of fame at all. After the Godspell experience, I remember thinking, Well, I guess I'm glad that happened, because now I know I'm not really into that level of fame. I don't really want to chase that, so I'm going to do stage, where there's a smaller audience and the excitement level is a little more subdued. And now I know that I don't want to go to Los Angeles. And I had many good years. It was great because you'd be out jogging or walking around and someone would stop you and say, 'Oh, Mr. Marsters, I saw your Macbeth last night, very nice,' and you'd say thank you, and you'd go on your way. And it felt really good. That was the level of fame that I enjoyed. I came to Los Angeles because I had a son and I had to actually make money, which they don't have a lot of in theater. I came down here for diaper money, not expecting at all to get famous. I thought I was going to do a couple of guest spots, get a little chunk of change in the bank account, and that'd be it. And then I met Joss Whedon and everything just exploded.\n\n\"So I hid, but the problem was I had white-blond hair, which is like a neon bulb, and it just draws the eye. When I was out on the street every eyeball just got visually pulled to the freak in the white hair. And if you look for more than a few seconds and you've ever seen the show, then you know 'Oh, that's the guy from Buffy.' It was usually between five and fifteen seconds that I had on a sidewalk anywhere in the world, then I had to get away from that sidewalk or a crowd would form and just get bigger and bigger, and it wouldn't stop. There was no way I could meet everyone and get everyone satisfied and just move on. It would continue to grow. It was a low-grade panic for me.\n\n\"I remember I was dating a girl and I constantly wanted to take her back to my apartment, and she was like, 'I don't want to go to your apartment, masher!' And I kept explaining to her that I couldn't just walk around the streets of Santa Monica. I couldn't just hang out and go to a restaurant or something. 'I'm not really comfortable out in public right now. I'm not really relaxed, you know, so if we could just go back to my place, I could have a good evening.' Ultimately I think we broke up over that\u2014she thought I was just trying to get on to second base.\n\n\"The thing that happened was I did a TV movie with Roger Daltrey, who was the lead singer of The Who, and he taught me how to be famous.\"\n\nWhat does that mean? How did he teach you how to be famous?\n\nJAMES: \"He described himself as a worm farmer. He said, 'I used to be a rock star, but now I farm worms for silk.' The world still thinks of him as a rock god. We were shooting a project called Strange Frequencies, where he played the devil and I played a guitarist. We'd be out on location filming and people would just be coming up to him constantly, saying, 'Oh my God, it's Roger Daltrey. Can I have a picture? Oh my God, can I have an autograph?' And he would be talking to me about worms, and he would graciously turn to the person, give them the picture, give them the autograph, and then move on. He had a very gracious way of letting them know that's over now, and he'd turn back to me and have his conversation. He had integrated this into the rhythm of his life. He wasn't running from it, he wasn't ashamed of it, he wasn't angry about it. He was having fun with it, but it wasn't feeding his ego either. And watching him do that, I thought, That's how you do it. He told me, 'It's not going to go away, so you can choose to take it seriously\u2014which will make you an egotistical jerk\u2014or you can choose to be afraid of it\u2014which will make you unhappy\u2014or you can just say, \"This is part of my life,\" and it is kind of weird and fun, but it's not all of what you are.' \"\n\nObviously the popularity and longevity of Spike going from a one-off to a recurring character to a regular on Buffy to a regular on Angel is a testament to your abilities as an actor, but it seemed that the funnier Spike became, the more popular he became.\n\nJAMES: \"I think you're absolutely right. If you're a character in Joss Whedon's world, if you want to last, you'd better be funny. People are funny in real life. People are humiliated, and they are afraid, and they are silly. Every human is, and I think Joss sees that. And I think that if you want to live in his world, you have to be able to reflect that. I remember he walked up to me at one point and said, 'James, you're funny! I didn't know how funny\u2014you're, like, Emma Caulfield funny,' and I knew that meant that he thought that I was really, really funny. If he thought you were 'Emma Caulfield funny,' you had arrived.\"\n\nWere there other factors you think contributed to Spike's longevity?\n\nJAMES: \"I think the principal one is that evil is not cool to Joss Whedon. I don't think evil is cool in real life\u2014I think evil is pathetic, pitiful, and I think that Joss sees it that way too. Hollywood quite often does a disservice by making evil look cool. It works for a story to make the villain cool, and everyone likes a villain that you love to hate, but it sets up a strange message sometimes. So in Joss's world on Buffy, vampires were not supposed to be sexy. They were not supposed to be cool. They were supposed to be metaphors for the challenges that you meet when you're a teenager. So we were supposed to be ugly and very quickly killed off. That's why he had us 'vamp out' when we bit someone, because he didn't want it to be sensual at all; he wanted it to be horrific. He got talked into one sexy vampire by his writing partner David Greenwalt, and that was Angel. It was not his idea\u2014that wasn't an original part of his vision for the show, but he got talked into it, and Angel took off like a rocket ship. Which is not surprising, because the audience wants that sexy vampire. There's a hunger for it whenever you do a vampire show, so he was satisfying that. And he told David, 'Okay, I gave you Angel, but that's the only one. We're not doing any more than that. We're gonna keep to my theme.' But for whatever reason the audience perceived Spike as a romantic character even though Joss very much did not. I was supposed to be a dirty, skanky, punk-rock character that Angel was gonna kill so that he'd look cooler. So for a long time Angel and I were the only two sexy vampires, and we were filling a need that Joss was denying the audience everywhere else on the show. I think that's a big part of the character's success.\n\n\"I think that both Joss and I are by nature subversive artists. I produced a lot of theater that was subversive. I really enjoy subversive art; it's my favorite stuff. Subversion, by the way, is not trying to make people feel upset or uncomfortable, but that often happens if it's working. Subversion is all about divesting the audience of lies they get taught in childhood. Some of these lies are things like violence works, old people are boring, you can buy yourself identity. Buffy was subverting the idea that females can't defend themselves. Another part of subversion is undercutting the powerful. Because the truth is that all human beings are equal, but in society we don't treat each other that way. So when a subversive sees a powerful institution or a powerful person there's a real instinct to even the playing field, to rip the powerful down somehow.\n\n\"That's where, artistically speaking, both Joss and I live. So in some way he got a great mouthpiece for his style because I instinctually understand what he's doing and I really like it. He hired a real original punk rocker to play a punk-rock vampire. You know, when he told me he wanted the Sid Vicious of the vampire set I told him, 'No, you don't. You don't want Sid; you want Johnny Rotten.'\n\n\"Sid was an idiot\u2014he really was. He was not a smart man; he was not a talented musician\u2014I'm not saying he was a bad person, but he was not a force of nature in any way. He didn't play on the one album that the Sex Pistols recorded. He pretty much ruined the tour because he was not a good musician. If Sid had played on the album, it would not have been a hit. Johnny Lydon, on the other hand\u2014Johnny Rotten\u2014is a frickin' genius. If you see any interviews with him, he is a maniacal, fiery subversive, and howlingly funny, and he was always the Sex Pistol that I was drawn to.\"\n\nSpeaking of musicians, you've been traveling the world for years as an actor, but also performing music that whole time, both with Ghost of the Robot and as a solo performer. So are you an actor moonlighting as a musician or a musician moonlighting as an actor?\n\nJAMES: \"Ha-ha! I don't have to choose! I'm having my cake, and I get to eat it at the same time.\"\n\nYou're also a writer. Do you have any writing projects in the works?\n\nJAMES: \"I love to sit down at a keyboard and try to arrange words in a way that they have an effect, and it is delicious when I can read something back that I'm working on and it seems like the engine is starting to hum. There's a joy that I have when I'm doing that. I am not an experienced writer. I've had a few little successes with it, but I love it.\n\n\"I was working on a Web series about an alien getting stranded on Earth\u2014this idea that the alien really could be\u2014he could be the mouthpiece for this thing that I feel, that as human beings we are so close to saving ourselves, that technologically speaking we are so close to Star Trek. We could do it; we could fix all the problems that we have. There are just a couple of pieces of research and development that if we got, we could heal the planet and march toward a great future, and we should not give up. We should not lose hope; we should not fall into despair in any way. It would be so tragic if we don't turn the corner because we're so close. And I would love for an alien to say that: 'Wait a minute, if you don't do it now, it'd be like quitting college on the last day before you get your diploma. You're so close.'\n\n\"I'm also working on helping to adapt the Shakespeare play Macbeth into a TV series that would be a western. I'm not usually a fan of doing Shakespeare in any way except exactly the way Shakespeare wanted to do it, but the idea these people came up with about exactly where to set it really excited me.\"\n\nWith all the time that has gone by, what behind-the-scenes memories really stand out to you from your time as Spike?\n\nJAMES: \"I remember the dichotomy of what was on-screen and what was happening on the day we shot the scene where Sarah and I finally get into it, and we are so passionate that we knock down a house around us. A lot of people remember that scene; it's one of the scenes that people like to talk about. The truth is that while we were filming that, we were worried if our stunt coordinator was alive or not. In the beginning of that scene, Spike jumps onto a chandelier and kicks Buffy in the face. In order to get that shot, they needed to make a chandelier that wouldn't sway very much while that gag happened. And to do that they had to make it extremely heavy, heavier than the human body. For the shot they wanted, it had to remain fairly still. And I remember talking to Jeff Pruitt, the stunt coordinator, saying, 'Hey, I'd like to do that gag. That's a pretty simple gag, I wouldn't mind doing that myself.' And I remember Jeff being very specific in saying, 'James, no\u2014the chandelier is really heavy, and it's a little dicier than that.' I remember being kind of frustrated.\n\n\"So Jeff doubled me, put on the coat and the hair and everything. He did the gag, and the worst thing in the world happened: the chain broke. As he had his legs up at the apex of the kick, the chandelier released from the ceiling. It was concentric circles of metal that came down to a point\u2014and the point landed on his face. They carried him to the hospital, and the entire time that we were shooting the scene, we didn't know if he was alive or dead. The moment the scene was over the entire company\u2014cast and crew\u2014invaded the hospital to check on Jeff. And Jeff is a stuntman, so when we get to the hospital, his whole head is bandaged, and he's like, 'Hey, guys! What's up! Man, that sucked.' He was back to work in record time, a month or something like that.\n\n\"I also remember trying to get off the set without letting people know how badly I'd hurt myself when I wanted to do the fire gag. I was only in one episode in season four, and I asked to do the gag where Spike's hand is lit on fire by the sunshine. It's a funny little scene. He falls asleep drunk because he's heartbroken, but he falls asleep outside and he's only woken up because the sun is lighting him on fire, and it's kind of funny. They had designed it so the stuntman's arm would be in the shot for the close-up of Spike's face when he wakes up and sees his hand is on fire. I asked Jeff if I could have that stunt, and he said, 'Well, James, you know that is one of the most dangerous gags in Hollywood because it's an unprotected fire gag. Usually when we do fire gags, it's on top of clothing so you can have a protected suit under your clothes, and you also have the clothes as protection, so it's really the clothes burning, not you, but in this instance it's just the skin, dude, so we dunk the hand in a protective gel and then we dunk the hand in the fuel and then we light you on fire. And the thing is, the protective gel is burning off really fast so the timing is crucial.' And I kept pressing for it. I really wanted that gag. I think they only relented because I was only in one episode that year, and they didn't have any plans to have me back for more. And so they let me light myself on fire.\n\n\"I'm not a professional stuntman. I'm an actor and I'm a fool, so I decided that the longer it took Spike to realize that he was on fire, waking up from being asleep, the funnier it would be. If you just had that moment where Spike was awake being like, 'Oh, wow, fire. That's beautiful. What a nice little image\u2014OH, FIRE! . . .' That is hilarious. So I let the gag go on. It's supposed to be a four-second gag, and I let it go for eight. And that was all the difference in the world. I remember going off the set and it's starting to hurt, getting into my trailer and it's hurting a lot, getting into my street clothes and it's starting to blister, and then trying to walk to my car and trying to smile to people who were saying good-bye, because they were saying good-bye forever, really. 'James, love you, good-bye!' And I'm just thinking, Don't tell the set medic that you've hurt yourself, just go straight to the hospital, because if they find out that you blew this gag so bad, they're never gonna trust you; if you ever get back on the show, they'll never let you do another gag at all. And I did it. I made it. I drove to the hospital with, like, . . . eighteen quarter-size blisters on my forearm. It was really pretty gross.\"\n\nDid you ever tell Joss that story?\n\nJAMES: \"No! Hell no!\"\n\nEveryone says working on a long-running TV series is a lot like a high school. You have your circles of friends, and there are always people you wish you could've hung out with more once you've graduated. So who do you wish you'd hung out with more?\n\nJAMES: \"Charisma Carpenter. I had assumed she was like her character on Buffy\u2014I thought she was that cheerleader who brutalized me in high school. So I was not interested in getting to know her at all, and I avoided her like the plague, and what I didn't realize was that she was just a phenomenally good actor. Years later I was shooting . . . Supernatural, and we were playing husband and wife, and I finally got to know her and realized what a sweetheart she is. We spent the day talking about our kids\u2014and I remember thinking, My God. She's one of the nicest people in the entire cast, and I thought she was so mean and I never got to know her. I think she'd be the one that I'd regret not having gotten to know better.\n\n\"At the same time I think it was only in season two where we were in the same cast, because by the time I was on Buffy, she was over doing Angel, and by the time I was on Angel, she wasn't there anymore. Actually, the reason why I got on to the show, both shows, was that I was her replacement. I was the new Cordelia on Buffy. I was the character that was supposed to tell Buffy that she was stupid and we were all gonna die. And I think that's kind of why I ended up on Angel.\"\n\nI'm sure that when you've had encounters with fans at conventions and things, you've had some uncomfortable things happen, but what are the best ones? What sticks with you?\n\nJAMES: \"I have met the most interesting people. I met a person who helped design the Mars rover. That's still up there doing science on Mars as we speak. I met four other people who work at NASA. I've met people who've worked for the NSA, CIA, the State Department, many physicists\u2014I'm a science fan, so I remember those jobs. And every time I go out and meet fans I meet at least one person with a job that I wish I could do.\n\n\"I love it when someone tells me how Buffy was the thing that brought their family together in some way. People will say, 'That's the thing that I had with my mom\u2014we watched Buffy.' I love when you see a twelve- or thirteen-year-old girl who is discovering Buffy for the very first time and you can see in her eyes that she is getting empowered by that. It's really wonderful. That is an age where girls start to get put into the vise of our culture, and [there is] the expectation of being a Barbie doll, the expectation of not being sexual, or the shame that comes with sexuality. There's a lot of stuff that can be crushing to young females, and a lot of them go a little crazy when they wake up and childhood ends and they're twelve or thirteen years old. It's not a good time for girls. And to have a show that is pushing back against that really hard is a glorious thing.\"\n\nYou've worked in all sorts of film and TV projects in the years since Buffy and Angel, including Hawaii Five-0, Without a Trace, Torchwood, and Smallville. What's been your favorite post-Spike role?\n\nJAMES: \"A high point was playing Buzz Aldrin in a movie called Moonshot that you can get on iTunes. That was a really hard shoot. The director explained that he wanted to do a movie that showed what a difficult mission that was. These people were fighter pilots, and they always radio back to NASA so calmly that it appears that it's just a cakewalk to get to the moon, but it really wasn't. It was really uncomfortable and really dangerous and they only gave them a 50 percent chance of survival, and they went. Like the LEM\u2014the lunar excursion module\u2014the walls of that vehicle were only as thick as three pieces of aluminum foil. If they had stepped the wrong way, it would have blown the vehicle apart. It would have depressurized and destroyed them. When Buzz and Neil landed on the moon, their computers were freaking out, and Neil Armstrong had to take over control of the vehicle and land it manually, which was not part of the mission. When they landed, they only had a handful of seconds of fuel remaining. And when they went to press the blast-off button\u2014the engine-ascent button to leave the moon\u2014it wasn't working. They had to figure out how to fix that button, and they ended up doing it with a felt-tip pen. It was really fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants Lewis-and-Clark stuff. The director said that whenever they've shown the capsule in these movies about Apollo, it's always a spacious capsule. It looks like Star Trek because they have to fit a big camera in there. For the first time, we were doing it with digital cameras\u2014they can be as little as a ChapStick, some of these cameras\u2014so they built this set to the exact specifications of NASA. It was a very cramped, difficult shoot, but when NASA saw it, they said it finally looked like the mission, which was cool.\n\n\"Torchwood was also a high point because Torchwood is a subversive show. It was done by Russell T. Davies, who is also a Buffy fan. He reawakened the whole Doctor Who franchise. Without him we wouldn't have the modern Doctor Who. But he said that Torchwood was his Buffy. It took me a long time to realize what he meant was that Torchwood was a subversive show. Buffy was subverting the idea that women can't defend themselves, and Torchwood was subverting the idea that gay people can't be heroes or that LGBT people can't be heroes.\"\n\n### JULIET LANDAU (DRUSILLA)\n\nYou've established yourself as a documentarian in recent years, beginning with Take Flight, a documentary focused on Gary Oldman, and now with A Place Among the Dead and A Place Among the Undead. What prompted the first foray into the medium?\n\nJULIET: \"Yes, my directorial debut was Take Flight, a documentary about Gary Oldman's creative process. That was the first time I worked with Gary, and we had a lot of fun! It started as a behind-the-scenes 'making of' and developed from there. Next my husband, Deverill, and I co-directed Dream Out Loud, about makeup artist Kazuhiro Tsuji, who was branching into the world of fine art. The film captured one of his creations from inception to culmination. It showcased interviews with Guillermo del Toro, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, and Rian Johnson.\n\n\"Currently, Dev and I are co-directing A Place Among the Undead and A Place Among the Dead. We are doing something very special with these projects . . . making film history. A Place Among the Undead is the definitive docuseries on vampires, featuring previously untapped intimate conversations and insights from the top of the A-list, between one person who has earned her place among the undead\u2014me\u2014journeying into the minds of our pop-culture icons and innovators, who have never been gathered together to discuss their place among the undead. So far we have interviewed Joss Whedon, Tim Burton, Gary Oldman, Willem Dafoe, Anne Rice, Ron Perlman, and Charlaine Harris, among many others\u2014including you, Christopher! We probe our deep-seated need for vampires and how they help us look at different aspects of ourselves: sex, loss, death, violence, addiction, obsession, the dark side of our natures, [and] being outsiders, to name a few. Each episode culminates in a five- to fifteen-minute film, which explores one of these metaphors. It is exciting to be writing and directing narrative content as well. While making the series, we discovered an underbelly, true-crime stories, in which people have taken the fantasy of vampirism too far. We profile one such case in the feature-length [project] A Place Among the Dead.\"\n\nWhat's the status of when folks will be able to see the finished product of both of those projects, and what have been your favorite moments from this odyssey?\n\nJULIET: \"They have continued to grow beyond our wildest expectations. Undead started as a feature, but so many people have come aboard that the project developed into a series. Some of the new interviewees include Lance Henriksen (Near Dark, Aliens, Millennium), Nathan Fillion (Dracula 2000, Buffy, Castle), Kristin Bauer van Straten (Pam from True Blood), David Slade (director of The Twilight Saga: Eclipse, 30 Days of Night), Kevin Grevioux (creator of the Underworld franchise), Marv Wolfman (creator of Tomb of Dracula and Blade), Lara Parker (original Dark Shadows TV series), Kathryn Leigh Scott (original Dark Shadows TV series), Gary Shore (director of the Universal blockbuster Dracula Untold), and Christian Kane (Angel). We are creating a companion book called Book of the Undead. Deverill has been shooting the stills for it along with Gary Oldman, who has been shooting tintype portraits of our Undead interviewees on his camera from 1853. We are still fund-raising and shooting, so it's looking like [the end of 2017] for the release of both projects.\"\n\nHave you always been fascinated by vampires and the supernatural, or was this something that sprang from playing such an iconic vampire yourself?\n\nJULIET: \"It started when I was on the Buffy set and continued from there. Whenever I have hung out with creators, writers, directors, artists, and actors who have played in the vampire universe, we have had the best conversations. There is a real camaraderie amongst us.\"\n\nYou come from what many would consider geek royalty, and with your work in video game and animation voice-over added to your time as Drusilla on both Buffy and Angel, you're an indelible part of our pop culture. But what are you a geek about?\n\nJULIET: \"I'm not really a geek in the classic sense of the word, but I'm kind of a geek about work. I am a perfectionist, although I have eased off of trying to make things perfect and just try to do them to the best of my ability. I obsess on every detail . . . whether it is performance, editing, sound design, score, color correction. I push myself and our team to go beyond the work we have done before. . . . My sound editor nicknamed me 'Kubrick,' but as far as I am concerned, there are worse things than being likened to one of the best filmmakers!\"\n\nThe first time I met you was on the set of Buffy. I interviewed you between scenes for the first Watcher's Guide, and while we talked, you kept up some of Drusilla's mannerisms, including hand gestures and some of her vocal cadence. Were you sticking with method and staying in character, or did you just like to freak people out?\n\nJULIET: \"Oh, that's funny! I don't think it was either! Sometimes James and I would keep the Spike and Dru dialects because it made it easier not to have to think about it at all. But as far as mannerisms and gestures, maybe it was leftover residue from the work. I hope I didn't freak you out too much!\"\n\nYou've had all sorts of roles in your career, both on camera and voicing animation. Aside from Drusilla, what has been your favorite? And which role would you hope Buffy fans would track down and watch, if they haven't seen it?\n\nJULIET: \"I have been so fortunate getting to play a diverse range of characters. I loved playing Loretta King in Ed Wood. It was my first big movie and working with Tim Burton was brilliant. The role I am working on whenever I am asked tends to become my favorite at that time! For me the exploration phase is what I love best. I did an episode of La Femme Nikita, directed by Joel Surnow, who created 24, in which I played two characters. It was an actor's dream! I loved voicing Tala in Justice League Unlimited and the Little Sisters in Bioshock. I just recorded an animated feature for DC, which I am excited about but can't talk about yet! Two of my favorite roles ever were onstage . . . Roberta in Danny and the Deep Blue Sea and Blanche in A Streetcar Named Desire. See . . . I told you it was hard to pick!\"\n\nYou have a theater background. How has theater been a part of your life both before and after Drusilla, and do you have plans to return to the stage?\n\nJULIET: \"I love doing theater. It has been a huge part of my career. Dev and I produced Danny and the Deep Blue Sea in Los Angeles a few years ago. We were supposed to run for six weeks but kept getting extended and ran for six months. We got twelve out of twelve rave reviews, including the Los Angeles Times Critics' Pick and multiple awards. I don't have plans at the moment for a stage production, because of the time commitment and scope of our two current projects, but I will absolutely be returning to the stage.\"\n\nLooking back now, what stands out to you about the process of being cast as Drusilla\u2014about the audition or your first look at the script, or both?\n\nJULIET: \"I never auditioned for the role. Joss had seen me in Ed Wood and another movie. I had read a few pages before going in for a meeting, which was the scene with the Anointed One. I went in and had the most amazing creative meeting with Joss, David Greenwalt, Gail Berman, and Marcia Shulman, who was the head of casting at Fox. Joss said the character could be British or American. I remember saying, 'She has to be English!' and then I did a little of Dru. I wafted up to the ceiling and talked to it in what became Dru's singsong cadence. He said if they could find an actor who could play Spike [as] British, it would be so. He explained that he'd had Drusilla and Spike running around in his head for ten years! The meeting was a free-form conversation and very inspiring. My cell phone rang before I had even reached my car in the parking lot. It was my agent saying they wanted to hire me. I couldn't wait to get on set to work with Joss and the gang!\"\n\nDid you have any idea after that first episode that Drusilla would be back or that she'd come to play a pivotal role in the series?\n\nJULIET: \"Yes. They weren't sure the number of episodes, but they told me in that initial meeting that Drusilla would be throughout season two. I think it developed past that as we went along.\"\n\nI'm sure you get recognized on the street. How did your life change once Drusilla became part of pop culture?\n\nJULIET: \"It is extraordinary when people respond deeply to a character which you have played. They often echo back to you the very elements you were imbuing the role with, and that is extremely rewarding and satisfying. Buffy, Angel, and the Whedonverse have such a phenomenal fan base. I think the main change is that I've gotten to meet so many varied and interesting people because of being a part of it.\"\n\nConventions and public appearances\u2014and just being in public\u2014must come with some pretty strange fan interactions. If you're willing to share . . . what are the best and worst fan moments you can remember?\n\nJULIET: \"Most Buffy and Angel fans are supremely smart and discerning. The shows were so intelligently conceived and written that the people who respond are very much in kind. I did have one fan run down the street screaming, 'Aaaaah, Drusilla!' as she went. I kept yelling, 'I'm an actress! I'm not a vampire!' But it was to no avail. Her bellows could be heard down the block. . . . And it was daylight, too! Sometimes people have tattoos done of your visage or your signature. I was at London Comic Con and a gal named Victoria Louise asked me to sign a picture: 'John, will you marry me?' I asked her if she was sure she wanted me to be in the middle of this intimate moment, and she said yes. As I was signing, she took out a ring box and so did he! He had been planning to propose at the very same moment! Buffy brought them together, and it was tremendously moving to be part of their special union. I am often touched by how many people say Buffy, Angel, and\/or Drusilla got them through a really hard time, like an illness or bullying\u2014all sorts of life challenges.\"\n\nIt's been a long time since Buffy. What are your favorite behind-the-scenes memories of your time on the show?\n\nJULIET: \"There are so many! Joss is a genius. It was a sensational group of people. On season two of Buffy, we got the scripts about a week ahead of time and we would sit down to table reads with all the cast. James, like me, has a theater background, so we'd get together and rehearse before shooting. We always came in rife with ideas, including blocking (where one moves in a scene) and it made the shoot days fluid and full of discovery, which can be unusual in television. Joss changed the genre with his vision and creativity, and he nourished and inspired us to bring our A-game to the set every day.\"\n\nEveryone says that working on a long-running TV series is a lot like high school, with circles of friends and then those people you wish you'd hung out with more. Who do you wish you'd hung out with more?\n\nJULIET: \"I got to hang out a lot with Joss, James, David, Julie, Sarah, Alyson, Nick, and Charisma, which was fabulous! I never thought of it like high school. . . . For me it was more like the run of a play, where you get to live with a character for a long time and learn new things. The difference in theater is that the text is the same, whereas in a series every episode is new, but in both, the understanding and the layers of the character deepen and grow.\"\n\nWhat are you working on now, and what does the future hold for Juliet Landau?\n\nJULIET: \"As discussed, I am co-directing A Place Among the Undead and A Place Among the Dead. I am starring in the narrative sections of Undead alongside many people's favorite performers. Dev and I are working on the Book of the Undead. I'm currently starring in a film on Netflix called Where the Road Runs Out, which I shot in Africa. I have a number of really cool projects brewing and a couple in the can, but I am not allowed to announce those yet!\"\n\n### CYNTHIA BERGSTROM (COSTUME DESIGN)\n\nYour first costuming job\u2014at least that I can find a record of\u2014was working in wardrobe for a Virginia Madsen movie called Zombie High. I need to see this film. What do you remember about that experience, and how did you get your first job on set?\n\nCYNTHIA: \"Yes, Zombie High was my first experience in film. I was friends with one of the producers. At the time I was working as a sales rep for a fashion line. My friend asked to use some of my samples for the film and brought me on board as the costume designer. It was a super-low-budget project and so much fun. I felt right at home and knew I had found my calling. I had no experience, yet everyone from each department filled me [in] on what a costume designer does beyond simply creating the look of the show. The accountant showed me how to devise a budget, the script supervisor showed me how to break down a script, the assistant directors filled me in on how to work with extras . . . and so on. I was also Virginia's stunt person. I recall being thrown across the room into a bookcase. I was then to get up and hit an older gentleman (a zombie) over the head with a balsa wood bat. Unfortunately, I was given the real bat and not the prop bat. . . . I'll never forget my horror when I realized the mistake when I heard the crack of the bat hitting his skull along with the shrill of his scream. The man was sent to the hospital. I believe he suffered a small concussion, yet was fine. Thank heavens I didn't have a very powerful swing!\"\n\nIn addition to an incredible run as costume designer on one hundred and ten episodes of Buffy, you also had long runs with series like Medium, Private Practice, and CSI: Miami. When we first met, and reading other interviews with you, it seemed obvious that your work helped define the characters on Buffy. I'm sure the degree to which that's possible, the freedom a costume designer has, must vary from job to job. How would you compare the experience on Buffy to others you've had?\n\nCYNTHIA: \"After I left Buffy, I soon came to realize that costuming Buffy was a unique experience. I was given a great deal of freedom, trust, and respect. Every show is different. It's a different group of people as well as a different concept. I found that each show has its own rhythm and way of uniting departments. Once that rhythm is found, then everything flows and all departments usually work together in a cohesive manner. After the first episode, I would again begin to see the same level of freedom, trust, and respect. I loved the other shows that I designed. The creative environment was different and that was okay. But Buffy was hugely creative\u2014it was fantasy and make-believe and traversed different realms. I loved imagining the fantastical. I loved building the costumes from imagination.\"\n\nWho was your favorite character to dress, and why?\n\nCYNTHIA: \"I am asked this question still to this day. It's a fan favorite. My answer is always the same. I loved dressing them all. Each character was so defined and individual. Each was an extension of my imagination and creativity. I loved it all and loved them all.\"\n\nAll these years later, do you have a favorite outfit from the series and a favorite moment when you knew your work on an episode really hit a home run?\n\nCYNTHIA: \"Episode six of season two. I think it was called 'The Wish.' I only know that because I recently moved. As I was unpacking boxes from storage, I found my old sketches from the show. I remember showing Sarah the sketch of the dress I designed for her. Her face was so precious and appreciative of the gorgeous gown that was being created for her. She was stunning in it. I recall that being a pinnacle moment in my evolution as a designer.\"\n\nSo much time has passed. What are your favorite behind-the-scenes memories of your time on Buffy?\n\nCYNTHIA: \"I loved it when the actors would come into the costume department and hang out just to chat. We had couches throughout the department where people could just come in and relax. I usually had my two dogs with me. The cast and our producer, Gareth Davies, would show up daily to play with the dogs. It was always so much fun and so joyful with lots of laughs, giggles, howling, and barking.\"\n\nEveryone says that working on a long-running TV series is a lot like high school, with circles of friends and then those people you wish you'd hung out with more. Who do you wish you'd hung out with more?\n\nCYNTHIA: \"That's a great question. In high school, I was a spirit leader, which meant at games and throughout the year, along with my co\u2013spirit leader, we would help to raise the morale and lift the spirits of others. I'm still doing this in life and most certainly did this on the set of Buffy. I was able to spend time with almost everyone in every department. I love getting to know people, seeing who they are and what makes them tick, and hopefully bring a little light into their lives.\"\n\nOverall, how would you characterize the influence of your time on Buffy on your life?\n\nCYNTHIA: \"Buffy was a great time in my life. It was a special group. We all had so much fun together. . . . We shared in each other's lives. We really cared about one another. Other shows were not like that. . . . There was caring; it was just different. On Buffy, we were creating something really special and unique. It wasn't always a bed of roses\u2014I mean, it was hard work, and, of course, with hard work and long hours, personalities get pushed to the brink. But we were family. I loved going to work every day . . . even the days I didn't love going to work.\"\n\nYou've taken a new path in your life and left costume design behind. What are you up to, and what does the future hold for Cynthia Bergstrom?\n\nCYNTHIA: \"Yes! I am complete with costume design. I left the business in 2014 after twenty-seven years. I went back to school to get my master's in spiritual psychology. I now work with highly motivated individuals who are seeking deeper meaning, purpose, joy, and fulfillment in their lives. I also recently discovered I have this amazing, powerful, and soulful singing voice. So I am singing professionally. I am writing two children's stories on spiritual transformation and have created workshops for adults on the same subject. Life is really good. My future is bright and, of course, as always, extremely creative.\"\n\n## SEASON 3\n\n### Lovers Walk\n\nEpisode 3.8\n\nArguments for the \"best season\" of Buffy the Vampire Slayer are unwinnable. Every fan is entitled to their own opinion. But if you were to make a list of the best twenty or so episodes of the series\u2014as we did\u2014it would be hard to argue with the position that season three contains more of those episodes than any other. Who can argue that \"Lovers Walk\" isn't a vital turning point, particularly for Spike? When\u2014at the end\u2014he mocks his own anguish along with the pain of the Scoobies, his comment isn't just one of the character's best lines, it's also a commentary on their drama: \"I may be love's bitch, but at least I'm man enough to admit it.\"\n\nWRITTEN BY: Dan Vebber\n\nDIRECTED BY: David Semel\n\nGUEST STARS: Kristine Sutherland as Joyce Summers, Harry Groener as Mayor Richard Wilkins III, James Marsters as Spike\n\nCO-STARS: Jack Plotnick as Deputy Mayor Allan Finch, Mark Burnham as Lenny, Suzanne Krull as Clerk\n\n#### THE PLOT THICKENS:\n\nXander comforts Willow, who is devastated by her self-perceived poor performance on the SATs. Buffy's unanticipated high scores are a shock to all, causing her to reevaluate her thoughts on her future. Cordelia points out that non-Hellmouth options are a good thing, asking, \"What kind of moron would want to come back here?\" Spike's drunken arrival answers that.\n\nSpike mopes for Drusilla in the abandoned factory. Cordelia, Xander, Willow, and Oz plan a double date for bowling. Cordy actually has photos of Xander in her locker, and Oz gifts Willow with a Pez candy-dispenser witch\u2014true love! Buffy shares Joyce's enthusiastic response to her high test scores with Giles, on his way to a retreat. He unexpectedly responds in the positive when Buffy mentions the idea of school outside of Sunnydale. Willow decides to solve her romantic dilemma of the secret trysts with Xander through an anti-love spell. Spike is in the magick shop looking for a curse to torment Angel; when Willow enters, he gets a better idea.\n\nThe Mayor authorizes Deputy Mayor Allan Finch to seek Mr. Trick's assistance in ridding Sunnydale of Spike. Angel endorses Buffy's tentative plan to leave Sunnydale, much to her chagrin. Willow tries to perform her de-lusting spell on an unknowing Xander, but he refuses to cooperate. Spike ends their debate by kidnapping both of them, knocking Xander unconscious, and informing Willow she is to perform a spell to draw Drusilla back to him\u2014or they're both dead, Xander first. She persuades him she can't possibly cast a successful spell without more ingredients and a spell book. Oz and Cordelia alert Buffy about Xander and Willow's disappearance; she sets them on the road to retrieve Giles and is phoning Joyce when she hears Spike greet Joyce on the other end of the line.\n\nJoyce is lending Spike a sympathetic ear when Angel spots them over their cocoa. Spike is so delighted by Angel's impotent attempts to convince Joyce to invite him in, he doesn't notice Buffy until she knocks him to the ground. While Joyce watches in confusion, Buffy invites Angel in and prepares to dust Spike, halting only when he reveals he is holding hostages. Oz and Cordelia are diverted from their frantic Giles retrieval by Oz's detecting Willow's scent. Spike, Buffy, and Angel search the magick shop for spell components. Spike decides misery loves company and spells out Buffy and Angel's romantic contradictions, leaving them \"comeback deficient.\" Willow comforts a revived Xander; they rationalize the comfort's turn to romance through invoking their dire situation. A situation that is dire in new ways, as Oz and Cordelia arrive to rescue them, only to discover them kissing. Cordelia's hasty exit from the warehouse is cut short as she falls through a rotten stair, impaling herself on a sharp spike. While an anxious Willow watches, Xander descends to check her condition. Oz goes for help.\n\nBuffy, Angel, and Spike's return to the warehouse is interrupted by the appearance of ten vampires sent by Mr. Trick, led by Lenny, an old acquaintance of Spike's. It takes a while, but the ten-to-three odds aren't in the vampires' favor, especially when Buffy and Angel discover an assortment of bottles of holy water. Spike finds the rush of the battle improves his spirits to such a degree he no longer feels the need for Willow or her spell. Revived, he heads off to Brazil to \"tie [Drusilla] up and torture her\" until she cares for him again. Buffy consoles Willow, grieving over betraying Oz. Xander attempts to make peace with the hospitalized Cordelia, who summons her strength just long enough to dismiss him absolutely. Buffy tells Angel she can't continue their relationship, that she has to be honest with herself. The episode closes with \"a series of images: the kids in misery,\" as Willow, Oz, Xander, Cordelia, and Buffy all face the future with sadness and uncertainty.\n\n#### QUOTE OF THE WEEK:\n\nGiles worries Joyce has had an Exorcist moment over Buffy's high SAT scores:\n\nBUFFY: \"She saw these scores and her head spun around and exploded.\"\n\nGILES: \"I've been on the Hellmouth too long. That was metaphorical, yes?\"\n\n#### THE AGONY AND THE ECSTASY:\n\nEveryone in this episode is \"love's bitch\" in one way or another. Willow and Xander struggle with the opposing desires to act on their attractions and be faithful to their chosen partners. Buffy and Angel struggle with admitting their continued love, as they've been cloaking it in the guise of her playing nursemaid to a friend in need. Cordelia makes the momentous leap of publicly displaying Xander's photo in her locker, only to find herself cuckolded, as does Oz. Spike pines for Drusilla the fickle (Angel\/Chaos Demon\/Fungus Demon). Joyce continues to struggle with Buffy being a Slayer, her enthusiasm for the SATs a reflection of her continued desire for Buffy to have a normal life.\n\nSpike's choice of Sinatra lyrics was changed in the final aired version, but the closed captioning still reflects the quote used in the original script: \"Mistakes . . . I've made a few . . . I ate it up . . . and spit it out . . . and did it my way. . . .\" instead of: \"More . . . much more than this . . . I did it my way. . . .\"\n\n#### POP-CULTURE IQ:\n\nBemoaning her \"low\" SAT scores, Willow compares herself to the stereotypically uneducated character from The Simpsons:\n\n\"I'm Cletus the Slack-Jawed Yokel.\"\n\nBuffy implores Giles to back up during his discussion of her leaving Sunnydale to go to college. She's using video store vernacular:\n\n\"Be kind. Rewind.\"\n\nBuffy may mean either the 1985 film or the 1994 television show as she inspects Willow's abandoned spell ingredients after Spike abducted her:\n\n\"I'm thinking Weird Science.\"\n\nAngel's long life and international experiences allow him to read philosopher Jean-Paul Sarte's Nausea in the original French (La Naus\u00e9e).\n\n#### CONTINUITY:\n\nSpike's return is a fractured mirror of his original arrival in \"School Hard,\" and a reverse of his departure in \"Becoming, Part Two.\" Buffy's comment \"Faith could be Miss Sunnydale in the Slayer pageant\" evokes \"Homecoming.\" The Mayor knew of Spike's activities in Sunnydale during the second season but didn't take exception to them before. Xander is nervous about Willow's \"de-lusting\" spell after Amy's love spell misfired in \"Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered.\" Drusilla leaves Spike for a Chaos Demon this time; in \"The Harsh Light of Day\" Harmony reports that she left him for a Fungus Demon instead. Spike nuzzles Willow's neck, a moment they'll relive when he unsuccessfully attacks her in \"The Initiative.\" Joyce has no reason to fear Spike, introduced to her as a singer in a band in \"Becoming, Part Two.\" Joyce hears in passing that Willow is a witch, but doesn't take it seriously until \"Gingerbread.\" Oz's were-abilities manifesting when he's human are a pivotal plot point in \"New Moon Rising.\" The events of \"The Wish,\" \"Doppelgangland\" and Anya\/Anyanka's presence in Sunnydale are all consequences of Xander and Willow's factory embrace. Spike's speech about how impossible Buffy and Angel's relationship is will be echoed by the Mayor (\"Choices\") and Joyce (\"The Prom\"), eventually resulting in Angel's departure.\n\n#### FROM THE ORIGINAL TELEPLAY:\n\nScript directions for the teaser:\n\n[A shot-by-shot recreation of Spike's arrival in \"School Hard.\" There's that \"Welcome to Sunnydale\" sign. And here comes Spike's car, crashing into it as it screeches to a stop. Growling rock cue as the door opens. Except instead of one boot, an entire Spike falls bodily out of the car. A clatter of empties, beer bottles and cans, accompanies him. Our boy's bombed.]\n\nSPIKE: \"Home sweet . . . home.\"\n\n[A moment of looking blearily around, then his head drops back and hits pavement.]\n\n### The Wish\n\nEpisode 3.9\n\nContinuing our argument that season three is the best of the series, \"Lovers Walk\" was followed immediately by \"The Wish.\" A week after the broken hearts and plot twists of \"Lovers Walk,\" with everyone hurting and in disarray, the series introduced two elements that would\u2014in time\u2014change everything. First we meet Anya, a.k.a. the vengeance demon Anyanka, who offers Cordelia a single vengeful wish. Spurned and betrayed, Cordelia blames Buffy and wishes she'd never existed . . . with results even Anya couldn't have foreseen. Not only does the arrival of Anya give us the introduction of one of the series's best loved and most indelible characters, but it introduces the character of Vampire Willow, who will reappear later this season in \"Doppelgangland\" and inspire the real Willow to begin questioning her sexuality\u2014setting up major changes down the line.\n\nWRITTEN BY: Marti Noxon\n\nDIRECTED BY: David Greenwalt\n\nGUEST STARS: Mark Metcalf as the Master, Emma Caulfield as Anyanka\/Anya, Larry Bagby III as Larry Blaisdell, Mercedes McNab as Harmony Kendall\n\nCO-STAR: Danny Strong as Jonathan Levenson\n\n#### THE PLOT THICKENS:\n\nXander and Willow help Buffy slay as a distraction from their broken hearts. Cordelia, mending physically, burns Xander's photos. On Cordelia's first day back at school, fashion-aware new girl Anya doesn't harass her for having dated Xander like the other Cordettes do. Evening at the Bronze finds Buffy, Willow, and Xander moping over chocolate while Cordelia shows Xander she's moved on. Cordelia heads home when her rebar wound cuts her demonstration short. Buffy tries to intervene with her on Xander's behalf. A random vamp attack ends their debate, and Buffy's successful vamp staking dumps Cordelia in the trash. The next day a sympathetic Anya lends a furiously venting Cordelia her necklace, and Cordelia speaks the fateful words \"I wish Buffy Summers had never come to Sunnydale.\" Anya reveals her demonic visage, and Sunnydale transforms.\n\nSunnydale High with no Buffy Summers has a series of deceased principals, monthly memorial services, and students uniformly choosing to dress in subdued, non-vampire-attracting colors. Cordelia makes several adjustments in her new reality: curfew, no car, and a vamp-infested Bronze. Harmony tells Cordelia that Xander and Willow are dead; actually, they're undead vampires. Cordelia, desperate for someone called the Slayer, is rescued from Vamp Willow and Vamp Xander by Giles, Oz, and Larry. Vamp Willow and Vamp Xander visit the Master at the Bronze, who reprimands them for not killing Cordelia outright when she mentioned the Slayer. They cruise to the library, cage Giles, and drain Cordy.\n\nThe white hats report other losses to Giles, who manages to free himself and remove Cordelia's body. Giles retains Anyanka's amulet. The Master rewards Xander and Willow, granting Willow permission to \"play with the puppy.\" Translation: torturing a captive Angel for sexual entertainment. Giles makes progress researching Anya and her pendant. He stops to battle vampires who are rounding up citizens, and is losing when Slayer Buffy Summers arrives from Cleveland.\n\nThis scarred Buffy has little patience with Giles's research, preferring to find something to stake to solve their problems. When Giles reveals that the Master inhabits the Bronze, she is on the hunt. Angel manages to overcome Buffy's mistrust of him and lead her to the Master and Co. at the factory, where the Master has perfected a technique to harvest blood from Sunnydale's remaining human population. Giles invokes Anya and takes steps to destroy her power center as Buffy and Angel lead an attack on the Master and his minions. Just as the Master kills Buffy, Giles succeeds in reversing Cordelia's wish by destroying the amulet, leaving Anya powerless and bewildered.\n\n#### QUOTE OF THE WEEK:\n\nLarry in Bizarro Sunnydale delivers the eulogy for dead Bizarro Cordelia, recently killed by Vamp Willow and Vamp Xander:\n\n\"Okay, the entire world sucks because some dead ditz made a wish? I just want to be clear.\"\n\n#### THE AGONY AND THE ECSTASY:\n\nDemon Anyanka grants wishes for women scorned. Death as a metaphor is at work for almost every character with a broken heart in this episode. Vamp Willow and Vamp Xander drain Cordelia. Vamp Xander dusts Angel. Buffy stakes Vamp Xander. Oz slays Vamp Willow. Giles grieves for the Slayer he never Watched, who dies at the hands of the Master (again).\n\n\"Cordette #1\"\u2014Nicole Bilderback\u2014played opposite Seth Green in the 1998 film Can't Hardly Wait.\n\n#### POP-CULTURE IQ:\n\nXander, watching Cordelia not missing him, quotes Smokey Robinson and the Miracles:\n\n\"Look at her. Tears of a clown, baby.\"\n\nAnya's old enough to be quoting both William Shakespeare's play The Tempest and Aldous Huxley's novel Brave New World in this reference to Cordelia's wish that Buffy had never come to Sunnydale:\n\n\"I had no idea her wish would be so exciting. Brave new world.\"\n\n#### CONTINUITY:\n\nWicca girl Amy Madison doesn't appear in this episode, but tells Willow off-screen she saw the recovering, betrayed Cordy at the mall. Cordelia and Amy bond over distaste for everything Harmony. In regular continuity, Oz rebuffs Willow's overtures and Buffy advises Xander and Willow about doomed romance. Anya tries to reverse events and regain her powers in \"Doppelgangland.\"\n\nEven in the alternate reality Angel has been summoned to Sunnydale to assist Buffy the Slayer. The Master emerges victorious over Buffy, reversing the events of \"Prophecy Girl.\"\n\n#### FROM THE ORIGINAL TELEPLAY:\n\nGiles's exposition was changed:\n\n\"Anyanka raised a demon to ruin her unfaithful lover. The demon did her bidding\u2014but then cursed her and turned her into a sort of patron saint for scorned women. Apparently the cry of a wronged woman is like a siren's call to Anyanka.\"\n\n### Amends\n\nEpisode 3.10\n\nCompleting the season three trifecta of awesome, \"The Wish\" is followed by \"Amends,\" in some ways the most romantic episode in a series full of them. With Angel coming to terms with the horrors he committed as Angelus, and being driven mad by The First Evil, Buffy's selfless expression of love toward him and their daytime walk through the seemingly miraculous snowstorm at the end is doubtless one of the sweetest and hardest-earned moments in the series. And that's three standout episodes in a row in a standout season.\n\nWRITTEN AND DIRECTED BY: Joss Whedon\n\nGUEST STARS: Kristine Sutherland as Joyce Summers, Saverio Guerra as Willy the Snitch, Shane Barach as Daniel, Edward Edwards as Travis, Cornelia Hayes O'Herlihy as Margaret, Robia LaMorte as Jenny Calendar, Eliza Dushku as Faith\n\n#### THE PLOT THICKENS:\n\nIt's a typical balmy Southern California Christmas season. No one seems to have the proper spirit except for Cordelia, headed for the slopes of Aspen and \"actual snow.\" Willow's Jewish and still Oz-less. Xander plans to sleep outside, away from family battles. Joyce guilt-trips Buffy into inviting Faith to join their festivities. Giles is somber, despite the \"Mr. Giles\" stocking hanging from the library door. And the apparitions of three of his victims, including Jenny Calendar, are haunting Angel.\n\nBuffy and Joyce shop for a tree, avoiding the large circle of unpleasantly dead ones in the tree lot. Angel tries to get information from a wary Giles about his nightmarish visitors but flees when Jenny's apparition appears in Giles's apartment. He dreams of another victim, and this time shares his dream with Buffy, who also appears in it. Angel is still tormented by Jenny and the others even when he awakens. Buffy seeks Giles's help, sharing the research load with Xander and Willow. The apparitions remind Angel he lacked integrity in life, and whisper to him of the evil he is capable of, with or without his demon. Buffy and Angel share a nightmare, which ends with Angel vamping out and biting her. Jenny appears and taunts Angel by telling him the dream reflects his true desires.\n\nBuffy and Giles's research pays off with info on the three Harbingers, eyeless priests who draw on the power of an unimaginably ancient evil, The First. Even the powers of the Slayer won't be able to affect The First, so Buffy's tactic is to try to find its priests. Willy imparts that the priests are rumored to be somewhere underground\u2014not much of a lead in tunnel-infested Sunnydale. Buffy and Joyce decorate their tree in front of an unnecessary but cheery fire. Faith accepts the Summerses' invitation, and Buffy heads upstairs to retrieve presents. Angel waits in her room and delivers an incoherent warning to stay away from him. Buffy leaves Faith to guard Joyce. The spirit of Jenny continues to torment Angel, encouraging him to kill Buffy.\n\nThe passage \"the harbingers of death, nothing shall grow above or below\" tips Buffy off to the Harbingers' location. Buffy takes out all three priests almost effortlessly but cannot physically assault The First, who, in the guise of Jenny, promises her that Angel will be dead by sunrise, when he plans to end his torment and hers. Just before dawn Buffy tracks Angel to an exposed bluff. Unable to persuade Angel to continue to be undead, Buffy moves from pleading to anger. As they prepare for sunrise, an unprecedented snow falls on them from the sun-obscuring cloud cover. Buffy and a rescued, stronger Angel walk silently through the snowy streets. \"Not saying a word. Not needing to\" [from the stage directions].\n\n#### QUOTE OF THE WEEK:\n\nBuffy, trying to talk Angel into coming in out of the sun before it rises:\n\n\"Strong is fighting. It's hard and it's painful and it's every day. It's what we have to do, and we can do it together, but if you're too much of a coward for that, then burn.\"\n\nThe weatherman who appears on a TV screen in the episode, discussing the freak snowstorm, is actually KTLA weatherman Mark Kriski, who reports for the Los Angeles WB affiliate. His then colleague, KTLA anchorman Carlos Amezcua, appeared in \"Hush.\"\n\n#### THE AGONY AND THE ECSTASY:\n\nOz and Willow reunite, but Oz gently puts Willow's adorable attempted seduction of him on hold. When a guilty but needy Angel approaches him for help, Giles strives to forget \"that whole Angel-killed-his-girlfriend-and-tortured-him thing.\" Buffy and Angel have a chance to air all the unspoken feelings that have been simmering between them since his return from Hell.\n\n#### POP-CULTURE IQ:\n\nBuffy envisions Christmas dinner with The Grinch Who Stole Christmas, written in 1957 by Dr. Seuss:\n\n\"Tree. Nog. Roast Beast.\"\n\nDuring Willow's planned seduction of Oz, he appreciates fellow musician Barry White, the \"King of Love,\" who began performing in the '60s:\n\n\"And you got the Barry working for you.\"\n\nIronically, \"Amends,\" billed by the network as \"A Buffy Christmas,\" began filming 10\/31\/98\u2014Halloween\u2014although it did air 12\/15\/98, during the holiday season.\n\n#### CONTINUITY:\n\nAngel killed Jenny Calendar in \"Passion.\" She also appeared in \"Becoming, Part Two\" as part of Drusilla's spell to ensnare Giles. However, the script makes clear that this is not the vengeful ghost of Jenny, but simply a form The First Evil has taken in order to provoke guilt in Angel. The scenes from 1753 Ireland and 1838 Romania establish more of the timeline of Angel's past. Xander provides research snacks, a theme echoed in \"The Zeppo.\" Joyce is not anxious to invite Giles to Christmas dinner following the events of \"Band Candy.\"\n\n#### FROM THE ORIGINAL TELEPLAY:\n\nBuffy's response to Joyce is more prophetic in the original version:\n\nJOYCE: \"You know, honey, I was thinking\u2014maybe we should invite Faith to spend Christmas Eve with us.\"\n\nBUFFY: \"I'll ask her. Worst she can do is\u2014well, the worst she can do is serious bodily harm, but she'll probably just say no.\"\n\nThe Mutant Enemy logo monster gets in the seasonal spirit with a Santa cap and jingle bells in the background. He was also altered in \"Becoming, Part Two,\" when he requested a hug, and \"Graduation Day,\" when he wore a graduation cap.\n\n### The Zeppo\n\nEpisode 3.13\n\nNo list of the series's best episodes is complete without the unique wackiness of \"The Zeppo.\" The title is a reference to Zeppo Marx, widely considered the least interesting member of classic film comedy team the Marx Brothers. In this case, it refers to Xander and focuses on his feelings of isolation and impotence among a group of people far more suited to saving the world than he is. In the background of this episode, the rest of the gang is stopping yet another apocalypse, but Xander not only has an adventure of his own\u2014slightly easing his discontent with his position in the group\u2014he also has sex with Faith, a twist fans certainly didn't see coming.\n\nWRITTEN BY: Dan Vebber\n\nDIRECTED BY: James Whitmore Jr.\n\nGUEST STARS: Saverio Guerra as Willy the Snitch, Channon Roe as Jack, Michael Cudlitz as Bob, Eliza Dushku as Faith\n\nCO-STARS: Darin Heames as Parker, Scott Torrence as Dickie, Whitney Dylan as Lysette\n\n#### THE PLOT THICKENS:\n\nBuffy and Faith slay several of the Sisterhood of Jhe, with the assistance of Willow and Giles. Concerned for his safety, they all suggest the badly beaten Xander should stay out of future battles. He doesn't fare any better the next day at school, when he misses catching a football that hits Jack O'Toole (\"a subliterate that's repeated twelfth grade three times,\" according to Cordelia) and gives Cordelia ample opportunity for Xander bashing. Xander develops what Oz describes as \"an exciting new obsession\"\u2014how to define and achieve coolness. He starts by driving his uncle Roary's 1957 Chevy Bel Aire, which attracts the attention of both car fan Lysette Torchio and his new best friend Jack. The rest of the gang tries to find ways to stop the Sisterhood of Jhe from opening the Hellmouth and bringing about the end of the world, asking Xander to remain out of the way except for the occasional doughnut run.\n\nXander finds himself \"having a very strange night.\" Under duress, he travels with Jack to three cemeteries to revive Jack's gang members. He discovers that Jack is also recently dead and revived, although prior to that he was a living, breathing high school bully. They decide to follow Dickie's plan to \"bake a cake.\" Xander's attempts to get Angel, Giles, or Willow to rescue him from his predicament are rebuffed. He flees for his life when Jack threatens to make him the fifth dead member of the gang.\n\nXander assists Faith by slamming into a member of the Sisterhood of Jhe with the car. Back in her hotel room she assists him in losing his virginity. She then tosses him out, pants in hand, and as he climbs back in the car, he realizes \"baking a cake\" is a euphemism for building a bomb. A new man, he drives past the gang and persuades one of the gang members to divulge the location of the bomb before he loses his head. Everyone ends up back at Sunnydale High, with Xander and his zombie buddies chasing one another through the halls as the rest of the Scooby Gang battle the demons emerging from the Hellmouth. Xander faces his final opponent, Jack, over the bomb as it ticks down its final seconds. Xander convinces Jack to pull the plug on it, then departs, with nothing more to prove. A surly Jack chooses the other exit, running into Wolf Oz. The next day the library warriors gather to examine their wounds, and Xander gives Cordelia the Teflon treatment, secure in his role in the universe.\n\n#### QUOTE OF THE WEEK:\n\nWillow suggests a use for burning demons after Buffy and gang toast the Sisterhood of Jhe:\n\n\"I brought marshmallows! Occasionally I am callous and strange.\"\n\n#### THE AGONY AND THE ECSTASY:\n\nXander and Cordelia's relationship is still strained and bitter following \"Lovers Walk\" and \"The Wish.\" Xander's attempts to lose his virginity have been around since \"Teacher's Pet.\" Buffy and Angel pledge to love each other, even beyond death, with shades of both \"Becoming, Part Two\" and \"Amends.\"\n\n#### POP-CULTURE IQ:\n\nXander, feeling useless, makes a Jimmy Olsen reference, which is lost on Giles:\n\n\"But, gee, Mr. White, if Clark and Lois get all the big stories I'll never be a good reporter.\"\n\nCordelia gets Superman references and isn't afraid to use them if it will give Xander pain:\n\n\"It must be hard when all your friends here have, like, superpowers. Slayer, werewolves, witches, vampires, and you're like this little nothing. You must feel like . . . Jimmy Olsen.\"\n\nThe Queen of Mean compares Xander to the fifth Marx brother, who may or may not also have been sent to get the doughnuts:\n\n\"You're the useless part of the group. You're the Zeppo.\"\n\nWhen he rises from the grave, Dead Bob needs his Chuck Norris fix:\n\n\"Walker, Texas Ranger. You been tapin' 'em?\"\n\nXander chooses the All-American singing group as a euphemism . . . or is it a metaphor? . . . to describe his currently virgin state:\n\n\"It's just, um, I've never been up with people . . . before. . . .\"\n\nAnd the musical references keep coming as Xander quotes the Beastie Boys at the bomb:\n\n\"Hello, Nasty.\"\n\n#### CONTINUITY:\n\nGiles continues to assist his Slayer, despite being \"unofficial.\" The gang re-explores the concept of \"cool,\" also discussed in \"Gingerbread.\" The book cage has once again been deemed secure enough for Wolf Oz (\"Beauty and the Beasts\") and proven otherwise. Giles and Buffy mention her dying at the hands of the Master the last time the Hellmouth opened, complete with demon now returning. Faith has returned from her \"walkabout\" activities in \"Helpless\" to actively slay with Buffy. The theft from the hardware store echoes both \"Band Candy\" and \"Bad Girls.\" Rival gang the Jackals is mentioned, perhaps cousins to the hyena kids in \"The Pack.\" Giles works to keep Willow safe, Angel acts to keep Buffy safe, Willow tries to keep Oz safe, and everyone acts to keep the world safe.\n\n#### FROM THE ORIGINAL TELEPLAY:\n\nJack changes his mind about Xander's coolness factor in this comment cut due to length:\n\n\"That's it. No way am I bringing him back after I kill him.\"\n\n### The Prom\n\nEpisode 3.20\n\nWRITTEN BY: Marti Noxon\n\nDIRECTED BY: David Solomon\n\nGUEST STARS: Kristine Sutherland as Joyce Summers, Alexis Denisof as Wesley Wyndam-Pryce, Brad Kane as Tucker, Emma Caulfield as Anya\n\nCO-STARS: Danny Strong as Jonathan Levenson, Mike Kimmel as Harv\n\n#### THE PLOT THICKENS:\n\nBuffy discusses prom and housekeeping plans with a reluctant Angel. Anya asks Xander to the prom. Joyce visits Angel and tells him if he loves Buffy, he should end their relationship. Prom plans are discussed in the library as Giles tries to focus everyone on the Ascension. Angel and Buffy are on patrol in the sewers when she brings up the prom again. He not only turns her down for the prom, he tells her they have no future. If they survive the Ascension, he will leave Sunnydale. Willow consoles Buffy as Buffy faces her heartbreak and going stag to the prom.\n\nXander enters the dress shop to tease Cordelia until he discovers that she has been reduced to a working girl trying to earn her prom dress. As they bicker, a Hell Hound bursts through the window and savages a youth in a tux before disappearing as abruptly as it appeared. The gang views the shop's videotape of the incident and realizes the Hell Hound was drawn to the victim by his formal attire. They also spot Tucker, apparent master of the Hound. Buffy squashes any thoughts of the gang missing the prom to assist her in Hell Hound roundup. Buffy and Angel have an uncomfortable run-in at the meatpacking plant, where Buffy gets Tucker's address. Buffy sends the others off to the prom; Giles remains behind to offer sympathy.\n\nAt the dance Willow and Oz, Xander and Anya, Cordelia, and Wesley (Faith's Watcher) mingle and keep an eye out for disaster. Buffy subdues Tucker only to find he has already released three of his Hell Hounds. Buffy manages to take them out one at a time before they can enter the dance floor. She changes into her \"kick\" pink prom dress. The Class Awards are given, including a new and unexpected one: \"Buffy Summers, Class Protector.\" Giles and Buffy quietly contemplate the significance of her work being appreciated by her peers while the others dance. Angel arrives in his tuxedo to help Buffy capture at least one \"perfect high school moment.\"\n\n#### QUOTE OF THE WEEK:\n\nGiles prefers slaying to shopping, though Willow and Buffy would rather discuss what to wear to the prom:\n\n\"I will be wearing pink taffeta, as the chenille does nothing for my complexion, and can we PLEASE talk about the Ascension?\"\n\n#### THE AGONY AND THE ECSTASY:\n\nBuffy sleeps in Angel's bedroom. Anya is drawn to Xander despite blaming him for her mortality (\"The Wish\"). Angel dreams of wedding Buffy, then seeing her destroyed as their life together tries to withstand the harsh light of day. He makes the hard choice to leave her rather than see their relationship ruin her chance for a normal romantic life. Wesley is jealous when he sees Xander and Cordelia together on the tape. Xander rises to the occasion by not revealing Cordelia's \"shame,\" and by dipping into his road fund to purchase her dress. Wesley asks Cordelia to dance at the prom, one more step in their mutual attraction. Willow and Oz's romance continues to blossom.\n\nVariations of Hell Hounds abound in world mythology. The most famous is Cerberus from Greek mythology. Ray Harryhausen depicted a fierce two-headed Cerberus in 1981's Clash of the Titans.\n\n#### POP-CULTURE IQ:\n\nCordelia compares Wesley to James Bond, prompting him to volunteer for chaperone duty at the prom:\n\n\"I bet you'd look way 'double oh seven' in a tux.\"\n\nBuffy quotes Robert Frost's \"Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,\" meaning that she has lots to do before she can fully appreciate the fashion choices associated with prom worthiness:\n\n\"Giles, we got it. Miles to go before we sleep.\"\n\nXander believes in pet treats for Hell Hounds and wants to employ a clever strategy to find same:\n\n\"Or check and see who's been stocking up on Hell Hound Snausages.\"\n\nBuffy conjures visions of bloody dripping golden arches when she finds Angel with some takeout down at the butcher's dock:\n\n\"I mean\u2014where did I think you got your blood? McPlasma's?\"\n\nBuffy refers to Stephen King's 1974 debut novel, comparing the imminent attack on promgoers to the carnage that psychokinetic Carrie caused after being humiliated at the prom:\n\n\"I've got to stop a crazy from pulling a Carrie at the prom.\"\n\nBuffy references the Prince song that was quoted widely in 1999, when confronting Tucker:\n\n\"I'm going to lock you up in here, and then I'm going to party like it's . . .\"\n\n#### CONTINUITY:\n\nXander reminds everyone of Willow's brave acquisition of key parts of the Books of Ascension (\"Choices\"). Joyce's conversation with Angel is a kinder version of the Mayor's (\"Choices\"). Angel refers to his post-sex reversion to Angelus in \"Surprise\" and \"Innocence.\" Willow's low opinion of guys who break up with their girlfriends and leave town will be heard again (\"Pangs\"). Jonathan has special reason to think of Buffy as the Class Protector (\"Earshot\"). Other students refer to incidents with zombies (\"Dead Man's Party\") and hyena people (\"The Pack\"). Buffy takes her umbrella to UC Sunnydale with her, where it is mistreated by Sunday (\"The Freshman\").\n\nDuring the days when the actual prom scene was shot, the weather varied from drizzle to pouring rain, making makeup, hair, and costumes that much more difficult.\n\n#### FROM THE ORIGINAL TELEPLAY:\n\nStage directions indicate the process Tucker uses to train his Hell Hounds:\n\n[His eyes held open with metal clamps (\u00e0 la A Clockwork Orange).]\n\nGiles endeavors to comprehend adolescence in this exchange cut due to length:\n\nGILES: \"Fine. You're all suffering from a touch of spring madness, if you ask me.\"\n\nOZ: \"Mine is more space madness. But I'll feel better once I get used to the weightlessness.\"\n\nWILLOW (TO OZ): \"Promise me you'll never be linear.\"\n\nOZ (A PLEDGE): \"On my trout.\"\n\n### Graduation Day, Part One\n\nEpisode 3.21\n\nWRITTEN AND DIRECTED BY: Joss Whedon\n\nGUEST STARS: Kristine Sutherland as Joyce Summers, Harry Groener as Mayor Richard Wilkins III, Alexis Denisof as Wesley Wyndam-Pryce, Mercedes McNab as Harmony, Ethan Erickson as Percy West, Emma Caulfield as Anya, Eliza Dushku as Faith, Armin Shimerman as Principal Snyder\n\nCO-STARS: James Lurie as Mr. Miller, Hal Robinson as Lester Worth\n\n#### THE PLOT THICKENS:\n\nXander is facing graduation day and the Mayor's Ascension with a sense of certain doom. Buffy tells Willow she doesn't find the graduation ceremony significant and may not attend. She changes her mind upon hearing that the Mayor will be the commencement speaker. Faith pays a fatal call on the seemingly innocuous geology professor, Lester Worth, and steals his papers, which have details of the last Ascension. Buffy recognizes her MO from the news report and decides to investigate. Xander learns Anya witnessed an Ascension in the past. Anya recalls the devastation that resulted when a human became a demon in pure, not hybrid, form. She is striving to contribute specifics when the Mayor braves \"the inner sanctum\" of the library. The Mayor's threat to Buffy goads Giles into stabbing him, to no avail.\n\nBuffy packs up Joyce and sends her safely out of town. Giles sends Angel to help Buffy look for clues at Professor Worth's. As Buffy and Angel argue on the street, Faith shoots Angel in the chest with an arrow. Giles and Buffy do first aid on Angel's wound as Wesley reads Professor Worth's papers. They learn an eruption killed an earlier demon. Angel collapses from the poisoned arrow, distracting Buffy per Faith's plan. Anya makes plans to leave town pre-Ascension and invites Xander to join her. The Watchers Council will not share information on healing Angel. Buffy reaches her breaking point and disassociates herself from the organization. Oz succeeds in tracking down a cure for Angel: \"to drain the blood of a Slayer.\" Buffy heads out to sacrifice Faith to the cause.\n\nFaith is chillin' when Buffy enters her apartment and informs her of both Angel's cure and her intent to see he gets it. They fight, no holds barred, with everything they value at stake. The fight extends violently through the window to the rooftop, where a determined Buffy handcuffs herself to her dark counterpart. Faith has enough energy to break the cuffs but is tiring as Buffy draws a familiar knife. Buffy stabs Faith. Faith knocks Buffy back from the edge of the roof, then falls out of reach onto the bed of a passing truck, denying Buffy her hard-won victory.\n\n#### QUOTE OF THE WEEK:\n\nWhat's a little hooky compared to the end of the world?\n\nXANDER: \"The Mayor's going to kill us all during graduation.\"\n\nCORDELIA: \"Oh. [beat] Are you gonna go to fifth period?\"\n\nXANDER: \"I'm thinking I might skip it.\"\n\n#### THE AGONY AND THE ECSTASY:\n\nThe Mayor and Faith continue to bond in their own mega-dysfunctional family manner; she responds to his praise and assurances he will still need her even after his Ascension. Anya strives to better understand herself and her attraction to Xander, despite her centuries of anti-male actions. Joyce hates leaving Buffy in Sunnydale to face danger without her, but recognizes she is a liability. Willow and Oz make love for the first time, seeking comfort in the face of danger. After their breakup Buffy can't stand being with Angel or separated from him. Either way she is not willing to let Faith or anyone else take the choice away from her. Xander's mature concern for Buffy's emotional well-being if she kills Faith is a mark of his growth.\n\nFaith shoots Angel from atop the Sunnydale cinema, proving once again \"The Sun\" is bad for vampires.\n\n#### POP-CULTURE IQ:\n\nWillow's dream commencement speakers are Las Vegas headliners, but no such luck. They're getting the Mayor:\n\n\"Siegfried? Roy? One of their tigers?\"\n\nXander references Jaws when he sees a picture of what the Mayor plans to transform into:\n\n\"We're gonna need a bigger boat.\"\n\n#### CONTINUITY:\n\nWillow and Harmony pledge to keep in touch; the undead Harmony returns in \"The Harsh Light of Day.\" Percy thanks Willow for refraining from assaulting him again (\"Doppelgangland\"). Amy is still a rat, but with a \"swinging habitrail\" (\"Gingerbread\"). Buffy tells Angel he's her \"last office romance\" but changes her mind for Riley in season four. Faith shoots Angel from a rooftop with her longbow, the same MO she used for the courier (\"Choices\"). Anya questions Xander's contributions to the group efforts, echoing Cordelia's taunts in \"The Zeppo.\" Buffy collected Faith's knife in the cafeteria after Faith killed an escapee from the Box of Gavrok (\"Choices\"). Anya and the death of Professor Worth provide essential clues to the demon's destruction, and Anya clarifies pure versus \"hybrid\" (tainted) demons.\n\n#### FROM THE ORIGINAL TELEPLAY:\n\nIn the opening dialogue Cordelia has lobbied for red graduation robes, and Xander prefers blue. Buffy later describes her gown as dark blue. The robes ended up being Sunnydale's maroon color.\n\n### Graduation Day, Part Two\n\nEpisode 3.22\n\nWRITTEN AND DIRECTED BY: Joss Whedon\n\nGUEST STARS: Harry Groener as Mayor Richard Wilkins III, Alexis Denisof as Wesley Wyndam-Pryce, Danny Strong as Jonathan Levenson, Larry Bagby III as Larry Blaisdell, Mercedes McNab as Harmony, Ethan Erickson as Percy West, Eliza Dushku as Faith, Armin Shimerman as Principal Snyder\n\nCO-STARS: Paulo Andres as Dr. Powell, Tom Bellin as Dr. Gold\n\n#### THE PLOT THICKENS:\n\nThe Mayor's confidence is shaken by Faith's empty post-battle apartment. Cordelia gets the skinny on Buffy's quitting the Council from research fiends Giles and Xander. Buffy relieves Oz and Willow from Angel watch. She forces Angel to drink her blood so that he can recover from the \"Killer of the Dead\" poison. Angel rushes the unconscious Buffy to the hospital, where she is treated just a few rooms down from the comatose Faith. The Mayor tries to suffocate Buffy, but Angel and the hospital staff rescue her. Angel assures the arriving Scooby Gang that Buffy will recover and will not turn into a vampire, but they're angry with him for nearly killing Buffy. Buffy and Faith share a dream, and a subdued Faith tells Buffy to use the Mayor's human weakness to destroy him. Buffy visits the recumbent Faith, then leads her team into preparations for war.\n\nThe gang meets in the library to formulate their attack plans. Suggestions include attacking the Mayor with hummus and a fake Ebola virus. Wesley joins them in a non-Watcher capacity, and they make do-it-yourself volcano arrangements. A scheduled eclipse means both Angel and the Mayor's hench vamps can join in the battle. Xander and Willow spearhead the effort to recruit other students.\n\nThe graduation ceremony begins. Snyder gives a completely uninspiring intro to the Mayor, who lectures his captive, about-to-be-devoured audience on Sunnydale history. The eclipse occurs, and he transforms into an \"unholy big-ass snake thing.\" Snyder's dismay at this chaos is brief, as the Mayor swallows him. The students drop their robes to reveal an assortment of weapons, the Mayor's vampires attack from the flank, and the battle is joined. Casualties are inflicted on both sides as Larry is slammed by the Mayor's tail and Harmony is bitten by a vampire. Buffy engages the Mayor in some David and Goliath action, taunting him with Faith's knife, then fleeing for her life and everyone else's. She charges through the school halls and into the library with the Mayor snake-demon in hot\u2014and destructive\u2014pursuit. She bursts out of the library's rear window, and as the Mayor enters, the library is blown to bits by explosives placed there by the gang earlier that day. Giles presents Buffy with her charred diploma. Buffy, Willow, Xander, Oz, and Cordelia contemplate the fact that they have a post\u2013high school future. The final shot is of a yearbook lying on the ground, captioned \"Sunnydale High '99\u2014The Future Is Ours.\"\n\n#### QUOTE OF THE WEEK:\n\nCordelia employs her usual tact when discussing Wesley's planned departure for England:\n\nGILES: \"Buffy no longer needs a Watcher.\"\n\nCORDELIA: \"Well, does [Wesley] have to leave the country? I mean, you got fired and you still hang around like a big loser, why can't he?\"\n\n#### THE AGONY AND THE ECSTASY:\n\nWillow and Oz are glowing with romantic contentment even with the arrival of the Ascension. Giles and Willow both show compassion for Angel despite the harm done to them by Angelus (\"Passion\" and \"Becoming, Parts One and Two\"). Buffy is willing to risk her life to save Angel, even knowing they have no future together. Cordelia and Wesley get a chance to act on their attraction but the resulting kiss is really, really bad. Angel tells Buffy he won't prolong their good-byes\u2014in some ways they've been saying good-bye since \"Choices.\" After the destruction of Sunnydale High and the Mayor, Buffy and Angel confirm each other's physical well-being with a look, and then he departs without another word.\n\nIt's graduation time for everyone as the Mutant Enemy logo monster dons his mortarboard as well.\n\n#### POP-CULTURE IQ:\n\nFaith's dream speech refers to both Robert Frost and Mother Goose:\n\n\"Oh, yeah. Miles to go. Little Miss Muffet counting down from seven three oh.\"\n\n#### CONTINUITY:\n\nAngel's vampiric nature rising in response to pain parallels Oz's wolf nature responding to emotional pain in \"New Moon Rising.\" Buffy kisses the comatose Faith on the forehead in unconscious imitation of Faith's gesture in \"Enemies.\" The battle plan discussions include a reference to Xander's pseudo-military knowledge (\"Halloween\") and Buffy's use of a rocket launcher against the Judge (\"Innocence\"). Wesley and Cordelia box the library books, which were recently returned after being removed in \"Gingerbread.\" Buffy retrieves the knife she used on Faith (\"Graduation Day, Part One\"), which was originally a gift from the Mayor (\"Choices\"), and uses it as the bait to lure the Mayor. Oz and Willow have sex again right before the graduation ceremony. Buffy's post-explosion verbal skills\u2014\"fire bad, tree pretty\"\u2014will resurface in \"Beer Bad.\"\n\n## CATCHING UP WITH THE CAST AND CREW\n\n### HARRY GROENER (MAYOR WILKINS)\n\nThough you've been acting in film and television through most of your career, you've had enormous success as a theater actor, including three Tony Award nominations (for Cats, Oklahoma, and Crazy for You). Is the stage where your heart is?\n\nHARRY: \"Well, I started out in the theater, and so you could say it's really my first love, although I do enjoy working in front of a camera. But they're two different disciplines. What working in front of a camera can do for the theater actor is that it can teach you how to economize and be simpler, because you don't need to do a lot of indicating for the audience about what's going on onstage and how you're feeling. You have to be a little bigger onstage to make sure that everyone understands what you're doing. You don't have to do that in front of a camera. What you bring from the theater to television and film is a kind of discipline, because in the theater you have to be so much more aware of how to communicate the story. You have to worry about being heard, being seen\u2014there's no script person, no costume person; there's no audio engineer that can come and fix something. You have to take care of it. In television and film, everything is done for you. You don't have to worry about being seen or heard. They all light it, they all make sure that your microphone's in the right place, they make sure that you're heard, and so you can just focus on trying to create a scene that is as real as you can make it for the audience to be able to believe it.\"\n\nIt's clear you take lessons as an actor from both disciplines, but do you find one more pleasurable than the other?\n\nHARRY: \"The theater's more immediate. It's right there every night. You hear whether you're communicating, whether you're being successful or not, by the response of the audience. You don't get that in television and film until it airs, and that could be\u2014in film, it could be a year later, year and a half later; if it's a low budget, it could be ten years. But on television, if you have a series and you have friends watching it, then they'll call you and say, 'I saw you, and it was a good episode,' or whatever it is. It's much more immediate, of course, with the theater, and you have more control over everything. In front of a camera it's really a director's and editor's medium. They control it; they control the story. They can change the story; they can move things around to make it clearer, to make it better, make it more suspenseful, make it a more believable story. They can do all that, and it's actually quite exciting.\"\n\nAnd what about when you step out the stage door after you've performed and you encounter the people who've just applauded you in the audience versus when you've met people who are fans of your work from television or they've seen you in a film? Is that experience different for you?\n\nHARRY: \"That's a very interesting question, because [the experience] really isn't. The people, the friends, that meet you backstage\u2014hopefully they're complimentary about what you're doing, and they're supportive and all that. When you meet a fan of Buffy, let's say, and you meet them in the supermarket, you meet them on the street, it's equally wonderful. But with Buffy, in particular, I really enjoy it because it was such a fabulous time for me. That doesn't always happen, but every once in a while, you get a job where the role is really interesting. I've been fortunate enough to get a number of those, and Buffy is certainly at the top of the list. Being given that role was just so much fun. I was a fan of Buffy, and I love the vampire myth. It was only supposed to be an eight-episode arc, but because of the fans, because of how they responded, I got all those additional episodes, which was just fabulous.\n\n\"I loved being with the company. Sarah was unbelievably wonderful and such a pro and so disciplined; and the cast was terrific and nice and fun to be around. When I first started working in television or film, it was so foreign to me and very different, and initially I said, 'I don't think I can do this. I don't understand it. I'll try to learn, but I'm not really getting it. It doesn't make me happy; I don't feel part of a company.' And you can't, because you're just coming in to do one episode; you're only there for a few days at the most. If you're in the cast, you can start to get that kind of company feeling you can have in the theater. Well, the more you do\u2014and, you know, over the years and going from one studio to the next\u2014then a lot of the people overlap. All of a sudden you have sound people, costume people, [and] script people that overlap from different shows, and it becomes one big huge community and very familial. And I just love that.\"\n\nYou mentioned that you were only supposed to originally be on Buffy for eight episodes, but that it grew because of the reaction of the audience. It didn't seem that way. It seemed organic. Did you not have any inkling that they were going to keep you around?\n\nHARRY: \"No, they told me. They actually showed me right at the very beginning what the creature would look like. They had a model of it. I knew that there was going to be some transformation at the end, but I did not know how we got there.\"\n\nSo the additional episodes were added because the Mayor became popular, so they wanted to incorporate you more into that season?\n\nHARRY: \"That's right. They just added more to fill in the time before the actual graduation, before the actual transformation. And then, of course, the very, very last time we see him [in \"Touched,\" season seven, episode twenty] . . . the only reason that that happened is because of my wife. We were in New York\u2014at that time we lived in both places\u2014and we had just come back to Los Angeles, and we were having breakfast out at some coffee shop and we found out that this was the last season of Buffy. My wife said, 'Why don't you call them up and tell them you're back and maybe they'll put you in.' I said, 'Oh God, don't be ridiculous. They're never gonna do that.' And she literally said, 'Don't be an asshole; call them up.' So I called my agent and he called them, and that's exactly what happened. But that would not have happened had it not been for my darling wonderful wife saying, 'Don't be an asshole; give them a call.' \"\n\nIt's such a testament to what you do that people really loved that character. He's so evil, and yet I think everybody watching the show would have loved to have had coffee with him. They don't love him because he's evil; they love him because he's so much fun.\n\nHARRY: \"Yeah, he seems to have a pretty good sense of humor. He seems to see life a certain way that's really kind of pleasant. One of the things that the fans would always say, one of the reasons they like him, is that he's much scarier than the demons that have horns and teeth and scales and all that, but he's like the guy next door. He's like your uncle; he's like just a regular-seeming, just a regular guy, but he has all of this inside of him.\"\n\nYou sing, you dance, you have this history of musical theater. Were you disappointed that Mayor Wilkins was killed off before Joss decided to do the musical episode?\n\nHARRY: \"Oh my gosh, that would have been funny to see him do, in some kind of fantasy, some person's nightmare, right? But I'm not disappointed at all because Joss gave me all kinds of fabulous things to do, so many fun things to do. And that was at a time when I could still dance. I probably could still sing a little bit, but I can't dance anymore because of knees and ankles and particularly my back. I have a lower back injury that I sustained when I was in\u2014if you can believe this\u2014my mid-twenties.\"\n\nYou've appeared in great films like About Schmidt, Road to Perdition, and Amistad and have had recurring guest spots in so many TV series, including\u2014I've noticed\u2014three separate Star Trek series as three separate characters. But for fans who only know you from Buffy, what TV or film role would you love for people to track down and watch to see you in action in something else, and why?\n\nHARRY: \"Yes, I've done these films and they've been really fun to do, but they're not large roles. You'd have to see a number of things\u2014you have to see just a number of different episodes of things so that you can see the range, the different kinds of characters that I've played. That's really the best way to see what kind of actor I am. From the beginning of my career, I've always wanted to be in many different roles and try to be unrecognizable. That's always the goal. You don't always achieve it, but you try, and it stretches you and it works the craft. Last year I got to do a Gore Verbinski film called A Cure for Wellness. I'm looking forward to that one because I got to do a little bit more in that film than I did in Amistad or something. I think it's kind of a thriller, but it looks so beautiful. I had such a good time. I went back and forth to Germany, and I just loved being there because I was born there. German is my first language, German and Russian. I don't speak either of them well, but those are the first two languages because I immigrated with my mother and my father when I was one and a half. And so going back to Germany, a lot of the language came back.\"\n\nSo much time has passed. Do you have any favorite behind-the-scenes memories of the time that you spent working on Buffy?\n\nHARRY: \"There was a funny moment during the graduation when the Mayor's transformation is supposed to happen. They built a suit that was supposed to break apart \u00e0 la the Hulk. To try to accomplish that, they rigged it in a way that, to either side of me, away from the cameras, so you couldn't see it, there were two people. Each person had, I'd say, between ten and twelve fishing lines that they had to pull at a certain moment to make this effect happen. And they worked on this and worked on this and worked on this, the poor people, for the longest time. Well, we get to it, and it's supposed to happen, and I feel these tugs and things going right and left and right and left, and none of it happened. It did not work. So they yelled, 'Cut,' and they tried it again. 'Cut, cut,' and it just did not work at all. Over and over and over, these poor people. It was hours and hours setting that stuff up and figuring it out and trying to get it, and none of it worked.\n\n\"Eventually they [decided] to just shoot it in front of a green screen, and even then, it didn't really work the way it was supposed to work. It really was funny at the time. Everybody was watching\u2014the whole graduating class sitting there with their weapons under their gowns, waiting to have this big huge final battle\u2014and we'd get to that bit and it just wouldn't happen. And it'd be so funny; there'd be people cracking up: 'God, all right. Here we go. Let's try it again.' Oh God, it was heaven.\n\n\"And, of course, it was a night shoot, and it was a working high school that we shot it at, and we all had to get out before classes started. So when they finally yelled, 'Wrap,' and we had to all go, it was a mad dash to clear the set. What was funny about that was that the sun hadn't come up yet. It was slowly coming up, and so it seemed like everyone was trying to get underground before the sun came up, like vampires. We were all trying to get out before the sun came up! Oh God, that was funny, running around, trying to get away before the school starts.\"\n\nYou've already talked about A Cure for Wellness. What else are you working on now, and what does the future hold for Harry Groener?\n\nHARRY: \"I just finished a play by Jon Robin Baitz called Vicu\u00f1a at the Kirk Douglas Theatre. This is a play that Robbie started working on in March 2016, and it was a play that reflected his feeling about what's going on now politically. I played a character that is based on Trump. It wasn't Trump; it was based on him. And all the circumstances were virtually identical: He was running against a woman; he has a daughter like Ivanka. He's getting ready for the final debate in three weeks' time, and he wants a fabulous suit. Vicu\u00f1a\u2014I didn't know this until we started, but Vicu\u00f1a's a wonderful, very expensive fabric, and he wants this suit for the final debate. It was very interesting doing this play before the election and then after the election, because there really is no future for this play if Hillary had won. But now there is a future, and it becomes prescient. Robbie was very smart. So many of the circumstances that actually did happen that we heard about on CNN and MSNBC\u2014he had already written in the play. He already saw it happening, I guess. At times it was almost as if Trump had read the script, because all of a sudden you'd go home and you'd see the news and he had done what was talked about in the play, that had already been there for months. It was really bizarre, but it was good to do the play. It became a very different play and seemingly more important and weighty after the election. We all had a really good time, but we were all very happy to finish because usually you do a play and you leave the theater and the world of the play stays in the theater. Well, in this situation, the world of the play was also the world outside, so you couldn't leave it. We were happy to finish telling the story.\n\n\"That's the last thing I did. Now my wife [Dawn] and I have a theater company, called the Antaeus Company, here in Los Angeles. We're founding members of the company. Right now we're building a theater in Glendale. There'll be two theaters, actually: a ninety-something-seat house and a forty-seat house. And we're going to open the theater with Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, and Dawn and I are playing Big Daddy and Big Mama.\"\n\n### JANE ESPENSON (WRITER, CO-EXECUTIVE PRODUCER)\n\nYou're one of the queens of TV\u2014and certainly of geek TV. The list of TV series you've worked on as writer and producer is like a pop-culture tour of the past twenty years. Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Ellen, Buffy, Angel, Firefly, The O.C., Gilmore Girls, Tru Calling, Eureka, Battlestar Galactica, Dollhouse, Caprica, Game of Thrones, Torchwood, Husbands, Warehouse 13, and, of course, Once Upon a Time. I think it's clear you're \"one of us,\" so what's your geek history, as it were? Where does your love of fantasy, sci-fi, and the supernatural come from, and how has that past served you in your career?\n\nJANE: \"Wow\u2014that list is long, isn't it? I must be very old! I do love fantasy and sci-fi, although I wouldn't say I have anything like an expert's knowledge of it. There are vast holes in my knowledge of sci-fi movies, for example. I just like what I like\u2014some sci-fi, some regency romance, some true crime, some historical fiction. I guess I use science fiction, often, as more of a setting than anything\u2014a backdrop for character interactions and emotions that are heightened by the extreme situations that the genre allows. But, of course, in the best cases, sci-fi also has something really special about it: stories that are driven by ideas, and I love that. That's what initially, as a kid, drew me to it. The stories of Ray Bradbury propelled me as a kid, and then in my teen years I found classic Star Trek. (Oddly, I'd been reading the Star Trek novels for years, but only dove into the original episodes later.) Then came movies like Blade Runner and Alien and Aliens and Terminator, that are obvious in their power. But I have to say that I loved TV comedy just as much as TV sci-fi, and I set out to be a comedy writer, not a genre drama writer. As it happened, though, Star Trek: TNG happened to be the open door to a career. This turned out to be a very good thing\u2014I loved coming up with pitches for Star Trek series, because they hinged on finding that central hook of an idea, an insight about human nature, say, and I love thinking about that stuff. But other than at that very beginning, I've made myself useful on staffs not because of any kind of facility for sci-fi, but much more because of a love of humor. The point I try to make, over and over, in my writing, is that everyone is human (even when they're not human), and that a big part of that is being funny\u2014accidentally and on purpose.\"\n\nYou'd been on staff for a handful of series before you came onto Buffy, but it certainly seems to have been the launching pad for you. Do you remember what it was like getting hired for the first time? How did that come about?\n\nJANE: \"I'd been on staff at five series: Dinosaurs, Monty, Me and the Boys, Something So Right, and Ellen, and I'd written a freelance Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and Nowhere Man. And yet you're absolutely right, Buffy was the launching pad. It was the first drama where I was on staff, and the first show that wasn't canceled during the year [when] I was hired. And it was the first place where I really felt I was contributing up to my abilities. I definitely remember being hired. I was brought in first for a preliminary meeting with two guys who were running Joss's company at the time, and all I remember about that meeting is that I was running late and in a bit of a panic about being late. I have a vague impression of bursting breathless into an office. But it went well enough that I was brought back to meet with Joss. I was asked to prepare some story ideas and I remember going over them with my friends until they were smooth. I remember that meeting more clearly. David Greenwalt was in the room, along with Joss, and I pitched my little ideas. One was the idea that turned into 'Band Candy,' my first script; although it was about a coffee shop, not candy, at the time. But the one that I think really helped me get the job was about a high school coach doing some kind of magic to make the football team start turning into cattle. At the time of my meeting, they had written the swim-team episode, but it hadn't yet aired, so I think I got big points for demonstrating that I was thinking along the same lines as the staff of the show. I got the call from my agent soon thereafter that I'd been hired. I was deliriously happy, of course. I sensed that this show was the right fit for me.\"\n\nSome of the show's writers engaged regularly with fans and others didn't. It's no exaggeration to say that the Buffy fandom\u2014particularly the core fans on posting boards like The Bronze\u2014basically invented modern fandom. How much do you still interact with fans of the many shows you've worked on, and what are your thoughts on the relationship between modern TV and its fans?\n\nJANE: \"That's very true. There was actually a party every year at which the writers and producers would mingle with the fans from the Bronze posting board. That party is such an artifact of that post-Net, pre-Twitter time, it seems amazing that it happened. I love that it's so easy now to get a sense of what viewers are responding to, but I'm increasingly aware that it can easily get overwhelming. The more you know, the less you know, you know? You air an episode, and then you're flooded with every possible reaction to it, to the point where you lose even your own instincts to judge it. The individual writer needs to be able to keep their head clear and write with passion enough to make their story sing, instead of trying to write to please everyone. Above all, the one thing fan interaction has made clear to me is that there are so many people out there with the voice and the drive to create their own content. Increasing access to the means to create TV will result, I hope, in more shows with groundbreaking heroes.\"\n\nYou were a writer and co-executive producer on Gilmore Girls, which was recently resurrected by Netflix for a direct continuation. Do you think such a thing would ever be possible for Buffy, and what other shows you've worked on would you love to see return in the same way, with the original cast and no reboot?\n\nJANE: \"I was amazed when that happened. It strikes me as a one-in-a-million chance that the original creator and original cast would be available and interested in a reboot at the same time. Buffy ended when the people involved felt it was time\u2014there wasn't a sense of having it ripped away unfinished\u2014and the continuation of the show in comic-book form has probably fulfilled any sense of stories left untold. So I don't see that as a possible path for Buffy Firefly, perhaps. It's a large cast, though, that has gone on to many other things\u2014the logistics seem overwhelming. But if it did come back with Joss, I'd be the first one in line to be involved again. Other shows? Battlestar and Torchwood, yes, I'd do those again in a heartbeat.\"\n\nAs you noted, your first script for the series was \"Band Candy,\" which remains one of my favorites for its sense of humor and for making Giles and Joyce adorably sexy. What's your favorite among the episodes you wrote for the series, and why?\n\nJANE: \"For a long time, 'Band Candy' was my favorite, because it had this glow around it of a story that started in my mind before I even got the job, and because it had such a comedic tone. But, looking back now, I'd choose 'Superstar' or 'Storyteller' or maybe 'Harsh Light of Day' or 'Pangs.' They all have a lot of humor in them, which I love. And I love a story where a supporting character, like Jonathan or Andrew, is given center stage. It's a reminder that in life there are no supporting characters; we're all the protagonist of our own story, which may be one of the most important lessons in all of life: everyone else is just as real as you. And I like Spike's role in 'Harsh Light' and 'Pangs'\u2014a villain who earns our sympathy is a wonderful thing. I feel I should add that Buffy was a very creator-driven show. I wrote the dialogue for these episodes, but the stories came from the room as a whole, which usually means they came from Joss.\"\n\nI've heard so many people talk about Buffy changing their lives\u2014in many cases saving their lives. How do you feel when you hear that sort of thing, and have you had similar reactions to other series you've worked on?\n\nJANE: \"I used to hear this from girls, and now, more and more, from boys, who identify with Buffy and draw on her courage to help transcend their own situations and get through high school alive. We got a lot of letters at Ellen\u2014and I'm sure Ellen personally got many more\u2014with similar sentiments. I think Ellen might have had a bigger impact for a brief amount of time, but Buffy has persisted in the culture for longer. Television has the power to have a tremendous impact on people's lives, and I hope I've been a part of shows whose overall impact has been positive.\"\n\nWhat are your favorite behind-the-scenes memories of your time on the show?\n\nJANE: \"Hmm, all of my memories are behind-the-scenes memories, I suppose. I usually don't love being on set, because it can be tedious and uncomfortable, but on Buffy you'd often get the sense that you were watching something iconic get made, and that was wonderful. I watched almost every frame of 'Superstar' being shot, and that was amazing. Getting to meet and hang out with Armin Shimerman, who played the principal, but who had also played Quark on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine . . . that was fantastic. Meeting Danny Strong, whom I already admired, and who became a life-long friend even during his meteoric rise. Watching how the musical came together. The time Joss told me about his idea for Firefly and I just could not get my head around the fact there were no alien species in it. When I came back from being sick and the staff had bought a slot machine for my office. Oh, and the time that one of the writers ate off a plate on the floor of the lunch room because we dared her to. And all the times we'd get to read a new script or watch a new cut of an episode.\n\n\"On more of an everyday basis, I loved hanging out with Doug Petrie in his office during our first couple years on the show. We'd just gab and gab. Then Drew Greenberg joined the club. And Drew Goddard and Rebecca Kirshner . . . oh, the whole staff was really cool.\"\n\nEveryone says that working on a long-running TV series is a lot like high school, with circles of friends and then those people you wish you'd hung out with more. Who do you wish you'd hung out with more from your Buffy days?\n\nJANE: \"Tom Lenk and Aly Hannigan\u2014they're such funny and kind people, but I was a little shy to talk with them as much as I'd have liked to.\"\n\nIf you're willing to share . . . what are the best and worst fan moments you can remember?\n\nJANE: \"There have been so many great fan interactions that I don't want to slight anyone, so I'll just give you the most recent good interaction. I was at Swancon in Perth earlier this year and there was a little girl, perhaps twelve or so, entered in the costume contest as Buffy. It was so nice to see the show continuing to find new fans! The worst fan moment was in the line for the women's bathroom at Rock of Ages, during the time when Tom Lenk was in the Broadway cast. The woman in front of me said she was the biggest fan of Buffy, and she just had one question, 'It's called Buffy the Vampire, but when did she become a vampire?' \"\n\n### DOUGLAS PETRIE (WRITER, SUPERVISING PRODUCER)\n\nMost recently you've been working in a prominent spot in the Marvel Netflix realm, writing and executive producing on both Daredevil and The Defenders. Are you a comics guy by nature?\n\nDOUGLAS: \"Always. Marvel comics in particular provided a seminal kind of storytelling that I carry with me to this day. It was action-based storytelling, certainly, but the team of artists and writers who made up the original 'bull pen' came, largely, from the world of romance comics. So there was always an element of soap opera and heartbreak baked into the larger, more operatic adventures. Nobody else was doing this at the time and the impact was enormous. So when Joss created a character whose calls to adventure were linked like a DNA strand to her interior personal life, it just felt right. All the writers embraced this dual-world approach pretty naturally, I think. We never saw it as a dichotomy. It was all one thing, like life.\"\n\nAs passionate as the fan base was on Buffy and Angel, those shows faced a constant battle to keep coming back season after season. With the Marvel stuff you're working on, the fan base is just as passionate, but how has the television model changed as far as the working experience?\n\nDOUGLAS: \"The Netflix model has changed storytelling in that binge watching is now the norm. Nobody waits a full week for next week's episode anymore (with some exceptions). Even if the episodes of a particular show, be it on network TV, FX, or HBO, are shown week by week, most viewers wait and then do a bingeing weekend. As a result, the threads of plot lines, exposition, and even things like musical cues need to be paced out differently. Showrunners get to be much subtler now, because we're going back-to-back-to-back with story. As for the fear of cancellation, that sword of Damocles still hangs over all our heads! Some things never change. . . .\"\n\nLike so many of the Buffy writers, you'd written episodes for a handful of series before you came onto Buffy, but it certainly seems to have been the launching pad for you. Do you remember what it was like getting hired for the first time? How did that come about?\n\nDOUGLAS: \"I remember seeing the show for the first time, and I just lost my mind. It was so good. The emotional build of it\u2014even within a single episode\u2014felt like music. Like a great, well-paced rock concert. The first episode I saw ended with Buffy firing a rocket launcher in a mall with the emergency sprinklers going off, and it felt great. I knew I wanted to be a part of this world and wanted very, very badly to be able to pull it off. It felt important. Still does.\"\n\nI'm fascinated to see that you wrote episodes of Rugrats and Clarissa Explains It All, shows that had a certain sophistication but were ostensibly children's TV. Did that help or hinder you when trying to get the Buffy gig?\n\nDOUGLAS: \"Helped. No doubt. The important thing about shows like the ones Nickelodeon put out in the nineties was that nobody thought of them as kid's shows. Clarissa was pretty emotionally legit. So I was trained to work internally from early on. Meaning, you don't judge the material, you just try to make it as real and funny and emotional as you can. Kids are smart and their inner lives are tumultuous and rich, so we spoke to that.\"\n\nSome of the show's writers engaged regularly with fans and others didn't. It's no exaggeration to say that the Buffy fandom\u2014particularly the core fans on posting boards like The Bronze\u2014basically invented modern fandom. How much do you still interact with fans of the many shows you've worked on, and what are your thoughts on the relationship between modern TV and its fans?\n\nDOUGLAS: \"Oh man. It's such a huge privilege to have a fan, any fan, let alone a bunch. But I stay off social media as much as I can. Sooner or later somebody's going to tell me I suck, and I have the voice in my head for that.\"\n\nYour Buffy episode \"Bad Girls\" remains one of my favorites. What's your favorite among the episodes you wrote for the series, and why?\n\nDOUGLAS: \"I don't know if I have a single favorite. Not of my own, anyway. Surely 'Fool for Love' was a special experience in many ways, and the fans responded nicely. But there is no match for the thrill of seeing your first-ever-produced Buffy episode, so I will always associate 'Revelations' with getting into the clubhouse for the first time. I did enjoy channeling the character of Faith and was pleased and still honored to have been trusted with the episodes Joss assigned in season three. Huge fun.\"\n\nI've heard so many people talk about Buffy changing their lives\u2014in many cases saving their lives. How do you feel when you hear that sort of thing, and have you had similar reactions to other series you've worked on?\n\nDOUGLAS: \"Art's a big deal. Storytelling is a big deal. Buffy spoke to a huge population that felt unheard and unseen until Joss unloaded his unique world vision. I think the best thing a show or a movie can do is to make us feel brave. I've had that experience. In 2016 the stakes have gone way, way up. The world needs saving more than ever, so we better pull some special shit out of our hats now.\"\n\nYou directed episodes of Buffy and The 4400. Any plans to return to the director's chair?\n\nDOUGLAS: \"Absolutely. Stay tuned.\"\n\nSo much time has passed. What are your favorite behind-the-scenes memories of your time on the show?\n\nDOUGLAS: \"Oh wow. So many. When people ask what it was like working on Buffy, I tell them it's like being able to say 'I graduated from Hogwarts.' The writers' rooms, where we'd congregate, could get unbelievably, brutally funny. Funniest group ever. And smart. I remember scouting the school bus with Joss as he was prepping his shoot on the final episode, and I realized that our adventure together was going to end. All things do. But that was hard.\"\n\n## SEASON 4\n\n### Hush\n\nEpisode 4.10\n\nIn the history of the series, there are a handful of episodes that became pop-culture moments in their own right. Buffy had done chilling horror before, but \"Hush\" remains the single most frightening episode. The arrival of The Gentlemen, the \"floating\" effect of their movement, their hideous grins . . . come on, it's creeping you out just to think about them right now. For an episode with so little dialogue and so full of horror, \"Hush\" also offers its share of comedic moments. The episode is notable too for its introduction of shy, stammering witch Tara Maclay.\n\nWRITTEN AND DIRECTED BY: Joss Whedon\n\nGUEST STARS: Marc Blucas as Riley, Emma Caulfield as Anya, Leonard Roberts as Forrest, Phina Oruche as Olivia, Amber Benson as Tara, Brooke Bloom as Cheryl, Jessica Townsend as Nicole, Lindsay Crouse as Maggie\n\nCO-STARS: Doug Jones as a Gentleman, Camden Toy as a Gentleman, Don W. Lewis as a Gentleman, Charlie Brumbly as a Gentleman\n\n\"Hush\" is considered a groundbreaking piece of television in that it's almost completely silent. Many other directors have dreamed of making silent episodes; Joss Whedon achieved it. It was nominated for an Emmy.\n\n#### THE PLOT THICKENS:\n\nBuffy dozes off during Professor Walsh's lecture on communication. Her dream is a curious mixture of kissing Riley and of a young girl reciting a strange nursery rhyme about The Gentlemen. The girl is holding a mystical-looking box. Riley wants to analyze the dream, but Buffy shares it with Giles instead. Neither he nor his Weetabix-hogging housemate, Spike, has ever heard of The Gentlemen.\n\nAnya drills Xander about the nature of their relationship, and any resolution is deferred by Giles's request that Xander take care of Spike for a few days while Olivia comes to visit. The campus Wicca group is a major disappointment to Willow, but she does notice a shy young woman there named Tara.\n\nThat night, as everyone sleeps, the evil Gentlemen come to town and magically steal all their voices. Confusion reigns. Riley and the Commandos don civvies, intending to help keep order in the Dale. Buffy and Willow walk through the town, stunned by the silence.\n\nThat night The Gentlemen glide eerily through the town. Olivia sees them and is able to sketch one of them for Giles the next morning. They take their first victim, a young male college student, who shrieks in silent terror as they slice open his chest and extract his heart.\n\nGiles finally realizes that The Gentlemen are part of a fairy tale. To kill them, the princess must scream. But he has no idea how to give Buffy back her voice.\n\nTara goes in search of Willow, intending (we later learn) to do a spell with her. She is nearly captured by The Gentlemen. She and Willow escape together and for the first time join forces to create magick. Buffy and Riley also join forces, coming upon each other as they battle The Gentlemen at the clock tower. Riley smashes the box containing all the voices of Sunnydale, and Buffy (the princess) screams. The Gentlemen's heads explode. The horror is over.\n\nIn the morning Riley comes to Buffy's dorm room. They have to talk, he tells her. She agrees . . . and they sit facing each other in uncomfortable silence.\n\nREVELATION 15:1\n\nA minister and his flock are silently reading from the Bible. This is the verse written on the congregates' signboard: \"Then I saw another portent in heaven, great and wonderful, seven angels with seven plagues, which are the last, for with them the wrath of God is ended.\"\n\n#### QUOTE OF THE WEEK:\n\nBuffy accidentally makes an obscene gesture as described in the stage directions:\n\nXander has scribbled on a pad, holds up for all to see: HOW DO YOU KILL THEM?\n\nBuffy snorts contemptuously, then circles her fist around an imaginary stake, plunges it down repeatedly.\n\nEverybody looks at her, a little thrown: the gesture doesn't read the way she intended.\n\nRealizing it, Buffy hurriedly and sheepishly grabs a stake from her purse, repeats the gesture.\n\nThe part of the newscaster was played by Carlos Amezcua, then real-life co-anchor of KTLA morning news in Los Angeles. Amezcua produced \"Comedy Compadres,\" the first all-Latino standup comedy program in Los Angeles. It aired on KTLA. Weathercaster Mark Kriski from KTLA was in \"Amends.\"\n\n#### THE AGONY AND THE ECSTASY:\n\nDespite their soulful first kiss, Riley and Buffy founder just when the moment for honesty arrives. Willow still misses Oz terribly. And Anya is thrilled when Xander attacks Spike when Xander thinks that the vampire has bitten her. Olivia and Rupert must decide if she can handle knowing that the things that go bump in the night are real.\n\nSign on the Initiative's wall near the elevator:\n\nIN CASE OF EMERGENCY, USE STAIRS.\n\n(The elevator is voice-activated.)\n\n#### POP-CULTURE IQ:\n\nRiley is not loving keeping his Commando life a secret from Buffy. Forrest gets it, as shown by his Superman reference:\n\n\"We have a gig that would inevitably cause any girl living to think we are cool upon cool, yet we must Clark Kent our way through the dating scene and never use this unfair advantage.\"\n\nGiles mentions this classic British band while confessing to Olivia that while monsters are real, his rock fame is not:\n\n\"Well, no, I wasn't actually one of the original members of Pink Floyd.\"\n\nThe Fairy Tale Connection: \"Gingerbread\" from season three and \"Hush\" both take their cue from fairy tales. These stories of witches, goblins, and trolls, when first told, were aimed at adults, not children. The original \"Sleeping Beauty\" has the Princess waking up during labor\u2014she's pregnant with twins!\n\nThere is a subgenre of horror literature consisting of traditional fairy tales retold for adults. A representative sample can be found in Snow White, Blood Red, edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling. Buffy costume designer Cynthia Bergstrom searches out old fairy-tale books for their illustrations, which she uses as inspiration to clothe the many demons in the show.\n\n#### CONTINUITY:\n\nThere is an oblique reference to Angel when Buffy dreams of kissing Riley: he tells her he will make the sun go down. Buffy and Riley do kiss, in the street during the silence that has spread all over town. Xander and Giles continue to work together on matters arcane. Willow floated a pencil in \"Doppelgangland,\" and in \"Choices\" she staked a vampire with a pencil. She mentions she would like to float something bigger than a pencil in \"Hush\"; then she and Tara together use their powers to slam a soda machine against a door.\n\n#### FROM THE ORIGINAL TELEPLAY:\n\nThe following dialogue was cut for length from the Wicca group scene:\n\nCHERYL: \"Well, you missed last week. We did a healing chant for Chloe's ankle. She said the swelling went right down.\"\n\nNICOLE: \"What's she doing on a mountain bike, anyway?\"\n\nCHERYL: \"She was trying to impress Justin.\"\n\nWILLOW: \"I was actually talking more about real spells.\"\n\nHere are descriptions from the shooting script of two scenes:\n\nINT. TARA'S ROOM\u2014CONTINUING\n\nHer room is wicca-y and also painted black and depressed-y.\n\nEXT. CLOCK TOWER\u2014NIGHT\n\nFrom up here we can see the whole town\u2014or possibly much less than all of it, but I can hope\u2014and the collective breaths snake all across the town heading here.\n\nDescription of one of The Gentlemen:\n\nHe's old, bone white, bald\u2014Nosferatu meets Hellraiser by way of the Joker. Actually, he looks kind of like Mr. Burns, except that he can't stop his rictus-grin, and his teeth are gleaming metal.\n\n\"Danse Macabre,\" the classical music Giles plays during his presentation on The Gentlemen, was also used as the theme song for the UK production Jonathan Creek, which Anthony Stewart Head also appeared in.\n\n### This Year's Girl\n\nEpisode 4.15\n\nWRITTEN BY: Douglas Petrie\n\nDIRECTED BY: Michael Gershman\n\nGUEST STARS: Kristine Sutherland as Joyce, Amber Benson as Tara, Leonard Roberts as Forrest, Bailey Chase as Graham, Chet Grissom as Detective Clark, Alastair Duncan as Collins, Harry Groener as Mayor Wilkins, Eliza Dushku as Faith\n\nWITH: Jeff Ricketts as Weatherby, Kevin Owers as Smith\n\n#### THE PLOT THICKENS:\n\nFaith lies in her hospital bed in the basement of Sunnydale Hospital, dreaming of cold-hearted, murderous Buffy and a warm and caring Mayor Wilkins. When at last she defeats Buffy in one of her nightmares, she awakens from her coma to discover that Graduation Day has come and gone. She beats up a woman and takes her clothes. Her nurse alerts someone by phone and tells him to \"send the team.\" Making her way to the ruins of Sunnydale High, Faith faces the truth: the Mayor is dead.\n\nRiley also rises from his hospital bed and has to pull rank to leave the Initiative complex. He has kicked the meds Maggie Walsh was feeding him, but the wound Adam dealt him is still troublesome. Buffy is filled with joy at the sight of him, and their reunion is tender. She reminds him that he has choices, despite the fact that he's been trained to obey orders.\n\nSomeone contacts Buffy (we don't know who) to tell her that Faith has escaped, while Faith seeks Buffy out. Faith is enraged that Buffy seems to have forgotten all about her. She goads Buffy, reminding her rival that Buffy tried to kill her for her Slayer's blood in order to save Angel. And now Buffy's boinking some other guy. . . . Their fight is brutal, but inconclusive, as the police arrive and Faith disappears onto the streets.\n\nMeanwhile, \"the team\" arrives: three nasty-looking men who make themselves at home in Giles's condo and greet him familiarly.\n\nWillow and Tara are more of a couple now, Willow acting protectively toward Tara as she explains to her about Faith. Meanwhile, Faith is moved by the Mayor's love for her\u2014he made a farewell video for her. He also left her a magical device, a Draconian Katra, which will allow her to switch bodies with Buffy. She goes to Buffy's house and terrorizes Joyce, assuming that Buffy will come rescue her mother. Buffy crashes into the bedroom, rescuing her mother, and she and Faith have a battle royal all over the Summerses' home. The police sirens blare in the background\u2014Joyce has called 911\u2014and at the last possible moment, Faith makes the switch, with no one the wiser.\n\n#### QUOTE OF THE WEEK:\n\nXander talking strategy with the gang on whom to go after first, Faith or Adam:\n\n\"I'd hate to see the pursuit of a homicidal lunatic get in the way of pursuing a homicidal lunatic.\"\n\n#### THE AGONY AND THE ECSTASY:\n\nFaith knows how to hurt Buffy\u2014by reminding her of Angel. Buffy hurt Faith by destroying the Mayor. But Buffy and Riley's love appears very strong as they reunite. Tara and Willow are close and affectionate, clearly happy to have each other.\n\n#### POP-CULTURE IQ:\n\nWordplay we have known and loved: Trey Parker's film, Orgaszmo, which was executive-produced by Fran Rubel Kuzui and Kaz Kuzui. The Kuzuis also executive produced Buffy. Woody Allen's 1973 film Sleeper and Roger Vadim's Barbarella also featured Orgasmatrons. However, Xander is talking about an Initiative blaster:\n\n\"Now, if it was called 'The Orgasminator,' I'd be the first to try your basic button-press approach.\"\n\nBuffy, referring to the character played by Arnold Schwarzenegger in the Terminator movie franchise:\n\n\"He's the Terminator without the bashful charm.\"\n\nBuffy's referring to The Patty Duke Show, which ran from 1963\u20131966. It starred Patty Duke as lookalike cousins:\n\n\"She's my wacky identical cousin from England, and every time she visits, hijinks ensue.\"\n\n\"Marshal Dillon\" Summers wants Faith gone from Sunnydale in this reference to the city in Gunsmoke, a popular TV western series:\n\n\"If I were her, I'd get out of Dodge post-hasty.\"\n\nFaith's referring to The World According to Garp, a novel by John Irving, made into a film in 1982:\n\n\"In The World According to Joyce, Buffy's gonna come crashing through that door any minute.\"\n\nFaith asks a hospital visitor for the date. In the original script the answer was Tuesday, February eighth. It was changed to Friday, February twenty-fifth.\n\n#### CONTINUITY:\n\nThe blaster Xander is trying to repair is the faulty one Maggie Walsh gave Buffy when she tried to kill her in \"The I in Team.\" The duplicity of Maggie Walsh and the murky ethical status of the Initiative are kept in focus. The past with Faith\u2014\"Faith, Hope & Trick,\" \"Revelations,\" \"Bad Girls,\" \"Enemies,\" and \"Consequences\"\u2014is partially spelled out. Spike still has the chip in his head, which prevents him from hurting any human being\u2014no matter how much he might like to. Buffy tells Riley about the Watchers Council and about Faith.\n\n#### FROM THE ORIGINAL TELEPLAY:\n\nBuffy explains what kind of force she plans to use to get into the Initiative, in this line cut for length:\n\n\"Explosives, tear gas, grappling hooks.\"\n\nStage directions for one of Faith's dreams:\n\n[We cut back to the Mayor. He's being horribly, brutally HACKED APART by Buffy with her knife. He's real dead real fast. Finished with this prey, Buffy whips her gaze to Faith, impatient and peeved.]\n\n### Who Are You\n\nEpisode 4.16\n\nWRITTEN AND DIRECTED BY: Joss Whedon\n\nGUEST STARS: Kristine Sutherland as Joyce, Amber Benson as Tara, Leonard Roberts as Forrest, George Hertzberg as Adam, Chet Grissom as Detective Clark, Alastair Duncan as Collins, Emma Caulfield as Anya, Eliza Dushku as Faith\n\nWITH: Rick Stear as Boone, Jeff Ricketts as Weatherby, Kevin Owers as Smith\n\n#### THE PLOT THICKENS:\n\nTrapped inside Faith's body, Buffy is strapped to a gurney and loaded into an ambulance as Joyce and Faith, in Buffy's body, observe. Faith is able to fool Joyce as she mimics Buffy's speech patterns and movements, and she extricates herself from an uncomfortable moment of tenderness in which Joyce hugs her, by announcing that she's going to take a bath. Alone, she luxuriates in her new body, and she mocks Buffy's goody-goody attitude in front of the mirror.\n\nMeanwhile, in the hospital, Buffy frantically tries to get free of the doctors, nurses, and cops holding her down long enough to sedate her. She tries to explain that Faith has taken her body and is alone with her mother, but she finally succumbs to unconsciousness.\n\nWillow and Tara are in Tara's room, and Willow is frightened that Faith will come after her. Tara reminds her that since no one knows she, Tara, exists, Willow ought to be safe with her. It's clear she's hurt that Willow hasn't introduced her to her friends. Willow tries to explain that she's being possessive of Tara, rather than ashamed, and Tara glows with understanding.\n\nFaith buys a plane ticket with Joyce's credit card. While Buffy is being transported from the hospital to jail, a van deliberately pulls into the path of the police car, causing a crash. The men of \"the team\" drag Buffy into the van. They are the Watchers Council operatives. Faith as Buffy goes on over to Giles's house \"to kill time\" before her flight by chatting with them about the capture of \"Faith.\" Giles informs them all that the Watchers Council team has gotten hold of her. Faith is delighted. She's also having psychotic delusions of gutting Willow, but she manages to keep her psychotic interludes hidden from the others.\n\nPretending to be the good little soldier, she informs the others that she's going to go patrolling for Adam. Instead, she goes to the Bronze to party. There, she runs into Spike, whom she's never met before. Once she realizes who he is, she baits him mercilessly, coming on to him and then laughing in his face.\n\nAdam has taken over the lair of Boone, a young vampire. He kills one of Boone's lackeys to get the attention of the others, then offers them some interesting perspectives on their existence, and on his own personal mission.\n\nBuffy wakes up shackled in the Watchers Council van. The assassins are not loving her, and they are not believing her story that she's really Buffy Summers inside Faith's body.\n\nBack at the Bronze, Willow brings Tara to the club for the first time. They're holding hands, clearly a couple. Willow spies \"Buffy,\" chugalugging and flirting with a bunch of guys in a most un-Buffy-like way. She introduces Faith to Tara; while she goes off for drinks, Faith verbally savages Tara, making fun of her stammer and making sure poor Tara knows just how much Willow loves Oz.\n\nBut Faith begins to experience what it's like to be well regarded: after she dusts a vamp, the girl he was feeding on shakes Faith with the depth of her gratitude. When she seeks out Riley and tries to work her sexual wiles on him, going for the kink, he stops her and makes tender love to her. Believing he's with his Buffy, he tells her for the first time that he loves her.\n\nBuffy manages to escape from the assassins, and Tara tells Willow that Buffy's not herself. Willow and she work intense magick, sending Willow to the nether realms. They conjure a Katra for Buffy, to switch her back into her own body, and find her at Giles's condo. They tell her that for it to work, she must make physical contact with Faith.\n\nAdam has launched his assault against humanity by sending Boone and the other vampires to a church. Faith, still masquerading as Buffy, charges to the rescue. She accidentally meets up with Riley, who's on the scene because he was going to church. The real Buffy and company show up.\n\nBuffy and Faith fight the vampires, and then each other. Buffy manages to clasp hands with her, and they switch back into their own bodies. Buffy is left to deal with the aftermath of Faith's escapades\u2014including Riley's having slept with her\u2014while Faith catches a train out of town, trying to process everything that's happened.\n\n#### QUOTE OF THE WEEK:\n\nFacing down Adam's vampires, Faith rises to the occasion:\n\nFAITH: \"You're not gonna kill these people.\"\n\nBOONE: \"Why not?\"\n\nFAITH: \"Because it's wrong.\"\n\nThere were six drafts of the script for \"Who Are You,\" the first draft delivered on January 24, 2000, and the final pages distributed to the cast, staff, and crew on February 2, 2000.\n\n#### THE AGONY AND THE ECSTASY:\n\nFaith experiences tenderness and kindness for perhaps the first time in her life; her lovemaking with Riley, followed by his declaration of love, throws her into a panic. Willow tries to explain her intense feelings to Tara, who clearly reciprocates. Tara and Willow bond ever closer as they work magick together. Buffy's devastated when she discovers that Riley\u2014unknowingly\u2014slept with Faith.\n\n#### CONTINUITY:\n\nThis is part two of a two-part episode. Faith is unimpressed when the Watchers Council sends someone to retrieve the rogue Slayer \"because that worked out so well when Wesley tried it\" (in \"Consequences\"). They discuss Adam, who's still at large. Spike brings Faith up to date on the chip in his head. Boone, the vampire, becomes Adam's mouthpiece in the church confrontation. One of the assassins reminds Faith that Buffy and Giles are no longer part of the Council. Willow tells Tara that she, Xander, and Buffy used to live at the Bronze. Faith has switched bodies with Buffy and goes after Riley, the same as she did with Angel. Willow mentions hyena possession, which occurred to Xander in \"The Pack.\" Riley mentions the drugs Maggie Walsh had been giving him. Buffy's still a bad driver, which has been a recurring joke in many episodes, including \"Band Candy.\" In trying to convince Giles that she's who she insists she is, Buffy makes reference to his being a demon (\"A New Man\") and Olivia (\"Hush\"), blowing up Sunnydale High (\"Graduation Day, Part Two\"), and his having had sex with her mother (\"Band Candy\").\n\n#### FROM THE ORIGINAL TELEPLAY:\n\nThe following line of Adam's was cut due to length:\n\n\"You are here to be my first. To let them know I'm coming. I am the end of all life, of all magick. I'm the war between man and demon, the war that no one can win. You're a part of that now. You have to show me you're ready.\"\n\n### Superstar\n\nEpisode 4.17\n\nWRITTEN BY: Jane Espenson\n\nDIRECTED BY: David Grossman\n\nGUESTS STARS: Danny Strong as Jonathan, Amber Benson as Tara, Bailey Chase as Graham, Robert Patrick Benedict as Jape, John Saint Ryan as Colonel Haviland, George Hertzberg as Adam\n\nWITH: Erica Luttrell as Karen, Adam Clark as Sergeant, Chanie Costello as Inga, Julie Costello as Ilsa\n\n#### THE PLOT THICKENS:\n\nWho ya gonna call? Jonathan!\n\nJonathan Levenson, former Sunnydale High classmate of Buffy and company, is the coolest, most important person in the world. Jonathan is stronger and more agile than the Slayer; a computer hacker cleverer than Willow; idolized by everyone, and the inventor of everything.\n\nBuffy and Riley are feeling very awkward around each other; while Riley didn't realize it was Faith he slept with, nevertheless he did sleep with her. The two concentrate on finding Adam, who is still on the loose. Jonathan gets to the heart of the problem for Buffy: when it mattered most, Riley didn't look into her eyes and realize she wasn't looking back at him.\n\nColonel Haviland, the new head of the Initiative, reviews the troops and explains that he's there while the government conducts a facility review. Their primary mission remains the recovery of Adam. To that end, Colonel Haviland asks the aid of their tactical consultant . . . Jonathan. He has detected Adam's internal power source: a small reservoir of uranium 235 encased in lead.\n\nWhile Jonathan is briefing Riley and the other Commandos, Karen, a fan of his, is attacked by a hideous monster with a distinctive symbol on its forehead.\n\nJonathan offers Riley advice on how to get back together with Buffy; at the Bronze, Xander accuses Anya of murmuring \"Jonathan\" during a critical private moment. All is forgotten as Jonathan takes the stage and begins singing. Then Karen enters, bloodied and weeping.\n\nIt seems she was attacked on his property; Buffy, Riley, Jonathan, and Karen go to investigate. When she sketches the symbol that was on the monster, something registers with Jonathan. Buffy notices, but he quickly recovers and insists it was nothing. He assures her that he'll take care of the monster himself.\n\nBut Adam knows it's something. He knows that Jonathan has cast some sort of spell, because he himself is impervious to it.\n\nShortly after that, Tara is attacked by the monster. Buffy's faith in Jonathan is badly shaken. It occurs to her that some of Jonathan's accomplishments don't add up: He's only eighteen, yet he's graduated from medical school. He starred in The Matrix, but he never left town.\n\nThen she realizes Jonathan sports the identical mark as the monster, and she pressures him to go on recon with her to find it. While the two of them search, the others research the mark. It turns out that Jonathan did an Augmentation spell on himself to make everyone idolize him. But he also created the monster. Kill the monster, and the spell is broken.\n\nWith Jonathan's help, Buffy prevails. The world becomes as it should be, with Jonathan something of a nebbish. However, the advice he gave Buffy and Riley sticks . . . and they reunite.\n\n#### QUOTE OF THE WEEK:\n\nControlled by Jonathan's spell, the gang's not used to Buffy's leadership skills:\n\nWILLOW [trying it out]: \"Buffy was right. Buffy was right.\"\n\nANYA: \"Doesn't sound very likely, does it?\"\n\nThe Jonathan comic features a brown-eyed super-Jonathan, but his eyes are actually crystal blue.\n\n#### THE AGONY AND THE ECSTASY:\n\nBuffy and Riley are having a lot of trouble dealing with the fact that Riley slept with Faith. Xander's jealous of Jonathan. In the end Buffy and Riley are able to put the past behind them, and Xander and Anya are solid again. Willow and Tara are still very much in the honeymoon stage.\n\n#### POP-CULTURE IQ:\n\nAron Nimzowitsch is one of the pioneers of hypermodern chess. In his magical world, Jonathan is a chess master:\n\n\"The Nimzowitsch Defense. Let's see if I remember. . . .\"\n\nThis famous theorem was not proven for more than 350 years after Fermat first described it; Willow's talking about Jonathan, who solved it, of course:\n\n\"He got a perfect score, and then he re-created the original proof of Fermat's last theorem in the margins around the answer bubbles.\"\n\nBuffy's seeing the illogic in all the things she and others believe about Jonathan. Joss Whedon has said the classic film is one of his favorites:\n\n\"He starred in The Matrix, but he never left town?\"\n\n#### CONTINUITY:\n\nSpike is still defanged; Adam is still at large. In this reality Buffy gave Jonathan the Class Protector award at the prom. Once the jig is up, Jonathan refers to the events in \"Earshot,\" when Buffy stopped him from committing suicide in the bell tower. Anya's past as a vengeance demon is discussed.\n\n\"Superstar\" author Jane Espenson also wrote \"Earshot.\" She and Danny Strong became friends.\n\n#### FROM THE ORIGINAL TELEPLAY:\n\nThe following line of Spike's was cut due to length:\n\n\"You're a bleeding idiot, you are, Jonathan. 'Cuz you'll be the first victim and you'll be stone dead before you hit the ground. [then, to himself, proudly] The worst kind of scum.\"\n\n### Primeval\n\nEpisode 4.21\n\nWRITTEN BY: David Fury\n\nDIRECTED BY: James A. Contner\n\nGUEST STARS: Leonard Roberts as Forrest, Amber Benson as Tara, Bailey Chase as Graham, Jack Stehlin as Dr. Angleman, Conor O'Farrell as Colonel McNamara, George Hertzberg as Adam, Emma Caulfield as Anya, Lindsay Crouse as Professor Maggie Walsh\n\n#### THE PLOT THICKENS:\n\nAdam reveals to Riley that he has activated a chip in Riley's arm, placed there by Maggie Walsh. He controls Riley's movements and actions now, even to speak or to be silent. He reveals the master plan, to create \"demonoids\" like himself, amalgams of demons and humans. Spike shows, enjoying watching Riley's frustration, but is frustrated himself when Adam refuses to take out Spike's chip . . . just yet. Spike didn't quite think through his plan to separate the Slayer from her friends\u2014Willow is decrypting the disks he \"smuggled\" from the Initiative, but she's not speaking to Buffy now, and vice versa.\n\nWillow forgot her laptop at Giles's condo. She and Tara go back for it, and Giles is extremely hungover. They leave awkwardly, with no resolution. Anya tries to cheer up Xander, who is worried that his friends are right and that he is a directionless loser. Adam introduces Riley to the reanimated Maggie Walsh and Dr. Angleman, who will help Adam create demonoid creatures for the new world order. Dead Forrest is there as well. He is sentient and actually quite pleased about his transformation.\n\nBuffy is searching for Adam back at the cave where she last saw him. Spike is there, pretending that he's looking for \"a little weekend getaway place.\" He's awkward in his attempts to encourage Buffy to go down into the Initiative all by herself, and she grows suspicious of his motives. As the disks decrypt themselves, Buffy calls Willow and gets the four\u2014Xander, Giles, Willow, and Buffy herself\u2014to meet and clear the air. Tara and Anya sit out the peace talks.\n\nThe four realize that Spike deliberately set them against each other. They also acknowledge that he was able to do so only because they had grown apart. As they talk, they compare notes and figure out Adam's plan to build a new race from dead humans and dead demons in an all-out war between Initiative Commandos and captured Hostile Sub-Terrestrials (HSTs).\n\nBuffy, Xander, Willow, and Giles sneak into the Initiative via the elevator shaft and have a teary make-up session at the bottom, but Colonel McNamara and his men are waiting for them. Buffy demands that he listen to her, but he's already convinced she and the others are anarchists; his opinion isn't changed when Giles explains that the object he's holding is a magick gourd. The power grid goes down and backup doesn't respond. Adam releases all the demons and the carnage begins.\n\nBuffy tries to get McNamara to let her fight, but he orders two of his men to lock up the lot of them. As soon as McNamara is out of the room, Buffy clocks both of the guards left in charge of them. She leads the way and they battle everything in their paths. Spike is waling on demons as he looks for an escape route.\n\nWillow jacks in, searching for Adam. She discovers evidence of a secret lab behind room 314. That's where Buffy expects to battle Adam. Spike is now fighting the demons (and Adam) because he didn't deliver Buffy alone, so Adam won't take his chip out.\n\nXander, Willow, and Giles magickally imbue Buffy with supernatural gifts surpassing her current Slayer abilities. Once he digs the chip out of his arm, Riley joins in, battling Maggie, Dr. Angleman, and Forrest. Speaking in Sumerian, Buffy is able to rip the power center\u2014the heart\u2014right out of Adam. The battle rages all around them, and Spike protects the Scooby Gang as they finish up.\n\nColonel McNamara is killed, but many other Commandos get out, thanks to Buffy, Riley, and the others. After a debriefing about the incident, the military brass decide to \"erase\" the Initiative: one suit goes so far as to suggest they sow the ground with salt.\n\n#### QUOTE OF THE WEEK:\n\nBuffy, explaining the way things are to Colonel McNamara:\n\n\"This isn't your business. It's mine. You, the Initiative, the suits in the Pentagon . . . you're all messing with primeval forces you can't begin to understand. I'm the Slayer. And you're playing on my turf.\"\n\nLindsay Crouse was disappointed when she discovered Maggie Walsh was going to be killed before the end of the season. As often happens on Buffy, that didn't prevent her return to the show.\n\n#### THE AGONY AND THE ECSTASY:\n\nAnya reassures Xander that no matter what, she loves him; Willow and Buffy tell each other that they love each other, then shower affection on Xander. The four original members of the Slayerettes essentially reunify when they combine to fight Adam. Riley is filled with regret at seeing the zombiefied Forrest.\n\n#### POP-CULTURE IQ:\n\nSpike, informing Adam that Buffy's in the Initiative, is parodying the phrase \"The Eagle has landed,\" spoken as the lunar module Eagle touched down on the moon's surface in 1969:\n\n\"The Slayer has landed.\"\n\nSpike is referring to Alice in Wonderland, a nineteenth-century fantasy novel written by Lewis Carroll (Charles Dodgson). He's anticipating that Willow will decrypt the disks for Buffy:\n\n\"The little witch gives her the info and\u2014pop\u2014Alice heads down the rabbit hole.\"\n\n#### CONTINUITY:\n\nMaggie Walsh's mad plan to merge humanity and demonity is finally revealed. Spike's left with the chip in his head after the destruction of Adam. Forrest, Dr. Angleman, and Maggie Walsh return, though they are reanimated dead. Buffy and company rediscover their original affection for one another after deconstructing their various grievances from \"The Yoko Factor.\" Xander asked Riley in \"This Year's Girl\" if he had a chip in his brain; turns out it was in his shoulder. The final battle occurs, and as usual, Sunnydale history will not record it.\n\n#### FROM THE ORIGINAL TELEPLAY:\n\nWillow and Tara discuss Willow's computer hacking skills in this exchange cut due to length:\n\nWILLOW: \"I'm scaring you now, huh?\"\n\nTARA: \"A little. In a good way. It's like a different kind of magick.\"\n\n### Restless\n\nEpisode 4.22\n\nWRITTEN AND DIRECTED BY: Joss Whedon\n\nGUEST STARS: Kristine Sutherland as Joyce, Amber Benson as Tara, Mercedes McNab as Harmony, David Welles as The Cheese Man, Michael Harney as Man, George Hertzberg as Adam, Emma Caulfield as Anya, Seth Green as Oz, Armin Shimerman as Principal Snyder\n\nWITH: Sharon Ferguson as the Primitive, Phina Oruche as Olivia, Rob Boltin as Soldier\n\n#### THE PLOT THICKENS:\n\nAfter the battle against Adam and his army, Buffy and her friends go to her house to detox by watching movies. Riley's off to testify on \"the administration's own Bay of Mutated Pigs,\" with hopes of getting an honorable discharge.\n\nXander's vote for cinematic release is Apocalypse Now, but he has plenty of \"chick-and-English guy\" flicks in case it doesn't please. But they all fall asleep before the FBI warning is over, and each has a dream that speaks in some way of their personal condition. Each is attacked by a strange, savage woman, seeking their destruction via the same aspect of themselves that they used to enjoin magickally with Buffy: Willow's spirit, Xander's heart, and Giles's intellect, or brain.\n\nWillow dreams of being safe with Tara, although they appear, at times, to be in a remote desert. She is getting ready for drama class, and she runs into Oz. Despite the fact that this is her first class, Giles is directing their production of Death of a Salesman. Harmony is in it, as a vampire. Buffy is a flapper. Riley is a cowboy. Anya and Xander both appear. The theme of the dream seems to be that Willow has been playing a part and that acting is about hiding. Once the truth is known, she will be punished. Buffy rips off Willow's costume, revealing the outfit Willow wore the first time she met Buffy. Said truth appears to be that deep inside, she's still the frightened, insecure Willow she was back then.\n\nWhile Oz and Tara whisper about her, Willow tries to present her book report. Xander is bored out of his mind, even when the Primitive attacks her and sucks the life right out of her, both in her dream and in reality.\n\nXander dreams that Joyce comes on to him, but he ends up in his basement instead of her bedroom. Then he's on a playground. Giles and Spike are on swings, and Spike declares that he's going to become a Watcher. Giles says that Spike is like a son to him. Xander acknowledges that these are both notions he's considered. Buffy refers to him as her big brother. Then he's in his ice-cream truck. Anya talks about getting back into vengeance while Tara and Willow, tarted up, kiss each other and invite him to come into the back of the truck with them. Everything is mixed up with Apocalypse Now and continually being sent back to his basement. Snyder tells him he's a whipping boy, and there are intimations that his time is running out. In his dream his father taunts him with the knowledge that he'll never get out of the basement; he hasn't the heart for it. Then he plunges his hand into Xander's chest; his hand becomes the hand of the Primitive, and he rips out his heart.\n\nGiles, in his dream, faces the notion of the road less traveled, as Olivia appears pushing a baby carriage. Buffy appears in a childish sundress, urging him to let her have fun at a strange carnival. Spike (in black and white) has hired himself out as a sideshow attraction, striking scary vampire poses as the flashbulbs pop at him. Then they're at the Bronze, where Anya is doing standup. Giles performs a rock opera (\"The Exposition Song\") and pieces together that the spell they cast with Buffy has released some kind of primal evil. He tries to warn Buffy, but the Primitive appears and slices open his head.\n\nNow it's Buffy's turn. She is standing in her bedroom. Anya, in her bed, urges her to wake up, to no avail. Tara appears, talking to Buffy as the Slayer makes the bed at seven-thirty, recalling that she and Faith just made it. Tara informs her that she doesn't know what she's doing. Buffy begins to look for her friends, and finds her mother living in the wall. She moves on, finding Adam, completely human, sitting opposite Riley at a glass conference table inside the Initiative. They seem to be creating a new world order. A loudspeaker announces that the demons have escaped; Buffy begins covering herself in mud as she finds herself facing Tara and the Primitive. Tara translates for the Primitive. The woman is the First Slayer. She and Buffy battle furiously, Buffy insisting that she, unlike the First Slayer, is more than rage. Buffy is not alone and she does not sleep on a pile of bones. And she wants her friends back.\n\nThe Primitive stabs her over and over\u2014in the enjoining, Buffy was the Hand, the physical vessel for all the magick\u2014but Buffy does not accept that fate. She wakes up\u2014as do the others, unhurt.\n\nAfter discussing what happened, Buffy goes upstairs to use the bathroom. She tosses off the comment, \"Yeah, well, at least you all didn't dream about the guy with the cheese . . . don't know where the hell that came from. . . .\"\n\nOf course, they all dreamed about The Cheese Man.\n\nAs Buffy stops on the threshold of her bedroom, Tara, in voice-over, promises Buffy once more that she has no idea what she is, and what's coming.\n\n#### QUOTE OF THE WEEK:\n\nThe Cheese Man, with slices of cheese on his head, addresses Giles during his dream:\n\n\"I wear the cheese. It does not wear me.\"\n\n#### THE AGONY AND THE ECSTASY:\n\nIn the dream, Riley and Buffy may or may not be together; Anya is talking about becoming a demon again, while Xander, who almost sleeps with Joyce, and with Tara and Willow together as well, continues to wind up in the basement. Willow and Tara are together, but Tara reveals that she is not all that she seems. Giles appears to be facing a choice: home and hearth, or something different?\n\n#### POP-CULTURE IQ:\n\nDiscussing the post-battle viewing selections for the evening. Apocalypse Now is based on the novella The Heart of Darkness, updated to take place during the Vietnam War:\n\nXANDER: \"And I'm putting in a preemptive bid for Apocalypse Now. Heh?\"\n\nWILLOW: \"Did you get anything less Heart-of-Darknessy?\"\n\nIn the line \"Come back before Dawn,\" Tara is referring to the new character, Dawn, who appears in season five.\n\n#### CONTINUITY:\n\nJoyce meets Riley \"finally.\" Riley's future will be based on what Graham and the others testify about the Initiative. As dreams often are, this episode is fraught with threads referring back to past episodes and characters. Principal Snyder even makes an appearance, standing in for Marlon Brando during Xander's \"Apocalyptic\" nightmare. Willow's real-life decision to take drama represents a giant step forward in self-confidence; in \"Nightmares,\" her worst nightmare was performing in front of an audience. But in her dream, she's the shy, unconfident Willow again, making a reference to Madame Butterfly, which was the opera that in \"Nightmares\" she was forced to perform in. She's also dressed exactly the way she was when she first met Buffy. In Giles's dream, Olivia returns, as does Harmony. Buffy reminds us of Faith's strange conversation with her in \"Graduation Day, Part Two\" about seven-three-oh, and also about making the bed with Faith\u2014which was actually Faith's dream.\n\n#### FROM THE ORIGINAL TELEPLAY:\n\nBuffy talks a little wacky to her mom, in this line cut due to length:\n\n\"I think they might be in trouble-danger.\"\n\nFrom the script, a description of The Cheese Man:\n\n[A skittish, balding, bespectacled little fellow in an old woolen suit. A voice not unlike Peter Lorre's.]\n\nMore stage directions:\n\n[And at this moment, as Giles continues to speak, he is suddenly DUBBED INTO FRENCH. We can see him talking, but we can't understand a word any more than Xander can, unless we speak French, in which case la-di-da aren't we intellectual, I'm not Joe DICTIONARY, ALL RIGHT?]\n\nGILES (FRENCH DUBBING OVER): \"\u2014the house where we're all sleeping. All your friends are there having a wonderful time and getting on with their lives. The creature can't hurt you there.\"\n\nXANDER: \"What? Go where? I don't understand.\"\n\nGILES (STILL DUBBED): \"Oh, for God's sake, this is no time for your idiotic games!\"\n\n[Anya rushes to them, worried. And dubbed.]\n\nANYA (WITH THE DUBBING): \"Xander! You have to come with us now! Everybody's waiting for you!\"\n\nGILES (DUBLY): \"Honey, I don't\u2014I can't hear you. . . .\"\n\n[Anya grabs his arm, starts dragging him.]\n\nANYA (DUBBAGE): \"It's not important. I'll take you there.\"\n\n## CATCHING UP WITH THE CAST AND CREW\n\n### GEORGE HERTZBERG (ADAM)\n\nA lot of time has passed since the days of Buffy, but the fandom is still out there and passionate, and new generations are coming into it. What does it feel like to be a part of something so enduring?\n\nGEORGE: \"Fantastic and incredible. It's not something I think anyone knew would happen back when the show was shooting, certainly not when I was on, [which was] primarily during season four. It's been an awesome and life-changing experience to meet incredible people from around the world, all of whom have been touched in some way by the show.\"\n\nYou went back to school and received your MBA from Pepperdine before you relocated back to Texas with your family in 2007. What is life like these days?\n\nGEORGE: \"I have been focused on raising three healthy boys (four, if you include me) in the state where I grew up. While I have done a few minor roles on TV since relocating, I transitioned out of acting and into business. That said, now that my boys are getting older, I'm looking at possibly returning to the stage, my first acting love.\"\n\nLooking back now, what stands out to you about the process of being cast as Adam\u2014about the audition or your first look at the script, or both?\n\nGEORGE: \"The audition piece was the monologue from my second episode. 'I'm a kinematically redundant biomechanical demonoid . . .' I remember calling my manager after I received the sides to say, 'WTF?' His response was, 'Just make it your own, man, and make it real.' I went into the audition and a couple of folks I didn't recognize were in the room alongside the casting director. I was fully committed and believing these nonsensical words. I went through it once, and when I finished, a smallish guy that reminded me of my college roommate said thank you and turned to the other guy to say something as I left. I didn't get ten feet from the door when the casting director came out and called me back in. The guy asked me to take a few minutes outside to change a couple things in my delivery and then come back in. I made the adjustments, and the guy, who I later learned was Joss Whedon, was impressed. An hour later my manager called to tell me I booked it and I needed to go to the valley and get a full-body cast . . . the journey had just begun!\"\n\nYou still do conventions from time to time, and they often come with some pretty strange fan interactions. If you're willing to share . . . what are the best and worst fan moments you can remember?\n\nGEORGE: \"Literally upward of 95 percent of interactions have been overwhelmingly positive. The Buffy fandom seem to be very smart, very creative, and generally friendly and good. Now, to balance that there was once a gentleman who I believe was a postal worker, judging by his authentic uniform, who came through an autograph line and then proceeded to hide out in a corner and film the guests for the next thirty minutes. That said, the most shocked I've ever been by an interaction was when I saw my character tattooed on a person's back. I was in Europe, and at the prompting of a nice young girl, her father raised up his shirt and bam, there was the whole principal cast and selected guest stars, including yours truly.\"\n\nSo much time has passed. What are your favorite behind-the-scenes memories of your time on the show?\n\nGEORGE: \"Sarah was always very focused and yet friendly to me on set. Here I was, standing about six feet seven inches with boots on, sweating under lights and heavy makeup, and she asked about getting me cooled off. She was friendly and helpful. Marc Blucas was a good dude\u2014easygoing, friendly. I remember he had a custom van he used to drive with a full queen-size bed in the back and a PS3. Between his scenes he'd go hang out and play games sometimes. Other than those, there's always the common, great story of arriving before everyone to get in makeup, and then getting wrapped before everyone and hitting the craft-service table only to get stares and glares from people who are thinking, Who's this guy loading up on trail mix and Emergen-C? It wasn't until my final episode in season four when everyone finally knew what I looked like out of makeup. That was a great time. I only had to arrive an hour early instead of the four and a half for makeup and wardrobe.\"\n\nI've heard it said that working on a long-running TV series is a lot like high school, with circles of friends and then those people you wish you'd hung out with more. Who do you wish you'd hung out with more?\n\nGEORGE: \"Hmm . . . I hung out with James Marsters quite a bit while I was filming. We lived pretty close to one another, and he was pretty down to earth. Other than that, James Leary\u2014whom I never worked with on the show but met doing conventions\u2014is a great friend of mine to this day. He's a great, solid mensch, a very talented guy whom I have incredible respect for and whom, without Buffy, I would probably have never met. I certainly wouldn't have all the insane memories.\"\n\n### MARC BLUCAS (RILEY FINN)\n\nYou were a basketball star at your alma mater, Wake Forest University, and went on to play in a European league after graduation. How did the transition from court to camera come about?\n\nMARC: \"It was an accident. I was a business major at Wake Forest, had a full scholarship to law school, and had started a business with the late NASCAR legend Dale Earnhardt. All was going according to plan, when Wake's sports-information director called me to say a local movie in North Carolina had come to town, and they needed a baby-faced white kid who could play basketball. I auditioned, got the job, and simply caught the bug. It was an interesting conversation with my parents when I said I was turning my back on law school and a successful business to move to California to pursue something I'd never done before.\"\n\nYou had a number of film and TV roles prior to being cast as Riley Finn, but Buffy was your first recurring role. Was that a turning point for you as an actor?\n\nMARC: \"I hadn't really done much before Buffy\u2014a few small gigs\u2014and I frankly had no idea what I was walking into. In hindsight, I wish I was more seasoned and mature back then to appreciate how good the show was\u2014I was just too green to get it.\"\n\nYou've had all sorts of film and TV roles since Buffy, including long stints on Necessary Roughness and Underground, and a major role in the film Knight and Day, alongside Tom Cruise and Cameron Diaz. Of the many parts you've played, which role would you hope Buffy fans only familiar with you as Riley would track down and watch, if they haven't seen it?\n\nMARC: \"I don't watch the things I do, so I certainly wouldn't wish that on anyone else.\"\n\nLooking back now, what stands out to you about the process of being cast as Riley\u2014about the audition or your first look at the script, or both?\n\nMARC: \"The thing that stands out the most is what Joss did for me. The audition process was pretty standard\u2014casting director first, then a callback with a few producers, then a callback to read with Joss. He then narrowed it to two people, who had to read opposite Sarah. The night before that audition I got undercut playing basketball and threw out my back\u2014I couldn't move. I went to the audition in flip-flops and leaned against a wall. After I sucked, I apologized for wasting their time and wished them luck. That night, Joss called me at home and said, 'I know you're the guy; I've seen you do it. Come back when you're better, and I'll tape you and Sarah again.' We did that two weeks later. He gave me a second chance in a town that isn't known for them. I won't ever forget that.\"\n\nDid you know what was in store for Riley when you were cast, that he would become Buffy's boyfriend and have such a major role to play in the series?\n\nMARC: \"Joss kept things pretty close to the vest, especially back then. I knew that Riley and Buffy would have an attempt at romance. I also knew after Angel that would be an insurmountable mountain. I distinctly remember Joss telling me to stay offline. I asked, 'Why?' And he replied, 'Because they're gonna hate you!' And he was right.\"\n\nSo much time has passed. What are your favorite behind-the-scenes memories of your time on the show?\n\nMARC: \"I loved the crew on that show. I'm still in touch with a handful of those guys. Being so new to the industry, and that show already being a big hit, they were very patient with me. Especially Sarah\u2014I couldn't have asked for a better person to have my first big role alongside. As frustrating as I know it was for her at times, she always knew I was trying and working my ass off, and I think she respected that.\"\n\nEveryone says that working on a long-running TV series is a lot like high school, with circles of friends and then those people you wish you'd hung out with more. Who do you wish you'd hung out with more?\n\nMARC: \"Well, Joss is currently writing and directing some of the biggest movies in the business, so I guess him. Ha! No, it happened at the right time, with the right people for me. I have no regrets, as I made some really good friends during that year and a half.\"\n\nWhat are the best and worst fan experiences you've had?\n\nMARC: \"Just this year I did my first convention . . . funny how the industry's view of conventions has changed over the years. Early on it was career suicide to go, and now it's career suicide not to go. But I had an amazing time\u2014many of the people there were rediscovering Buffy again by watching it with their kids. Maybe that nearly twenty-year gap was needed for people to separate the actor from the character\u2014I know it was good for me! No one threw shit at me, at least.\"\n\nWhat are you working on now, and what does the future hold for Marc Blucas?\n\nMARC: \"I've been really lucky in that I can make a living doing what I love and still be a real father and husband. I'm at my perfect level of celebrity: 99 percent of the world could give a shit, but I get enough recognition to stroke my ego and let me know I at least have some kind of career. I live on a farm in Pennsylvania with my wife and kids and animals and couldn't be happier with the ups and downs that life has delivered. I'm glad Buffy was a small part of that.\"\n\n### JAMES C. LEARY (CLEM)\n\nYou've done a series of blogs called Confessions of a G-List Celebrity, in which you talk about your Hollywood dreams, your time as Clem on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the wonderful and the awful things that resulted, and your retreat from Los Angeles. Folks can go and read the blog for the full story, but what prompted you to be so brutally frank, and how has your honesty been received?\n\nJAMES: \"Hmm . . . well, part of it had to do with being in recovery and wanting to own up to the crappy things I had done\u2014when something like that goes out, there is no hiding from that stuff anymore. There is a saying: 'You are only as sick as your secrets,' and most people had this image of me as this 'fun-loving, wacky nice guy,' who maybe liked to party just a little too much\u2014but it felt like a mask. People didn't see the aftermath or that 'wacky nice guy' was just a cover to hide insecurity. People got hurt, jobs lost, relationships ruined because I couldn't be honest. When Clare Kramer (and Brian Keathley) approached me to do something for GeekNation, after talking about ideas, we settled on this concept of me just being brutally honest . . . but you know, in a funny way.\n\n\"The other reason is that I think people have this image of Hollywood actors\u2014that it is this glamorous lifestyle full of parties and pampering and piles of cash\u2014and while that may be true for the very, very top percentage of actors, for everyone else it is a daily grind to get work. There aren't a lot of people who talk about the everyday struggles of the rank-and-file actor, and I thought maybe I could shed some light on that.\n\n\"And finally, I had hoped that by sharing my story\u2014good, bad, and ugly\u2014that maybe I could help someone else who was struggling through something similar. To show that no matter how far you've fallen or how many mistakes you've made, there is a way back.\n\n\"A few people were upset by the revealing of such personal details . . . and I have to take full responsibility for that, but overwhelmingly the response was very positive. It was one of the scariest things I've ever done in my life, putting it out there\u2014and I'm grateful I took the leap.\"\n\nLooking back now, what stands out to you about the process of being cast as Clem\u2014about the audition or your first look at the script, or both?\n\nJAMES: \"The writing. Always the writing. When I got the sides for the audition I was so excited it was a scene with Spike and Buffy. I was a huge fan of the show, so I was super excited to get to audition. I was lucky enough that I knew the casting associate, and she brought me right in to the producers. That can be a double-edged sword, but I like having an audience. I knew the show well and decided to read my lines as if my character were human and for as much humor as I could. Once I got the first laugh in that room I knew in my gut I had the gig. One of the few times I'd ever had that feeling.\"\n\nDid you have any idea after that first episode that Clem would be back, and at what stage did you start to realize what a fan favorite he'd become?\n\nJAMES: \"I really didn't. I mean, I certainly hoped, and I knew the show had a habit of bringing characters back. It's funny: at the end of my day of shooting for that first episode, James Marsters and I were chatting and I expressed how awesome it would be to come back, and he said, 'You're funny. Trust me\u2014you'll be back.' I thought, Yeah, he says this to all the day players. But sure enough, when I came back a few months later for 'Older and Far Away,' where I got to shoot for the full week, he came right up to me and said, 'See! Told you you'd be back.'\n\n\"I don't think it hit me what a fan favorite Clem was until I started doing conventions the following year. I certainly had no idea while I was shooting. I was just happy to keep coming back, because I was having such a fun time. It still seems surreal to me, even after all these years. I only did eight episodes over two years, but for whatever reason Clem struck a chord, and I'm grateful for it. The role truly changed my life (both good and bad)\u2014I've been all over the world and gotten to meet so many fans to whom the show means so much. As an actor, that is what you do this for\u2014to affect people, to make them laugh or cry or forget about the crappy day they've just had.\"\n\nA lot of the cast members from Buffy still get recognized in public on a regular basis, but you were under makeup the whole time\u2014virtually unrecognizable, except to hardcore fans. Is that a good thing? Do people recognize you outside of convention settings? And is it strange to shift back and forth between ordinary day-to-day life and those convention settings?\n\nJAMES: \"I think it was a good thing and a bad thing. Good in the sense that I could and still can go just about anywhere. I never had to deal with what the other actors had to as far as, say, not being able to go to the mall or out to eat without being recognized. (And look, that comes with the territory, it's part of the gig.) So I was able to maintain my privacy and anonymity. Unfortunately, it also meant that casting directors didn't recognize me. Because I was in makeup, they felt like they didn't get a sense of what I could do. I'm not sure why that is, but in talking to other actors who work with makeup I certainly wasn't alone in that thought. I even remember getting called into an agent's office because his assistants loved the show, only to get in to meet him and have him say, 'Oh, you were in makeup. . . . Yeah . . . Sorry, not much I can do for you.'\n\n\"Shifting back and forth from cons to regular life proved very hard for me. I'm an extrovert in every sense of the word. I love attention. Being the life of the party, and at cons that was the name of the game. Where it was hard for some of the top of show actors to mingle with the fans due to the mayhem that sometimes occurred, I could (and always did) hang out. At home I was a struggling actor waiting tables and auditioning for herpes commercials, but at cons . . . I was a damn rock star. So the transition from that much attention was tough for me.\"\n\nWe've talked about how conventions come with some pretty strange fan interactions. If you're willing to share . . . what are the best and worst fan moments you can remember?\n\nJAMES: \"The best moments are always when someone tells a story about how the show helped them through a hard time. From divorces to deaths in the family to just getting them through a deep depression\u2014the show kept them going. As an actor that is what we strive for\u2014we want to affect people. Onstage you get that interaction immediately, but with film and TV it's different\u2014you don't get the instant feedback, so to hear that from people really means a lot.\n\n\"Worst fan moments\u2014hmm, I'd say it's like that old SNL sketch with William Shatner. Occasionally there are folks that have a hard time distinguishing the character from reality. There have also been the odd inappropriate touch or hug that lasts too long, and people who share a little too much personal information: 'I've written thirty pages of slash fan fiction between Clem and Spike\u2014would you like me to read it to you?' But the majority of interactions are very positive. It's why I love cons so much.\"\n\nWhat are your favorite behind-the-scenes memories of your time on the show?\n\nJAMES: \"All of them. I certainly loved that Emma and Alyson loved playing with Clem's ears\u2014that didn't suck. Also the first time I showed up on set out of makeup\u2014since I always arrived way before everyone else to start getting into makeup, no one had ever seen what I really looked like. One day I wrapped early and went to go say good-bye to everyone and they had no clue who I was. I believe Emma said something to the effect of: 'Oh, wow! You're cute!'\u2014another thing that didn't suck.\"\n\nEveryone says that working on a long-running TV series is a lot like high school, with circles of friends and then those people you wish you'd hung out with more. Who do you wish you'd hung out with more?\n\nJAMES: \"Anthony Stewart Head, for sure. I got to meet him later doing conventions, and he is one of the warmest people I've ever spent time with. I wish we'd had scenes together. Oh . . . and Joss. He was doing Firefly for most of season six, so I never got to work with him directly.\"\n\nYou've recently returned to theater. What have you been performing in, and what are your plans for the future?\n\nJAMES: \"I've been doing a lot of improv comedy in the Austin area. Austin, Texas, has kind of become the Chicago of the South for improv. I perform mostly at the Institution Theater. In fact, I'm working on the second run of an award-winning show called Hard-ish Bodies that is basically The Full Monty in a Magic Mike world, which has been incredible. I also do as much local film as I can\u2014mostly indie stuff, Web series, shorts, and stuff. Beyond that, I'm not sure what the future holds. There is a part of me that would love to get back into the acting world now that I'm older and wiser, so if anyone needs an average-looking funny white guy, drop me a DM (as the kids say these days).\"\n\n### TODD MCINTOSH (MAKEUP DEPARTMENT HEAD)\n\nYou've been doing professional makeup for film and television since 1979 and your heroes were FX [special effects] makeup giants like Rick Baker and Dick Smith, yet judging by your site, you hadn't done a lot of FX makeup\u2014monsters, at least\u2014before your 107 episodes of Buffy. Was that part of the attraction of the job, and did you get everything you wanted out of it?\n\nTODD: \"If you look at the list of my early projects, I did the films Clan of the Cave Bear and Masters of the Universe, and TV productions like Hoover for Showtime. These were done with Michael Westmore, whom I consider to be my mentor. All of them were heavy prosthetic shows. Perhaps they weren't monster movies, but they were certainly FX character makeups, which is what I was more interested in then, as I still am today. There is a misconception outside the industry that we crew members somehow choose the projects we work on\u2014I wish that were the case! I take what's offered to me. In the case of Buffy, I was the right fit and was able to stay with the show and make a spot for myself that allowed what I do best\u2014painting and application, as well as management skills\u2014to shine. It was a serendipitous marriage. I was inspired to get into makeup because of the TV show Dark Shadows, which I saw when I was seven years old. Yes, it had monsters, and other people aside from myself have noted that Buffy and Dark Shadows have a TV lineage in common; so I certainly felt at home on a vampire show, and in a way I felt I had come full circle to the genre that attracted me to my career. But I got the job because I was simply in the right time and place to get it. Did I get from it what I wanted? I got recognition as an artist and a chance to shine at my craft\u2014while earning a living!\u2014I can't think of anything better.\"\n\nThe mind boggles when attempting to tally up the sheer number of hours that must have gone into being the department head for makeup on 107 episodes of Buffy, handling both beauty makeup and FX makeup. Did you ever expect the job to last so long? And did it ever get boring or was there always something new to intrigue you?\n\nTODD: \"Buffy was a hard show. I'm sure any crew member you ask who lived through the show will agree with me. We called it Buffy the Weekend Slayer because the hours were so long, and we worked right into Saturday morning most weeks. I did my first twenty-four-hour day on that show, though it hasn't been my last! Most days were fourteen hours, to my recollection. Did I expect the job to last that long? No. We made the pilot and first season in a vacuum\u2014it was a midseason replacement, so we didn't know if it would even be aired when we made season one. When it turned out to be a success, I was just happy to be asked back. TV shows are like any freelance contract\u2014when you finish a season you go home and begin looking for your next job. No one asks if you want to come back for another season. That changed when it seemed that the show would have a seven-year run, and I was thrilled to be asked to return. Bored? Never! It was so fast-paced. And sometimes there were three units filming simultaneously and I was running them all out of the main makeup trailer, so there wasn't time to get bored!\"\n\nMany years ago, when I first interviewed you, we talked a lot about your inspirations, but what TV and film makeup\u2014other than your own\u2014would you point to as new inspirations?\n\nTODD: \"Frankly, in the years since Buffy, the makeup field has simply exploded. There are makeup artists under every rock now! When I was a young artist, there were only a few masters that we looked up to\u2014mine being Dick Smith and Mike Westmore. Today there are so many talented prosthetics and beauty artists working that I cannot keep track of them. Everywhere I look I see beautiful work\u2014out of England, Canada, Europe, as well as at home in every state that films are made. I'm so impressed by the work on the Star Trek movies, on the TV show Westworld, and the Harry Potter movies, just to name a few. But also\u2014look at the schools! The IMATS makeup competitions are showing the amazing level of creativity and talent coming out of the schools. When I started, there were no schools!\"\n\nDuring your time on Buffy, you became a celebrity in your own right within the fandom, doing the occasional convention appearance. How unusual is that, and do you still have contact with Buffy fans?\n\nTODD: \"Well, I don't know if 'celebrity' is the word. 'Notorious' might be better! Let's say I gained a certain amount of notoriety. I think that was unusual at the time. The Internet and fan sites were new, and it was the first time random crew members could, if they wanted, interact with the fans. I took advantage of that because if I were not in the industry, or I wanted to be a makeup artist, I would have been a fan of the show and beside myself with excitement to talk to someone directly involved with making it. I have always been an educator and have tried to give back to the people who support the shows we make a living from. Now, with the explosion of awareness of the career of makeup, we as a craft are regularly a part of the conventions.\n\n\"Yes, I still get the occasional Buffy fan contact. More often I'm on set and some actor I'm working on will tell me they watched Buffy as a child\u2014or worse, that their big sister watched it when they were a baby and they have only recently discovered it. I guess the years catch up with us all\u2014but it's an odd feeling. Sometimes I get e-mails from girls saying, 'What eye shadow did you use on Buffy in episode [blank]?\" Really? That was twenty years ago! I've gone through a lot of eye shadow since those days. The beauty makeups I did on Buffy are so old they are considered 'period' makeups now! I also get requests for the actors' phone numbers or addresses . . . funny how people not in the industry imagine that it works . . . or even if I had that information that I would just hand it out.\"\n\nYou've worked on so many fantastic films and TV series\u2014everything from Memoirs of a Geisha to Pushing Daisies, from Torchwood to True Detective. What non-Buffy project would you point to as your favorite example of your work, and why?\n\nTODD: \"There is no doubt in my mind that Pushing Daisies stands out as the other prime example of my work on camera. The other makeup artist, David DeLeon, and I are two matched painters. We get it as a team. David and I, with the support and freedom given by Bryan Fuller, and the amazing lighting by Michael Weaver, created a look that every day made my heart soar. Plus, for the first time in my career, I was allowed to design and have constructed all the prosthetic makeups. It was a dream job, and I would have stayed on it until the end of my career if I could have. I won my second Emmy for Daisies, and what makes the situation special is that the Emmy for Buffy was for prosthetics and the Emmy for Daisies was for beauty and character work. That sums up my career\u2014what has always been most important to me is to be a well-rounded and complete makeup artist in the mold of my heroes, those amazing artists that came before me. Many people forget that Dick Smith could do a beauty makeup as well as any prosthetic.\"\n\nSo much time has passed. What are your favorite behind-the-scenes memories of your time on the show?\n\nTODD: \"You know, I get asked this question often, and the minute I do, I can't remember a thing. As I said, the work was intense and the hours long. I have flashes of certain moments: One season, Jay Wejebe and I had terrariums with tiny frogs on our stations that we kept and coddled for the whole season; I remember long and deep conversations with James Marsters in the wee small hours of the morning while I put him in vamp-face; I remember the camaraderie of ten makeup artists huddling by a heater in the woods while rubber monsters roamed around in bee-smoke fog; I remember one makeup artist so exhausted that she touched up a dummy of a creature, thinking it was the actor. So many laughs and tender moments. After all, it was six years of my life! Perhaps my favorite memory was of one Halloween night, which we always worked. I hired extra help to cover the set, and my team and I stayed in the trailer and made up anyone who wanted it\u2014actors who had the night off, office staff, producers' kids\u2014anyone. It was a lovely night.\"\n\nEveryone says that working on a long-running TV series is a lot like high school, with circles of friends and then those people you wish you'd hung out with more. Who do you wish you'd hung out with more from your Buffy days?\n\nTODD: \"I know this is going to sound like I'm prevaricating, but I did manage to socialize with all the people I liked on the show. To this day I am still friends with Sarah. Recently, I was working on the Fox lot, and a crew van pulled to a stop beside me and David Boreanaz jumped out and gave me a hug\u2014I hadn't seen him in twenty years! James Marsters and I ended up in Vancouver at the same time and had a lovely dinner. I see Juliet Landau quite often and recently was interviewed for her Undead documentary. I loved our camera crew, and we had a great sarcastic and joking rapport. I still work with the odd crew member going from show to show. Of course, the makeup artists that were part of my crew are still in my working life, and we socialize when we can. I even had a party in my home for the stuntmen and -women on the show\u2014with so many hours spent in makeup we became friends. I have few regrets for those days.\"\n\nWhat does the future hold for Todd McIntosh?\n\nTODD: \"I truly wish I knew! As I said earlier, I am not in control of the work that comes my way. As we speak, the show I was on just had its order cut suddenly, so I'm sitting by the phone waiting for the next call that will change the landscape of my career. That is the fun and scary side of being freelance in the film industry\u2014what, indeed, comes next?\"\n\n## LOOKING BACK: INTERVIEWS OVER THE YEARS\n\n### ALYSON HANNIGAN (WILLOW ROSENBERG)\n\nThe way Alyson read her lines in her audition has defined Willow ever since.\n\n\"I was sitting in the parking lot in my car waiting for the audition,\" she recalls. \"I was reading the lines, and it was just sort of depressing. She was saying, 'Oh, boys don't like me, and this and that, and I can't really speak around guys.' I just didn't want to feel sorry for her. How are [viewers] going to like her if they're saying, 'Oh, look at her feeling sorry for herself'?\n\n\"There was a scene between Buffy and Willow, and in the beginning of the scene Willow says, 'Xander and I went out when we were four or five, and then we broke up.' Buffy says, 'Why?' 'Because he stole my Barbie.' It changed once we got to [shoot] the actual scene, but in the [original version] Buffy says, 'Did you ever get your Barbie back?' And Willow's line was: 'Most of it.' And so I thought, you know what, I'm gonna make that a really happy thing. I was so proud that I got most of my Barbie back. And then that clued in how I was going to play the rest of the scene. It defines the character. That was the one line that triggered it. Then I went back and said, 'Okay, now how can I play the whole scene like that?' And it really helped me. And Joss said later, 'Oh, yeah, most of it!' It was a funny line, and he didn't even know there was a joke there. I made the right choice.\"\n\nWere you interested in horror and fantasy growing up?\n\nALYSON: \"Yeah. I mean, I was a chicken. I still pretty much am, you know. I'm the screamer in the theater, but it was always fun to get spooked.\"\n\nWhat were you afraid of as a child?\n\nALYSON: \"Tests that I hadn't studied for? I was sort of afraid of my spelling teacher. She was mean. Obviously, you go through the phases of 'Okay, there are monsters moving under my bed,' so I was obviously afraid of anything that could be under there. That's why I kept all of my toys under my bed. You know, my mom thought I was just messy. No, no, it was protection.\"\n\n### NICHOLAS BRENDON (XANDER HARRIS)\n\nAre you expecting Speedo backlash over your performance in \"Go Fish\"?\n\nNICHOLAS: \"I'm not looking for backlash. I'm looking for forward lash.\"\n\nDo you have any skills or talents you haven't showcased as Xander yet?\n\nNICHOLAS: \"I discover new talents. Like dancing. Whatever comes up, I'll do it. I've done a lot of pratfalls and stuff like that.\"\n\nDo you have a favorite moment, on or off camera, from your tenure on the series?\n\nNICHOLAS: \"Probably the day I did my Speedo stuff. The crew was so supportive. I was so terrified of it. When we finally did my scene it was four minutes of sheer hell. Walking in, doing my dialogue, then diving into the pool. Then, coming up from the water, I heard this weird smattering, and then I emerged and the whole crew was applauding. It was really nice. Everyone was very supportive.\"\n\nYou've kissed or been in some intimate situation with each of the female cast members. Is this the best job you've ever had?\n\nNICHOLAS: \"It's not bad. I'm sure I can get paid to do worse things.\"\n\nEveryone on the set seems to think that Buffy's success, and the team that came together to make it happen, was almost destiny. Do you share that feeling?\n\nNICHOLAS: \"It's one of those things where everything worked. When you're creating a successful show, it's ninety percent luck. Joss has the talent, but when it comes to casting, it's all luck. It was my first pilot season, and I kind of won the lottery.\"\n\n### CHARISMA CARPENTER (CORDELIA CHASE)\n\nCharisma first auditioned for the role of Buffy.\n\n\"I was wearing overalls and these bright orange flip-flops and a jacket, and I was just kind of hanging, you know, because I felt that Buffy could really just be herself,\" she remembers, a wry smile playing at the edges of her mouth. \"She could wear the flip-flops, and she could be low-key and still be very\u2014it wasn't about looking as cute as I could to get the part. It was about just being cool, just being fun with your identity. And that's how I felt. The other girls in the room were really dressed up, and they were wearing very high school trendy clothes with knee-high stockings and short skirts.\"\n\nTo Charisma's surprise, however, the producers asked her to audition for the role of Cordelia as well. To say the least, the actress was unprepared. She had, after all, come to read for Buffy.\n\n\"I was thinking, I'm never going to get this part because of the way they're seeing me. Sometimes you have to show people. Cordelia is definitely a character to dress for. You have to kind of give it to them and let them work on that. It was an interesting experience, because I had about fifteen minutes to go outside and prepare for Cordelia when I had spent all this time on Buffy.\"\n\nObviously, it went well. The producers soon had Charisma scheduled for a screen test for Cordelia. All did not go as smoothly as one might imagine, however.\n\n\"I was super, super late for the screen test, because I was working all the way down on the beach for Malibu Shores, and I had to go to Burbank, which was on the opposite end of the city. I was late, and there was traffic, and it was raining,\" she remembers. \"My agent called me right when I was at the exit, paged me, 911, and I went, 'Oh, gosh, I better answer this.' So I pulled over, even though I was tremendously late. I said, 'What? I'm on the exit right now.' She tells me, 'They're going to leave, you'd better hurry up.'\n\n\"I said, 'You tell them that they'd better order a pizza or something, because I did not drive an hour and a half in all this traffic to not go in there and at least audition.' Obviously, I was panicked.\"\n\nFortunately, when she finally arrived, the audition went well. The producers were \"laughing, really responsive,\" Charisma recalls. She left with a rush of confidence. \"After it was over and they had all left, I called my agent and said, 'I got this part.' She said, 'No, don't say that, you don't know.' But I knew I had the part, I could tell.\"\n\nShe was, of course, absolutely correct. During the first season, the character of Cordelia seemed little more than Buffy's snobby nemesis. But in the season finale, the character learned the truth about Sunnydale. From that point on, Charisma knew that her character was going to be much more involved with the Slayer's posse. Ironically, she admits that this news caused her some anxiety.\n\n\"I wasn't sure how I felt about it, because I didn't want to lose my edge. I didn't want her to be nice; I didn't want her to change because that's who she is,\" she says thoughtfully.\n\nIn fact, when discussing a moment of kindness Cordelia exhibits toward Xander in the second-season finale, Carpenter asserts in no uncertain terms that: \"We don't want too many of those nice moments.\" She has often urged the producers to \"make her meaner.\"\n\n\"It would be boring if she was too one-dimensional. It's a challenge for me to find that balance. That's why I enjoy playing her so much. She's got to be somewhat tolerable or why would they hang out with her? But I [try] not to lose her edge, her honesty.\"\n\nWas she Cordelia in high school, or was she more like one of the other characters on the show?\n\n\"Well, I wasn't Willowish, I wasn't terribly academic,\" she says quickly. \"I wasn't in the clique, either; I wasn't Cordy. I was kind of a loner, and nobody really is a loner in this cast.\"\n\nDo you have a favorite moment, either off camera or on, since you've been on the show?\n\nCHARISMA: \"I have a lot of favorite moments, most with Xander. A lot of Cordy's conflict, and a lot of who she is, comes out around Xander. Because she is in love with him in spite of herself, or in spite of him. I have my best moments with Nicky [Nicholas Brendon].\"\n\n### DAVID BOREANAZ (ANGEL)\n\nWhich of your character's personae have you most enjoyed portraying?\n\nDAVID: \"There are pluses and minuses to each,\" he points out. \"With Angel's good side, I wasn't really exploring as much, as far as his being as outgoing as I wanted to be. But I know when I go back to being good, then I'll have learned from that. I think they both balance each other out pretty well. . . . Yeah, I've done some bad things.\"\n\nWere you interested in the horror genre at all when you were growing up?\n\nDAVID: \"I remember being terrified by Frankenstein when I was a kid. The old Frankenstein. Boris Karloff. When he came and visited the little girl playing by the lake. Terrible, I couldn't watch it. That, and I like Godzilla movies.\"\n\nDo you have a favorite moment, either on or off camera, from your work on the series?\n\nDAVID: \"There were a couple, actually. When I had the scene in the Factory\u2014just after I had changed\u2014and I was striking the match off the brick table. That was a really cool moment. The whole scene seemed to really gel.\n\n\"Also, I work with Sarah a lot and there is good chemistry between the two of us. We are able to grasp each other's insights pretty easily. That's really pleasant. There have been a lot of moments with her that I would walk away and say, 'Wow, that was really great.' And there are moments where you say, 'Wow, that was really bad,' but it comes out great. You can't really judge yourself. You've just got to do it. You learn from your mistakes; you grow from them.\"\n\n### SETH GREEN (DANIEL \"OZ\" OSBOURNE)\n\nHe's the only member of the series cast who was in the movie.\n\nYes, really.\n\n\"I was cut out of the film, but I'm on the back of the video box,\" he says. (Go on, check it.) \"I was awful in it, and I really hope the footage never surfaces, because in retrospect I realize how bad I was in it. At the time, I was very excited. You see me really early on as sort of a geeky guy that Sasha kind of makes fun of in passing, like knocks books out of my hands or something like that. . . . And then he is walking through the woods toward the merry-go-round.\n\n\"The way it goes in the movie now, Sasha says, 'I'm going to turn around, and when I do, you are not going to be there.' When he does, it is Paul Reubens on the merry-go-round. There are five minutes cut out of that, where he turns around and I'm standing there and I have the face of a vampire, and I call him by name, and he says, 'What are you doing here?' and he comes over and I just start laughing, and he picks me up. He lifts me up threateningly, gripping my collar, and he lets me go and I stay floating in the air. I start laughing like crazy, and I grab him and I bite him.\n\n\"It was terrible. For some reason, I told them I had a thirty-two-inch waist, so the harness they gave me was five sizes too big. I just look like I'm wearing a diaper. . . . It was impressive,\" Seth concludes with a dry chuckle.\n\nWere you interested in horror and fantasy growing up?\n\nSETH: \"Absolutely. There was a time when I was very into vampire mythology and things like that. Then it got a little spoiled for me. It is difficult for it not to be spoiled when there are all these people running around with dyed black hair and Marilyn Manson T-shirts talking about how they suck blood. Quite frankly, when you have something that you take relatively seriously just made so laughable by a few ignorant people, it is difficult to still hold it with the same amount of respect. That is why I am glad there is a show like Buffy, where even though the show is a little tongue-in-cheek sometimes, they take their monsters seriously and it is scary. It is not a joke. Like Buffy the movie was just on TV a couple of times, and I always get that kind of sadness when I see it.\"\n\nDo you have a favorite moment from your tenure on the series?\n\nSETH: \"There was a day when we were making 'Innocence.' They had built that whole mall in this warehouse in downtown Los Angeles, and we had a kind of mini-revolt, and Aly and Charisma and Nick and Tony and I all went to the mall across the street and we ate lunch there. It was so bad, we were told there was a Chinese place and they wouldn't serve us. They were like, 'We're only doing lunch orders now.' We said, 'Yeah, we want lunch.' 'No, no bulk orders for delivery,' and they wouldn't give us food. So we wound up eating at McDonald's or something, and then we started scouring the mall for board games, and we wound up buying TVopoly, which is like TV Monopoly. It was just like a long time between setups. Juliet and David and Sarah were all on set; they were working. We didn't have anything to do, so we just sat in Charisma's trailer playing board games. It was so much fun.\"\n\n### ROBIA LAMORTE (JENNY CALENDAR)\n\nRobia came to the series through the usual audition process. But she knew right off that this was something different.\n\n\"Sometimes you get scripts, and you just know,\" she says. \"The words just fit in your mouth a different way when you know you're supposed to speak them. And I kind of knew I was going to get it. I came in and auditioned, and they liked me, and I came back and met with everybody, and Tony [Head] came in to read with me. I think it was me and one other girl, so they wanted to see the chemistry. But I didn't know who he was. I thought he was a producer, so he was talking with me, and I was joking with him, and we walked into the room, and I was chewing gum, and I gave it to him, and said, 'Here, hold this.' I didn't even know. I was just playing around with him. They hired me, I think, the next day.\"\n\nDo you have a favorite moment, on or off screen, from your time on the show?\n\nROBIA: \"The moment I loved, loved, loved, is in the very first episode I did. As soon as I saw it on tape, I said, 'Praise God that I get to say this kind of line, because you don't get the chance to do it very often.' It's when Giles is returning her earring. I loved it on the page; I loved the way it came off. 'No, that's not where I dangle it.' Yeah, that's a classic.\"\n\nUnlike many of the other characters, you didn't get much chance to kick butt. Are you disappointed?\n\nROBIA: \"I have not gotten to kick as much butt as I would have liked, but I did get to do a little bit of stuff in my demon episode. I jump out the window, and I throw Giles. I got to slam his head into the table and throw him and do some stuff like that. That was a fun episode.\"\n\n### ARMIN SHIMERMAN (PRINCIPAL SNYDER)\n\nArmin admits that there are certain traits he shares with the youth-hating Snyder.\n\n\"Principal Snyder bristles much more so than I, of course, but I am not particularly easy around children. I have a lack of communicative skills with people that age and younger. So that is what I draw upon. Some of the principals that I remember growing up were major authoritarian figures who had a disdainful aura about them. . . . And I draw upon that as well.\"\n\nIn fact, Armin believes that, to a point, Snyder is more threatening to the teen characters on the series than the vampires.\n\n\"He really holds power over their future,\" he explains. \"If they get expelled from the school, then they'll really be screwed over. They can attack a vampire, but they can't attack a school record. To our younger viewers, that's a real threat.\"\n\nWhat were you afraid of as a child?\n\nARMIN: \"I was afraid of snakes, which I just had to recently deal with in Buffy\u2014not as close as Charisma did, but close enough. I was afraid of chickens, because I grew up on a chicken farm and they constantly pecked at me, and that was pretty unnerving. And certainly, as far as the show is concerned, I was certainly afraid of not being liked. That is probably what endears the show to me the most. Here are teenagers who are desperately dealing with the angst of growing up amidst a group of people that they are not a part of.\"\n\nDo you have a favorite moment, on or off screen, from your tenure on Buffy?\n\nARMIN: \"It happened the very first day. I knew that I wanted my new character to be something totally different from Quark [on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine] and I wanted it to be serious and comic at the same time. I was blessed from the very start. It is the scene where Tony and I are walking down an aisle of the school auditorium. As it went on, I remember thinking, This is exactly the character; this is exactly right; right off the bat this is working exactly right. I was elated. When I did Deep Space Nine, it took six full episodes before I realized, Ah, this is who Quark is! But when I walked down that aisle with Tony in that first scene and talked with the four of them on my first day, I thought, This is it. It was a great feeling of achievement. Sometimes I try to re-create that specialness. Sadly, my acting moments aren't always as good as that first encounter. But that first meeting was just something magical for me; when I worked with those people for the first time and slipped flawlessly into character the first time. It was perfect.\"\n\n### KRISTINE SUTHERLAND (JOYCE SUMMERS)\n\n\"As a mother, I can't help but be concerned about Buffy not having a father figure and not having a father around. My parents were divorced, so I have some sense of what it is like to grow up in a divorced household. The dynamic, at least from my experience, was very different, because for me, when my parents got divorced, it was such an admission of failure on their part somehow, that they lost a tremendous amount of authority in the household. They both had their own emotional problems, which I suppose contributed to that, but as an adolescent you take that and you wedge it wide open: 'What would you know? You screwed up in such a big way, and you are going to tell me what to do?'\n\n\"That makes it difficult for a single parent to wield authority over an adolescent. Actually, I have gotten a number of letters from parents in their early thirties who write to me about their empathy with Joyce as a single mother and the struggles involved.\n\n\"I think everybody was sort of finding their way, and there were other things to establish the first season,\" she notes. \"I have been really, really thrilled with the writing and some of the stuff we have to do [during season two]. It has been really nice. I think one of my favorite scenes was the one at the end of her birthday, that two-party story [\"Surprise\" and \"Innocence.\"]. When [Joyce and Buffy are sitting] on the couch. I thought Joss did something so wonderful in that scene with Joyce being her mother and knowing that something is going on that is very hard for her. Just being there and not asking what it is. Knowing that. You just have to be there and hope for the best for them. You can't say, 'Oh, let me be your best friend and tell me everything that is going on.' That's not your place; you're a mother.\n\n\"I get very caught up in the story,\" she says happily. \"I remember so much of what it was like to be an adolescent, and it just rings so true in so many ways.\" And as for the second-season finale, she reports having been \"stunned\" by it.\n\n\"I read it in my car,\" she says incredulously. \"I couldn't wait to read it and I had picked it up, but then I had to go to this morning voice-over thing. Well, the first free moment I had, I am sitting in my car, baking without air-conditioning, parked somewhere in Hollywood. I just had to find out what happens and I just sat there and read it. I was in shock. I mean, when she gets on the bus and leaves. I was just sobbing in the car.\"\n\nWere you a fan of horror or fantasy growing up?\n\nKRISTINE: \"I loved fantasy and science fiction, but I could never stomach horror. In fact, when I rented the movie Buffy the Vampire Slayer, I had to have my husband sit and watch it with me. I know it is funny and everything, but I am so terrified of horror films. I am waiting for Sarah to do a film that isn't a horror film so I can go see it. I don't know if I could even watch the show if I wasn't in it. I'm terrible. I get scared watching the show even when I'm in the episode and have seen most of it being shot.\"\n\nDo you have a favorite moment, on or off the screen, from your work on the series?\n\nKRISTINE: \"It has been really fun for me [during season two], because last season almost all my work was just with Sarah, and I felt I didn't know the rest of the cast that well. So this year has been really fun, getting to know everybody else and feeling much more a part of the group. But my favorite day this year was Halloween. I was working Halloween day\u2014which was a slight bummer because I didn't get to go trick-or-treating with my daughter\u2014but what better place to be on Halloween than on the set of Buffy the Vampire Slayer with vampires running around? A lot of us came in costume, which was really fun. We were shooting the episode 'Ted' that week. I came in a whole '50's garb as Ted's first wife. Sarah was Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz , and [her dog] Thor was Toto.\"\n\nDoes Joyce think that Giles is sexy?\n\nKRISTINE: \"Yeah, I think she does.\"\n\nIn \"Band Candy,\" when you were sixteen, was that how you were at sixteen, or did you just sort of create a composite of what sixteen-year-olds were like?\n\nKRISTINE: \"It was sort of a composite, although I have to say that I was not into Burt Reynolds when I was sixteen.\n\n\"That was a really interesting episode. I always think that I remember very clearly what it was like to be a teenager, but to actually walk it, talk it, and inhabit it, it was so much more intense than just sitting around remembering what you were like. And it was interesting because I have to say some of it was really fun, and some of it was painful. It brought up feelings that I hadn't even thought about in so long.\n\n\"Like the scene with the music, it was that thing of being a teenage girl and wanting to make a connection with the guy and he's into the music, and he's into cigarettes, and he's into the scene, and you want to make a connection with him but you don't quite know how. You're just going along with him because he's leading you into that place. I hadn't even really thought about that so much until we started doing that scene and suddenly all those feelings came back to me of what it was like to be in that given circumstance. But it wasn't until we sat down to really do it that it hit me.\"\n\nDo you have any mythology you've created about how Joyce gave birth to a Slayer? Do you believe there is anything about Joyce that made that be what happened to her? Because we don't really know how the Slayers are picked.\n\nKRISTINE: \"No, I've actually always sort of seen it as the opposite. That the way I as Joyce see Buffy as the Slayer is sort of symbolic, when you look at your child and realize that they are a totally different person than you are and that they have different gifts and a different calling. It's a separation thing. In this case it's just more extreme and because it isn't just that she's an incredible pianist.\n\n\"It's something that has a moral cause behind it and so it brings dual feelings. 'I'm your mother and I'm older and I'm wiser but yet you're my daughter and you're this really spectacular person who's going places and wrestling with things that are beyond what I'll ever have to do in my lifetime.' \"\n\nHow was it different when Joyce didn't know that Buffy was a Slayer versus now that she knows? Has it made it harder to play her or is it just something that's built into the way you approach your role?\n\nKRISTINE: \"It's been much easier, although it was never hard for me as an actress to play that I didn't know that she was the Vampire Slayer. And a lot of people used to say to me, 'Oh, that must be so hard for you,' and I didn't find it hard at all because I think we have a natural built-in mechanism that allows us to deny the things that it's not the right time to see. And I think a mother, a good mother, needs a good healthy dose of that!\n\n\"So I didn't find it difficult as an actress to do that, but at the same time, in terms of my relationship with Sarah, it just became so much richer, it opened up so many more possibilities and experiences for my character to move beyond that.\"\n\nWhat about if you were a vampire? What if they made Joyce a vampire? Have you ever wanted them to vamp you out?\n\nKRISTINE: \"No, I've never wanted to be a vampire! I'm a little claustrophobic. I just have to say I've never wanted to endure the makeup.\"\n\n### EMMA CAULFIELD (ANYA JENKINS)\n\nTell us how you auditioned for the role of Anya. How did you find out about the role?\n\nEMMA: \"Brian Meyers, who is no longer casting the show. Brian called up my representation and said that there was a part on the show, and would I come in and meet Joss. I of course did, I love the show. I found out the same day that I got it. I mean I went in and got it. I was working pretty immediately.\n\n\"The role wasn't designed to be anything more than a one-time guest shot and then just sort of evolved from there. I think we got a call like a month later asking if I wanted to come back again. And of course I did, I went back and about halfway through filming that episode it was made kind of clear that they wanted me to come back again, and it just kept evolving from that point.\n\n\"By the end of season three, the whole vibe was pretty much, 'Well, we'll see you next year,' but without anything formalized. And then I guess when they started up production again in July, I got the call and they asked if I'd come back for sort of an indefinite amount of episodes. They wanted to work me in. They worked me in and about hallway through this season, which is season four, they made me a regular. It's been quite an evolution, to say the least.\"\n\nDo you think the psychology classes you took in college play any part in the way you interpret Anya? Because she's trying so hard to figure out relationships and people?\n\nEMMA: \"Well, having a background in psychology, having taken those classes and trying to basically dissect the human psyche, I don't see how that wouldn't help with any character analysis. The process is very similar.\n\n\"But Anya, I gotta say, just comes very easy for me. There's just not a lot of guesswork with her. The most difficult part is not knowing what they want to do with her, and not having that to work with. I wouldn't say I identified with her really, we're pretty different people, but when they humanized her was when I really started to have fun with the character, and there's been nice synchronicity between my take on her and what the writers and Joss want to do with her. Just sort of a nice melding of the minds.\n\n\"It's just such a fun character to play. So much of it is in the dialogue, and how can it not come easy to you when someone is writing such great words! Joss created a character that is just so much fun. I don't have to sit and go, 'Oh, what am I gonna do with her this week?' She's pretty much out there already.\"\n\nWho do you think would win a tactless contest, Anya or Cordelia?\n\nEMMA: \"Anya! Without any question. Oh, God! Not even a question. 'Orgasm friend.' I mean, who says that? Who talks like that? That's what's great about her. Because it's everything you want to say, but usually don't. She appeals to your base impulses. She is just sort of the id personified for me, and it's fun to play. It's great. She says things I only wish I could say!\"\n\nHaving been on several teen shows now, how do you feel Buffy compares with other teen shows?\n\nEMMA: \"I don't think of it as a teen show at all. I think it's been a complete misconception. I think Buffy is the ultimate case in irony. I really do. I think even the name, it's sort of like Joss Whedon has the last laugh on everyone. It's a wink and a nod and I really do think that. It got me, too. I mean, when it first aired, I thought, I'm not gonna watch Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I mean, how ridiculous is that! This must be so stupid. And then of course you watch it and it's so smart and clever and understated, and I think the beauty of it is that it doesn't talk down to its audience. It assumes you're smart enough to get it.\n\n\"And they leave it alone. I mean, the disclaimer at the beginning of the show . . . I don't know that that's a strong enough disclaimer. Because if I had a twelve- or thirteen-year-old, I wouldn't want my child watching, especially now. I'm surprised. I'm shocked at some of the things that we get past the censors.\n\n\"I don't think it's a teen show at all. Obviously it appeals to teens, and if I were a teenager, I'd be watching it. But the people who make a point to come up to me and say something about the show, they're not teenagers. They're people in their forties.\n\n\"I said this before, I do think it's sort of a modern allegory, I really do, and I think the show works so well because they don't treat the situation like it's abnormal. Everything that comes their way is very normal, and that's just life, and they don't camp out the show at all.\n\n\"They just play it for straight, and I think that's what makes it so smart. Really, I think ultimately all the characters are good role models for teens. It's a great show, and it bums me out that the Emmy board refuses to acknowledge it every year. It's on every critic's top ten, and so every year they do the plea to the Academy, and they refuse.\n\n\"I don't know what their problem is. It's frustrating. I think 'Hush' was some of the best TV I've seen any show do ever. It was a great piece of TV. You don't have to follow the show to understand it. You can just turn it on, and it's complete in and of itself. So smart, so original, it's like, if that doesn't get the show its Emmy nod, I don't know what would. It's very frustrating.\"\n\n### ALEXIS DENISOF (WESLEY WYNDAM-PRYCE)\n\nHow did you get Buffy, and then how did you end up on Angel?\n\nALEXIS: \"I had come over to LA, I had been living in England, where I had trained as an actor at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Arts, and came over here on vacation, actually, for ten days with two friends, and we promised ourselves\u2014they were actors, too\u2014we promised we wouldn't look for work.\n\n\"Which, of course, is when work comes your way. I got a pilot during that time and stayed on to do the pilot and then that led to more auditions in LA. I was intending to go back to London\u2014six months had gone by and I had only expected to be gone a couple weeks\u2014and was anxious to go back, and an audition came up for a show called Buffy. I knew nothing about it because it had not aired in Britain. I had no idea that I was going up for this cult, culturally extraordinary show. And really, Wesley was just going to be for a couple of weeks.\n\n\"Tony was an old pal from England. We had worked together years ago, and so in fact, he is the one who suggested me. I had called him when I was in town just to hang out socially, and they had approached him from the office and said, 'We're looking for such and such a type part, of Wesley, a Watcher.' And he said, 'I might know a guy who could do it,' and so he called up and said would I be interested, and I said of course I was.\n\n\"And so then I met Joss and the team and we had a meeting and Wesley was invented. Really, he was meant to come in, irritate and annoy Giles and Buffy for a couple of shows, and then be gloriously terminated. That was the original thought behind the character. He was sort of a bookish academic, out of the Training Academy, and was here to shake things up and to get them back onto the straight and narrow.\n\n\"But then we found this kind of curious humor in this guy, and it was just too hard to kill him off. Suddenly half the season had gone by and they didn't have the heart to kill him off\u2014which I'm delighted that they didn't\u2014so we broke up for the summer hiatus of season three of Buffy, and Wesley was kind of hanging in the air. Joss said, 'Well, we really want to keep him here, it's just how and when to make him part of the community.'\n\n\"It was tricky. They already have a very successful and loved and adored Watcher in Giles, so they needed to go to the drawing board and figure out what to do with Wesley. And then I went away and did another movie, Beyond the City Limits, which actually Alyson did as well.\n\n\"I went to England and did a TV show there, and then when I got back from that, there was a call from Joss saying, 'I think we found a place for you. How do you feel about joining the team on Angel?' And of course I was thrilled. So we met and we talked about his ideas, and it's just been a wild ride ever since. Demons, fighting and cruising LA, and darker elements, and here we are looking at season two. That's sort of what happened.\n\n\"He's obviously been reshaped. Retooled a little. The summer off gave Joss a chance to figure out how to use him in the long-term because the originally conceived character, you know, although lovable in a way, was probably not sympathetic enough to be a long-term character. So we needed to give him a little history and a little experience in the world during that break between Buffy and Angel so that when he came back he could be used to expand the show.\"\n\nOn Angel, we're dying to know if it's hard to kiss badly on purpose.\n\nALEXIS: \"Well, I have to say when that script arrived and we'd been having all this fun playing with the chemistry between Wesley and Cordelia, I read that and I kinda laughed hysterically, but then also was struck with terror. Because so often you're asked to create the most magnetic kiss in screen history, but I had never been asked to create a dud. So when we came to it, that was one of the most fun days we had playing around with it. It's obviously a very funny scene to play. These two highly charged people kind of coming together and it falls flat.\"\n\nDo you have any funny, interesting, or creepy stories, especially from season three?\n\nALEXIS: \"On Wesley's first episode, I was very anxious to make a good impression, and was working very hard, and we had this fantastic monster who was just the size of a bloated walrus, some kind of demon. Giles and I are handcuffed and surrounded by his henchmen, and this superb actor playing that role, which is scaring the hell out of us, and in the middle of the take the little door of the tub that he's in swung open. And this is how the actor gets in and out of the tub and gets into the fat suit, and there before us is from the waist up, this great, enormous, horrific, slimy, bloated demon and from the waist down is this little actor's legs in a pair of shorts. The poor guy was roasting alive in there underneath the rubber suit, but it sort of dashed the moment.\"\n\nHow did you create your character? Did you draw from personal experience? Was there somebody you thought of to hang him on?\n\nALEXIS: \"You take a lot from the way a person behaves and their interaction with the people in the scene. It was important to use Giles as the model, because it was important that he be close enough to Giles that it be irritating. That he be irritating. That he be similar but not, at the same time. Obviously when he was first brought in, he was there to kind of get tough with Giles and Buffy, so he thought about what type of personality and behavior would be most loathsome to them.\n\n\"And then used the whole Council training as a background. He probably wished himself the head of the class kind of guy, the one who did his homework and kind of was a little bit snotty about it to the other kids, and so just a sort of superficially rather irritating person, who was, underneath, this soft, fuzzy guy that just really wanted to be liked.\n\n\"So now as time goes on we get a chance to shed some of those outer layers and see more of the kid who, like everybody else, wanted to have good friends in school and wanted to clown around and have fun and do well. So that's how I sort of came about making him. And then in the early days Joss was very clear with notes and saying, 'Well, that's a little too stuffy' or 'Soften that up' or 'Get tough here with that,' so in that way together you start to mold the person. But a lot of it is just from the ground up. You start creating things, things that work you keep, things that don't work get left behind.\"\n\nTony said that he is so, so sorry that he ever had Giles stammer 'cause when he does it's so hard to re-create, to follow. Is there anything that you think, \"Oh, thank God I did X\" or \"Jeez, I wish I hadn't done Y\"? Or something that is hard to remember that he does, or any kind of a quirk or eccentricity or little point that either you're glad you put it in or you're sorry you ever thought of in the first place?\n\nALEXIS: \"Well, sometimes I'm sorry I made him so intelligent and clever and able to understand these various demons and historical references that he rattles off with such confidence, because now scripts arrive with paragraphs and paragraphs of stuff I have no idea what they're talking about.\n\n\"And I think, 'Oh, God, I've got to somehow make sense of it.' Not only that, learn it. And then I see Angel's response is a grunt and I think, 'Oh, God, if only we could switch once in a while.' But I'm only kidding, it's great fun to play him, and he really just exists now. I don't worry about him too much. Wesley's waiting for me when I get to work. Put on the clothes, there he is.\"\n\n### ELIZABETH ANNE ALLEN (AMY MADISON)\n\nEverybody wants to know how you feel about cheese.\n\nELIZABETH ANNE: \"Do you want to know what the funniest thing is? I'm allergic to dairy. That's my standard joke. I love cheese, but I can't eat cheese because it gives me hives.\"\n\nHow do you feel about rodents?\n\nELIZABETH ANNE: \"I used to have mice, and gerbils, and all those little animals in my house. Which I'm sure was to my mother's dismay. But I loved them. I had tons of hamsters and gerbils and guinea pigs. It was like a zoo at my house.\"\n\nHow did you get the part of Amy, and who did you tell first?\n\nELIZABETH ANNE: \"I had originally tested for the role of Buffy, and I didn't end up getting that role, obviously. And they brought me back in for the role of Amy.\n\n\"And it was really funny because I went back in four times, because the director of this particular episode just thought, Well, I just don't think she could be mean. I kept saying to Joss, 'I don't think he knows what he's talking about.' But he had a hard time. After my fourth audition for that character, they finally gave it to me. And the director was great. He said, 'You've proven me wrong.' \"\n\nCan you tell us any stories you'd like to share about any of the episodes?\n\nELIZABETH ANNE: \"Well, 'Gingerbread' was kind of funny, because the day that they put me on the pyre was my birthday. So they said I was a human candle, and when they lit the candle everybody sang 'Happy Birthday' to me.\"\n\nWhat is your birthday?\n\nELIZABETH ANNE: \"November eighteenth. It was a very funny episode. I thought, Somebody's sick and twisted out there.\"\n\nHow close did you get to actual flames?\n\nELIZABETH ANNE: \"Pretty close. They have to surround us in it, and it's strange. It's not something that you have a great deal of control over. They always have a guy with fire extinguishers, and there's actually a fireman on the set any time there's fire.\"\n\nWe thought it must have been CGI.\n\nELIZABETH ANNE: \"Well, they do to some extent. But it's a few inches from you, at times. It's kind of scary. Some of your reactions are completely genuine.\"\n\nCould you feel the heat?\n\nELIZABETH ANNE: \"Oh, definitely. I mean, they make sure you're okay. There's somebody standing next to you who appears to be an extra but who really is a fire person.\"\n\nDo you think Amy is aware that she's a rat?\n\nELIZABETH ANNE: \"I'd like to think that rats have some capacity to process thoughts. Rather than wake up in a complete stupor two years later, and still think I'm that guy on That '70s Show or something. I'd like to think I know some of the things that are going on. But then again, I don't know. I think some of the things I could have possibly seen . . . maybe I don't want to hold on to those. I had a couple of people send me letters and ask me if I remember anything from the night Willow spent with Oz.\"\n\nDo you know anything about Wicca in your real life?\n\nELIZABETH ANNE: \"I actually did quite a bit of research originally, because I didn't want to falsify what Wicca's about. And Wicca is actually pretty much about the Earth, and what you put out there you bring back. Be careful what you say, because it comes back to you. If you call for judgment, be prepared to receive judgment on yourself. I don't think those are things that people into Wicca would use as lightly as some of the things that we use. It's very serious. They take a lot of responsibility for their actions because it directly affects them. Sort of like instant karma.\"\n\n### MARCIA SHULMAN (CASTING)\n\nWhat about the famous \"David Boreanaz was walking his dog\" story?\n\nMARCIA: \"[Angel] was supposed to be in just the first episode. Sort of like a vision. . . . The character was supposed to start working the next day. I said to Joss, 'Just give me one more day. I don't feel like he is there yet.'\n\n\"[The person who became David's manager] was looking out the window as David was walking his dog. He's a friend of mine, and he called me and he said, 'I am telling you, I just saw Angel. I can send him.' David walked in and I ran down the hall [to Joss].\"\n\nShe flips through her casting book. \"9-9-96. I wrote, 'He is the guy.' \"\n\nHow did you know Sarah Michelle Gellar was Buffy?\n\nMARCIA: \"We didn't know she was Buffy. I knew Sarah from New York, when she was a kid, as I knew Seth Green from when they were eight years old. At the time we were all trying to find our way to make the show something, its own thing apart from the film. Sometimes it's sort of hard to get a new vision going. So we didn't think of Sarah as Buffy because we thought she [Sarah] was too smart and too grounded and not enough of a misfit in a sense, because Buffy was this outsider. How could Sarah be an outsider? She's so lovely.\n\n\"So we brought her in as Cordelia, and she was fantastic as Cordelia. We still kept looking for Buffy. Then when we went to the network, they [knew] that Sarah was a star [from her previous work], and that she could be a Buffy, and that we could do that Buffy. It was a different Buffy. It was a great Buffy.\"\n\nThen how did you cast a new Cordelia?\n\nMARCIA: \"I had met Charisma before, and I brought her in and she just nailed it. She was hysterically funny. . . . She was just great and beautiful and she brought so much to it.\"\n\nWhat about Willow?\n\nMARCIA: \"Willow was really hard. Because when you think about it, the kind of character Willow is\u2014a sort of shy, insecure person\u2014is the exact opposite of what somebody has to be as an actress. So it was like working against who came in and had the nerve to audition.\n\n\"When Alyson came in, we all got her immediately. I had pre-read her first and then brought her to everyone else and we felt good. She just brings so much vulnerability. She makes me cry all the time and she is also funny. She is an 'everygirl.' I think Willow is the kind of character that there is someone like her in high school . . . or most of the girls in high school are like her.\"\n\nWhat about casting Nicholas Brendon as Xander?\n\nMARCIA: \"Nicky also came in [via the pre-reading process]. I read him and then I brought him to the guys and every time he came for a callback, he brought more and more to it. When we went to the network for everybody to see him, he improvised a line, which was, 'Let's go get some schwarma.' And now we have used it in the show. I think that gave him the part. We all just died and so the part was his.\"\n\nTell us about Tony Head as Giles.\n\nMARCIA: \"I had brought him in the first day and we all just completely fell in love with him. I was so happy because when you start working for somebody new, you always want the first day of casting to be good. Because you want [your boss] to say, 'Good,' so you can stay for the second day. When everybody responded to Tony the first day, I said to Gail, 'I'm so happy Joss is happy today.' Tony was a no-brainer. Like David [as Angel].\"\n\nAnd the newest regular, Seth Green.\n\nMARCIA: [smiling] \"Seth and I . . . we get each other. When I knew Sarah Michelle Gellar and Seth [in New York], you brought them in on everything. They were really star kids. And now they are star adults, and no surprise.\"\n\nWhat about some guest stars?\n\nMARCIA: \"James Marsters came in on the pre-read process. But I am always partial to theatrical training on a r\u00e9sum\u00e9 [which James had]. In New York, it's not even a question. Out here it is very different. With Juliet Landau, I knew her. I got a tape of her and I went in to Joss. Same with Armin Shimerman. Merrick is Richard Riehle, a really wonderful actor I know from New York.\"\n\nDo you have a special moment?\n\nMARCIA: \"Well, the David moment, because it was so hard to find [Angel] and he walked in the day before we were shooting, but there are so many moments. This is a really special group.\n\n\"Joss has such a complete vision and you sort of come not to expect in your career that [working on a show] is going to be such a cohesive thing. It is crazy to produce this number of shows on this schedule. That goes with the territory. I am always amazed that a group of people can carry out a vision that it is somehow communicated through the writing, and through who Joss is as a person. It is a very unique situation. It is why I want to do Buffy.\"\n\n### JOSS WHEDON\n\nJoss has said that Buffy \"is the most personal work I've ever done. Which is funny. The opportunity to mythologize my crappy high school experience makes it extremely personal, but also sort of exorcises it. It isn't just reliving it, it's sort of reinventing it, so it moves me more than anything I've ever done. The opportunity to keep developing the characters and finding out what's going to happen to them and how they're going to grow apart or together is . . . the more it goes on, the more personal it gets.\"\n\nWith all that soul-searching, one would think that Joss would begin to change his feelings about his high school years. Joss disagrees. He also notes that, contrary to popular opinion, \"my high school years were not all terrible. There was that Thursday. . . .\" He laughs.\n\n\"No, I did have a couple of friends, and I had a lot of good times, but all the bad high school stuff definitely went down. This lets me come to peace with that. But really, I'm at enough of a distance, and it's not like 'That girl, and I'll get her. . . .' There's nobody I harbor any particular malice toward from high school.\n\n\"I think that's part of why I like doing the show so much. I'm able to look at high school and say, 'There's the dumb jock who was mean to me. Well, what's his perspective? He's going through something too. There's the teacher who flunked me.' I suppose in that sense, it is sort of revelatory. It's nice because I can go to the pain, but at the same time, I have a much more pleasant view of it, because I am seeing it from a bit of a distance.\"\n\nThat pain, in fact, has become almost more important to the series than the horror or the humor of the characters.\n\n\"When we realized how much we could really live these characters' lives, we found that we could go to that dark place,\" Joss says. \"I made a joke that, 'The key to the show is to make Buffy suffer.' Sarah said, 'Why do you do this to me? Another crying scene? Do you know what I go through here?' and I said, 'America needs to see you suffer, because you do it really well.' \"\n\nJoss laughs, but he isn't really joking.\n\n\"We're doing these sort of mythic-hero journeys in our minds,\" he says. \"A lot of times, the story doesn't make sense until we figure out who's suffering and why. Including the bad guy. If the bad guy's not hurting, not relating to her, then it's just a cardboard guy to knock down. And the same thing goes for the audience. If they're not feeling it, if her relationship to what's going on isn't personal, and if ours isn't, then it's just guys with horns running around and some good jokes, but it's not going to resonate.\"\n\nIt's amazing, given how personal a project this is, that Joss ever got to do it at all. The film was not what he had originally envisioned, and he thought he'd had his chance. Then Gail Berman and Fran Kuzui came to him to ask if he wanted to do the TV series.\n\n\"I had never thought of doing it myself, but I was like, 'Oh, wow, that's sort of neat!' And I thought about it, and the more I thought about it, the more I realized how many stories there were to tell and how excited I was,\" he recalls. \"I was pretty much out of TV completely at that point, and my agent asked me, 'Now, come on, really, what do you want to do?' I said, 'I'm already writing scenes for this in my head,' and he said, 'Fine, I'll make the deal.' I did not expect it to take over my life like this. I did not expect it to move me as much as it did.\"\n\nAnd, though he loves horror and always has, it isn't really the horror that moves him.\n\n\"I love invoking all those [old horror] movies, but at the same time, the core of this series, emotionally, is a very safe place. These are people who care about one another and when their world is upset, you care about it. Whatever horror is out there is not as black and terrible as what is already within and between us.\"\n\nStill, horror has and will always have a special place in Joss's heart. His knowledge of films, comic books, and movies is encyclopedic, and his influences are many and varied.\n\n\"I have a lot of influences,\" Joss says. \"So many, in fact, that I can't even think of them all. I've sort of hodge-podged together my favorite bits of everything. I take what I need for the series. For example, vampires look like vampires part of the time, because I want to see demons so you don't have a high school girl just stabbing people. At the same time, I want her to see people that [the viewer] doesn't know if they're vampires or not. They turn to dust because it's cool, but also so we don't have to have twenty minutes of body-cleaning-up at the end of every show.\"\n\nDo you have a favorite moment, on or off the screen, from the series?\n\nJOSS: \"At the end of 'I Robot, You Jane,' when they're all sitting there realizing how pathetic their love lives are, that was my favorite ending. That was very nice. For me, there have been a bunch of things. I think one of them was definitely when I shot 'Innocence.' Things came together for me. That's when everything just completely fell into place. And I thought we had created something that is more than the sum of its parts. And I'd always been proud of its parts, but that was the first time the thing really just completely talked back to me.\n\n\"That was really neat, and then everyone was like, 'You must be so happy you did well?' And I would say, 'Oh, yeah, but I was so happy before.' I didn't even notice the ratings because I was already on such a high.\n\n\"There was a moment when we were shooting that scene in 'Innocence' with the rocket launcher: the guys are flying, a big explosion, and I was quite literally jumping up and down. I was so happy. And the next day, we shot the last scene with Buffy and her mom, and I was watching the two shots of Kristine and Sarah, and I thought, Yesterday, I had the rocket launcher, and this is better. They were so good in that, and it looked so beautiful, and it felt so right, and that to me was just . . . we had everything. We had the kitchen sink on this show, but it's still the small stuff that holds it together.\"\n\nHas the cast ever inspired the evolution of their characters?\n\nJOSS: \"Oh, absolutely. They certainly inform the way the characters behave and the way they talk. They can't help but bring some of themselves to it. Although I'm still pretty strict about what they have to do. But the more we write the characters, the more Willow becomes like Aly . . . all of them. As I get to know them more as people. They bring so much more depth to it. They all become the heroes to their own stories because I know them as people.\"\n\nAre the vampires in the Buffy mythology organized as clans?\n\nJOSS: \"I don't really think of them as clans. I think of them more like people. There are religions, there are religious leaders, different sects. What do they say in C. S. Lewis books, 'We all worship the same god, we just call it different names'? Well, they all worship evil, they just call it different names. It's not so much clans where different vampires have different appearances or powers. What you have are certain charismatic figures who find themselves surrounded by stuntmen.\"\n\nIs there a Council of Watchers?\n\nJOSS: \"There is an actual little Watcher Bureaucracy based in England that Giles works for. But they're very loose and pretty incredibly inefficient. Since nobody ever seems to know what anybody else is doing. But so much of finding the Slayer and training her and figuring out who's going to be next is magic and luck. And nowadays, people are just not that dedicated. Giles tried to get out of it. It's a little bit muddy. Things get balled up at the head office.\"\n\nAre you prepping Willow to be a Watcher?\n\nJOSS: \"No, I'm not. I've never thought of Willow as a Watcher. I've got something else in store for Willow.\"\n\nEveryone involved with this show seems to think of it as some kind of destiny. Does that spook you?\n\nJOSS: \"It's only spooky when I think, Jeez , I'm going to work on other shows where this doesn't happen. It does feel like Manifest Destiny. It's such luck and chance that everybody from our DP to David Greenwalt to the entire cast just happened upon this project. And if they hadn't . . . I break into a cold sweat thinking about what I would do without any of them. Let alone Sarah. It does have a kind of inevitability to it. It seems like it just flowed into being.\"\n\n## SEASON 5\n\n### No Place Like Home\n\nEpisode 5.5\n\nWRITTEN BY: Douglas Petrie\n\nDIRECTED BY: David Solomon\n\nGUEST STARS: Clare Kramer as Glory, Charlie Weber as Ben, Ravil Isyanov as Monk, Kristine Sutherland as Joyce Summers\n\nCO-STARS: James Wellington as Nightwatchman, Paul Hayes as Older Nighwatchman, Staci Lawrence as Customer, John Sarkisian as Old Monk, Pasha Lychnikoff as Young Monk\n\n#### THE PLOT THICKENS:\n\nTwo months ago: A trio of monks bolt themselves into a chamber of their monastery to perform a ritual over an unseen glowing object they refer to as the \"Key.\" Outside the room, a powerful force pounds on the heavy wooden door trying to get in. The glow intensifies and then disappears just before the doors explode.\n\nNow: Outside a Sunnydale factory\u2014but not the factory from previous adventures\u2014Buffy fights yet another vamp intent on killing the Slayer. Once again she easily dispatches the evil before running into a nightwatchman. He has no interest in detaining her for trespassing, but does pick up a strange glowing ball off the ground and returns it to Buffy, assuming it's hers. She accepts the odd item and returns home. The next morning, she makes a pampering breakfast for her still ill mom, argues with her sister, and then goes to the grand opening of the Magic Box to show Giles the strange glowy globe.\n\nAll the Scoobies research the presumably mystical device, Buffy returns home with her new sister, Dawn, to find Joyce all icky feeling on the couch. Although Buffy wants to take her mom back to the hospital, Joyce insists that she just needs her prescription refilled. Buffy goes on the errand to the hospital pharmacy, where she runs into intern Ben trying to subdue a patient. Buffy uses her Slayer strength to lend a hand and is surprised to find that the rambling man is the nightwatchman from the previous evening. The suddenly crazy man warns her that \"they come to you through your family.\" Suddenly her mom's mysterious illness doesn't seem as mysterious.\n\nBack in the factory the surviving monk from two months earlier is still being pursued by the hideous beast in the form of a perky yet intense young woman. She begins a fun game of \"torture the monk\" to get him to reveal the location of The Key. When that doesn't work, she moves on to another nightwatchman and gives the guy a serious brain drain.\n\nBuffy reports to the orb researchers on her assumption regarding Mom's illness: something or someone is attacking her through her mom. While helping customers in the packed Magic Box, Anya suggests a spell to \"pull the curtain back\" and reveal the source of the magick affecting Joyce. So Buffy goes all trancelike and is disappointed to find that nothing seems to be affecting her mom, but her sister begins to zone in and out of reality. Finally Buffy realizes that Dawn is not her sister.\n\nAs Buffy struggles with the realization, unable to accept the news, Giles calls to report that he and the team have identified the orb as the Dagon's Sphere, created to repel \"that which cannot be named.\"\n\nBuffy goes back to the factory where she found the item and finds the monk, as well as she which cannot be named. A fight ensues and Buffy pretty much gets the crap beat out of her, but she does manage to escape with the monk. However, the torture and fight were too much for the man. As he lies dying, he reveals that he had sent The Key to the Slayer in the form of a human . . . namely, Dawn. He and his fellow monks created false memories in the Slayer's family and friends so that they would accept Dawn as real. With his last breath, the monk explains that Dawn is not aware that she is anything other than Dawn Summers, and that she must be protected. With that news, Buffy returns home to her sister and puts aside their petty fights . . . for now.\n\nClare Kramer starred in the cheerleading movie Bring It On with Eliza Dushku.\n\n#### QUOTE OF THE WEEK:\n\nBUFFY: \"What are you doing here?\"\n\nSpike starts gesturing. Long answer alert.\n\nBUFFY: \"Five words or less.\"\n\nSpike starts to count them off on his fingers.\n\nSPIKE: \"Out. For. A. Walk. . . . Bitch.\"\n\n#### LOVE IN VEIN:\n\nThe Buffy\/Riley weirdness continues. Yet another strain is added to things when Dawn blurts out that Buffy's been talking about him in a \"weak and kitteny\" sort of way. Spike is caught stalking the Slayer, and not in the usual vampy way, either.\n\n#### POP-CULTURE IQ:\n\nDawn likens her sister's control of the kitchen to that of the participants in the cult hit cooking \"game show\" imported from Japan that pits restaurant cooks against a selection of Iron Chefs to make the best meal featuring one surprise ingredient:\n\n\"Who died and made you the Iron Chef?\"\n\nBuffy's prescription for relaxation for Joyce includes watching the queen of daytime television:\n\n\"Feet up, plenty of Oprah.\"\n\nRiley compares the Slayer training room to the Danger Room from Marvel's line of X-Men comic books:\n\n\"Giles, you got that danger room set up out back?\"\n\nBen falls into Popeye speak when impressed by Buffy's buffness. The Paramount Pictures\/Famous Studios cartoons from the 1940s starred a sailor man with a penchant for spinach:\n\n\"You've got some serious mus-kles for a girl.\"\n\nBen jokes that Buffy's mus-kles might have the same origin as Marvel Comics' Spider-Man:\n\n\"Radioactive spider bite?\"\n\nThe title \"No Place Like Home\" comes from Dorothy's lines at the end of The Wizard of Oz, in which she chants that magical phrase and clicks her heels to return to Kansas.\n\n\"Somebody's gotta sit down on their tuffet.\"\n\nThe beast (later known as Glory) makes a reference to the nursery rhyme \"Little Miss Muffet,\" continuing the curious theme started by Faith in the dream sequence in \"Graduation Day, Part Two.\"\n\n#### CONTINUITY:\n\nDawn's mysterious arrival is explained, along with the arrival of the new Big Bad for season five. Joyce's headache is back and it brought friends. For a time Buffy suspects it is supernatural in origin, but her spell confirms that it is an earthly malady, as we will later learn.\n\n#### DRAMATIS PERSONAE:\n\nAnya's interest in money truly blossoms as Giles hires her to work at the Magic Box.\n\nGlory complains that she doesn't want to be in this state, or on this planet, and that she finds this whole \"mortal coil\" thing disgusting.\n\n#### FROM THE ORIGINAL TELEPLAY:\n\nThe script for this episode is very specific in describing the monk who arrives in Sunnydale:\n\nA monk (not the old one, not the young one, but the surviving one) hastily resets a fallen candle. . . .\n\nGlory's first entrance is described as follows in the teleplay:\n\nBOOM! The door comes BLASTING off its hinges and lands, intact, ten feet from the doorway, revealing not some hulking monstrous demon, but a GIRL. Real hottie, too. About Buffy's age. Whoever she is, she's a star and she knows it. Curly blond tendrils fall all around her shoulder, highlighting her sharp red business dress and killer pumps.\n\n### Family\n\nEpisode 5.6\n\nWRITTEN AND DIRECTED BY: Joss Whedon\n\nGUEST STARS: Mercedes McNab as Harmony, Clare Kramer as Glory, Charlie Weber as Ben, Amy Adams as Beth, Steve Rankin as Mr. Maclay, Amber Benson as Tara\n\nCO-STARS: Ezra Buzzington as Bartender, Peggy Goss as Crazy Person, Tory Pendergrass as Demon, Megan Gray as Sandy, Brian Tee as Intern, Kevin Rankin as Donny\n\n#### THE PLOT THICKENS:\n\nBuffy tells Giles what she's learned about Dawn being The Key, which isn't all that much. They decide not to tell anyone else for the time being to keep Dawn safe. In the meantime, Willow's plans for Tara's twentieth birthday celebration are under way, even though the rest of the Scoobies aren't entirely on the bandwagon since they don't feel that they know Tara all that well. The plans, however, hit a considerable snag when Tara's father, brother, and cousin show up unexpectedly.\n\nAs Buffy tries to figure out more about the new threat to Sunnydale and, more importantly, what to get Tara for her birthday, she kicks the overprotective up a few notches around Dawn. Tara's family seems just as overprotective when they insist that Tara come home with them simply because her birthday is nearing. As it turns out, the women in the Maclay family have a nasty habit of turning full demon on that wondrous occasion.\n\nTara refuses to leave Sunnydale and casts a spell so that her friends won't see her demon half. Sadly, the spell goes awry and Buffy et al. are unable to see the demons that the Big Bad sent to kill the Slayer. They aren't even able to see Spike when he arrives and suddenly finds himself in the middle of the fight to save the Slayer's life.\n\nTara enters the Magic Box mid-battle and reveals the demons and then the truth. Her family comes to take her away, but the gang stands by their friend in spite of her supposed demon leanings, which, considering the demons they know. . . . Tara's father insists that she's evil and it's for her own good. That's when Spike decides to test Tara by punching her in the face to prove she's not a demon. As his violence-blocker kicks in, he realizes that her father is just trying to exercise his control over the women in the Maclay clan. A joyous Tara\u2014bloody nose and all\u2014sends her family home and celebrates a fully human birthday with her friends, who have grown closer to her than family.\n\n#### QUOTE OF THE WEEK:\n\nWillow worries that her tardiness may have kept her from hearing the important information so helpful for demon slaying and, more importantly, telling the audience at home just what's going on.\n\n\"Am I late? Did I miss any exposition?\"\n\n#### LOVE IN VEIN:\n\nBuffy's dad is living in clich\u00e9 off in Spain with his secretary. Hank hasn't even gotten in touch with his daughters since Joyce got sick, but this is only the beginning of his absent-father act. Spike continues to dream of Buffy, and his rush to kill her becomes more of a life-saving thing. To combat his romantic ennui, Riley frequents Willy's demon bar, where he's hit on by a vampire.\n\n#### POP-CULTURE IQ:\n\nXander notes one of the highlights of Buffy's now \"former\" dorm room is that it can be used to re-create comic plays known for their high-energy pacing with characters making many entrances and exits:\n\n\"Got two entrances, lotta opportunities for bawdy French farce.\"\n\nBuffy compares the perky evil being to a beauty pageant title awarded to the nicest contestant by the other pageant participants:\n\n\"Any breakthrough on the identity of Miss Congeniality?\"\n\nBuffy tries to mask the seriousness of the \"demon's\" incredible power by using descriptive phrasing taken from the theme song from the Aaron Spelling hit that premiered in the seventies, The Love Boat:\n\n\"This demon chick is exciting and new.\"\n\n#### CONTINUITY:\n\nThe events of this episode start on the same night as \"No Place Like Home\" ended. Five cases of sudden insanity have hit the local hospital in the past month\u2014presumably all people touched by the as yet unnamed evil one. Harmony mentions that she went \"shopping\" at April Fool's, which is the store where Cordelia worked at the end of her senior year (following her father's bankruptcy). A possible reason Tara messed up the demon locator spell in \"Goodbye Iowa\" is revealed. She was probably afraid it would locate her. Tara's mother is mentioned in the past tense. More about her will be revealed when she bonds with Buffy in \"The Body.\"\n\n#### DRAMATIS PERSONAE:\n\nBuffy begins to grasp the weight of the fact that her memories of Dawn's life are entirely false. After complaining that Dawn needs to grow up (\"Real Me\"), Buffy now sees her sister as someone who needs to be protected, even sheltered. She moves back home temporarily.\n\nWillow is surprised to learn that Tara has a brother.\n\nTara apparently didn't have many friends in high school\u2014according to her brother. Tara's father indicates that she used to hide her magick.\n\nGlory is embarrassed to learn that she had been fighting with something as common as a Vampire Slayer.\n\n#### FROM THE ORIGINAL TELEPLAY:\n\nThe following stage direction is written into the scene where the team is moving Buffy out of her dorm room:\n\nTara is in the closet (no jokes, please).\n\n### Fool for Love\n\nEpisode 5.7\n\nWRITTEN BY: Douglas Petrie\n\nDIRECTED BY: Nick Marck\n\nGUEST STARS: David Boreanaz as Angel, Mercedes McNab as Harmony, Juliet Landau as Drusilla, Julie Benz as Darla, Kristine Sutherland as Joyce Summers\n\nCO-STARS: Kali Rocha as Cecily Addams, Edward Fletcher as Male Partygoer, Katharine Leonard as Female Partygoer, Matthew Lang as 2nd Male Partygoer, Chris Daniels as Stabbing Vampire, Kenneth Feinberg as Chaos Demon, Steve Heinze as Vampire #1, Ming Liu as Chinese Slayer, April Weeden-Washington as Subway Slayer\n\n#### THE PLOT THICKENS:\n\nWhen Buffy gets beaten by a regular ol' average vamp, she feels the full weight of her mortality bearing down and develops a sudden interest in finding out why her many predecessors became predecessors. Finding a dearth of information in the Watcher's Diaries on the actual death of Slayers, Buffy consults the only person she knows who actually bore witness to such notable events: Spike.\n\nAs Buffy picks the brain of the killer of two Vampire Slayers, Riley leads the Slayerettes on a less-than-stealthy recon for the vamp that nearly did in the Slayer. They stumble across a nest of vampires, causing Riley to revise the plan so the gang will come back in the morning. But he returns alone to do in the entire nest and take out some aggression.\n\nOut of the goodness of Spike's heart, and more than a smattering of greed, the neutered vampire recounts his personal history to Buffy. Starting in the year of our lord eighteen hundred and eighty, he tells of his birth into the darkness while glossing over his priggish prevampire life and briefly touching on a story of an unrequited love. Along with Angel, Darla, and his beloved Drusilla, Spike trips through time, taking out one Slayer in China during the Boxer Rebellion and another in a New York City subway in the seventies. After a night of lessons, he finally imparts to Buffy the reason why the Slayers died. He claims that death is what every Slayer truly longs for.\n\nBuffy does not want to admit that she understands the feeling, nor does she want to admit that she has any feelings for Spike other than hate. Instead she echoes the words of his long-lost unrequited love by telling Spike that he is beneath her.\n\nFeeling the full weight of Spike's lesson, Buffy returns home to find her mom packing to go to the hospital. The \"nothing to worry about\" that Joyce had been experiencing over the past few weeks has turned into something worthy of further exploration. Buffy goes out to the backyard to be alone when Spike comes to put an end to his pain by putting an end to the Slayer. But when she looks up at him in tears, the vampire softens and sits beside her to lend his silent support.\n\n#### QUOTE OF THE WEEK:\n\nHarmony kindly reminds Spike of his powerlessness over the Slayer:\n\n\"The second you even point that thing at her you're gonna be all . . . 'Ahhh!' and then you'll get bitch-slapped up and down Main Street.\"\n\n#### LOVE IN VEIN:\n\nSpike's revisionist history shows great glimpses into his romantic life, starting with an infatuation from his human days for the refined Cecily Addams. He also glosses over his relationship with Drusilla from their meeting in England in 1880 to their most recent breakup in South America in 1998 (under the watchful eye of a Chaos Demon). It is also implied that his infatuation with the Slayer was evident to Drusilla at that time. Buffy reiterates Cecily's words when she tells Spike that he is \"beneath her.\" Spike continues his discourse on love and blood as he first told Buffy and Angel in \"Lovers Walk.\"\n\n#### POP-CULTURE IQ:\n\nBuffy hopes to experience the same power of preservatives as in the puffed cheese snacks Cheetos, made by Frito-Lay:\n\n\"I know every Slayer comes with an expiration mark on the package, but I want mine to be a long time from now. Like a Cheeto.\"\n\nSpike protests that his siring was far more intriguing an event than the hunting and gathering rituals of animals in programs routinely seen on the cable channel devoted to science and nature:\n\n\". . . don't make it sound like something you'd flip past on the Discovery Channel.\"\n\n#### CONTINUITY:\n\nSpike's history is on display as numerous life moments are revealed, including the truth behind both his \"William the Bloody\" moniker and his nickname, \"Spike.\" (Because his poetry was so \"bloody\" awful one would rather have a railroad spike driven through one's head than listen to it.) The audience gets to see Spike from his siring and through the killings of two Slayers as well as learn about his prevampire life and a brief mention of his close ties to his mother. These will be further examined in the sequel-like seventh season episode \"Lies My Parents Told Me.\" Spike reiterates Faith's comment earlier in the series that death is something he gets off on and suspects that Buffy does too. His lessons for Buffy on the subject of her search to know more about death are major foreshadowing, including the fact that he will be there for her final swan dive just as he promises\u2014although he won't be celebrating. The New York Slayer from the seventies is shown, as killed by Spike, and her long leather trench coat is snagged by him as a prize. More about this particular Slayer will be revealed in the seventh season episode \"First Date.\"\n\nThe episode was the first in a two-part crossover event with the second season Angel episode \"Darla,\" which showed more of Angel and Darla's history in the time periods seen here.\n\nThe actress playing Cecily, Kali Rocha, returns in the sixth season as Anya's demon friend Halfrek.\n\n#### DRAMATIS PERSONAE:\n\nBuffy realizes that death is all around her, a point that will echo through the rest of the series, as various characters\u2014good and bad\u2014will point this out to her.\n\nGiles suspects that the reason Watchers never chronicled the deaths of their Slayers is that, if the Watchers were anything like Giles, they would find the whole thing too painful.\n\nSpike considers his siring to be a very profound and powerful experience and that getting killed made him feel really alive for the first time. Once Angel told him about Slayers, he became obsessed with them because he was looking for fun and death. If Spike does not intend to hurt someone, he can get away with a limited form of violence without the chip in his brain activating to cause him pain.\n\n#### FROM THE ORIGINAL TELEPLAY:\n\nThe following stage direction for a bit not seen in the episode explains one of the Spike life mysteries.\n\nWe are in a Buddhist Temple. We hear a punch and Spike comes staggering back into frame, sporting a bloody nose. Before he can regain his footing a sword comes slicing into frame, just nicking the top of his eyebrow, cutting it open (the eyebrow where he's got his scar today).\n\nThe title of this episode, \"Fool for Love,\" comes from a play written by Sam Shepard.\n\n### The Body\n\nEpisode 5.16\n\nOne of the series's most pivotal episodes\u2014and certainly one of its best\u2014\"The Body\" is often misremembered as the one in which Buffy's mom, Joyce Summers, dies. In reality, Joyce was discovered lying dead on the living room sofa at the end of the previous episode. \"The Body\" picks up in that same moment and carries on from there. The characters have dealt with death many times, but this is a real, human death\u2014a reminder of mortality and the fragility of being human. The grief on-screen feels real and relatable, and when Buffy goes to Sunnydale High to share the news with her sister, Dawn, the seen-but-not-heard conversation is shattering. The minutiae of dealing with the death of their mother, of handling burial arrangements and a funeral, both brings the grief into sharper focus and brings the group closer together. Joyce's death changes the series and its characters forever afterward, including their relationships to one another. In the midst of this comes another moment that was pivotal for Buffy the Vampire Slayer: comforting a mourning Willow, Tara kisses her. It wasn't the first lesbian kiss on American television, but it was the first between two female characters involved in a committed, long-term, loving relationship.\n\nWRITTEN AND DIRECTED BY: Joss Whedon\n\nGUEST STARS: Randy Thompson as Dr. Kriegel, Amber Benson as Tara, Kristine Sutherland as Joyce Summers\n\nCO-STARS: Kevin Cristaldi as First Paramedic, Stefan Umstead as Second Paramedic, Loanne Bishop as 911 Operator, J. Evan Bonifant as Kevin, Kelli Garner as Kirstie, Rae'ven Larrymore Kelly as Lisa, Tia Matza as Teacher, John Michael Herndon as Vampire\n\n#### THE PLOT THICKENS:\n\nBuffy comes home to find her mom on the couch sprawled out in a way that doesn't quite look like sleep. Flashback to Christmas and a happier time: the family of Scoobies is together at the Summers house, celebrating good food and a slightly singed pie. Jump cut back to Joyce lying on the couch, eyes open.\n\nBuffy shakes her mom to wake her, but the jolt does no good. She calls 911 and the operator talks Buffy through CPR, but her Slayer strength cracks a rib. The operator is not concerned by the snap, but her tone does shift when she hears that Joyce is cold. She switches from referring to her as \"your mother\" to \"the body.\" Buffy hangs up on the operator and calls Giles, telling him only that he has to come. When the paramedics arrive, they try to revive Joyce, but fail.\n\nBuffy is instructed to wait for the coroner to come and not to move the body. She becomes sick.\n\nThinking that Glory has attacked, Giles rushes into the nearly empty house and, seeing Joyce, tries to revive her as well. Buffy yells at him to stop, citing that she is not supposed to disturb \"the body.\" She is horrified that she too has now distanced Joyce from what is happening here.\n\nIn the meantime, Dawn is suffering the tortures of being a teenager at school, but just when things start to look up for her, Buffy interrupts her art class with the devastating news. Her class\u2014including a hot guy she was hoping to impress\u2014looks on as Dawn collapses in the hallway.\n\nThe rest of the Scoobies gather in Willow's dorm room to present a united front for their friend. Tara tries to calm Willow who can't stop crying or changing clothes so she doesn't make the wrong statement. Anya keeps asking inappropriate questions, because the thousand-year-old ex-demon doesn't know how to handle death. And Xander feels the need to take out his aggression on a defenseless and shoddily made wall. They head over to the hospital, not knowing that\u2014in an instance of the mundane\u2014Xander has just been issued a parking ticket for parking his car illegally in front of the dorm.\n\nAfter they arrive at the hospital, Buffy is informed that her mom suffered an aneurysm due to post-surgery complications. Even if Buffy had been around at the time, it is doubtful that anything could have been done to help Joyce. She wants to know if her mother suffered. The doctor assures her that Joyce didn't, but Buffy hears something different in his pat answer.\n\nWhile Tara, who's also dealt with the death of a mother, talks with Buffy, Dawn sneaks down to the morgue to see her mother one last time. As she approaches the body that is hidden under a sheet, another sheet begins to move behind her. A vampire rises and attacks. Buffy realizes where her sister has gone and comes in just in time to stop the vampire. During the course of their struggle, the sheet comes off Joyce's face. Once the vampire is dust, Dawn gets up to look at her mother and reaches out to touch the body. . . .\n\nJoyce is called \"the body\" eight times in the dialogue from this episode.\n\n#### QUOTE OF THE WEEK:\n\nAnya tries to cope with her grief:\n\n\"But I don't understand! I don't understand how this all happens, how we go through this, I mean I knew her and then she's, there's just a body, and I don't understand why she just can't get back in it and not be dead. It's stupid, it's mortal and stupid, and, and Xander's crying and not talking and I was having fruit punch and I thought, well, Joyce would never have fruit punch ever and she'd never have eggs, or yawn or brush her hair, not ever and no one will explain to me why.\"\n\n#### LOVE IN VEIN:\n\nThis episode contains Willow and Tara's first on-screen kiss, which Tara instigates at an emotional moment to calm her lover's outburst.\n\nThis episode is very different from traditional episodes in some very distinct ways:\n\n\u2022 There was no \"Previously on Buffy the Vampire Slayer\" clip package at the opening of the episode.\n\n\u2022 There is no musical underscore.\n\n\u2022 Each act is essentially constructed as one scene in one location. (Teaser: Buffy in the house with her mom. Act 1: Buffy in the house with her mom, the paramedics, and Giles. Act 2: Dawn at school with her friends and Buffy. Act 3: Willow, Tara, Xander, and Anya in Willow's dorm room. Act 4: The entire group at the hospital.)\n\n#### CONTINUITY:\n\nThe episode picks up at the moment \"I Was Made to Love You\" left off. The flashback to Christmas would have been following the events of \"Into the Woods.\" Buffy's warning to Joyce and Giles to \"stay off the band candy\" is a reference to the time the pair shared an interesting evening in \"Band Candy.\" Word has spread through Dawn's school about her cutting incident in \"Blood Ties.\"\n\n#### DRAMATIS PERSONAE:\n\nAnya uses the advantage of her thousand-year-old demon knowledge to explain that the myth about the myth of Santa Claus is a myth. In fact, Santa Claus does exist and has been around since the 1500s. He wasn't always called Santa, but the part about Christmas night, flying reindeer, and coming down chimneys is all true, although \"he doesn't traditionally bring presents so much as, you know, disembowel children.\"\n\nTara tells Buffy about her own mom's death\u2014which was both expected and sudden\u2014when she was seventeen.\n\n#### FROM THE ORIGINAL TELEPLAY:\n\nWhen the scene shifts to Dawn's art class watching her and Buffy in the hall, this is what's being said between the sisters, according to the script:\n\nBUFFY: \"Mom died this morning. While we were both at school, she\u2014\"\n\nDAWN: \"No . . .\"\n\nBUFFY: \"I don't know exactly what happened, but, she's dead. . . .\"\n\nDAWN: \"No, NO NO no no you're lying you're lying she fine she's FINE and you're lying oh no no please please no you're lying she's fine, she's fine . . .\"\n\nBUFFY: \"Dawnie . . .\"\n\nDAWN: \"It's not true it's not real it's not real ohhhhh noooooo . . . no . . .\"\n\n### The Weight of the World\n\nEpisode 5.21\n\nWRITTEN BY: Douglas Petrie\n\nDIRECTED BY: David Solomon\n\nGUEST STARS: Clare Kramer as Glory, Charlie Weber as Ben, Dean Butler as Hank Summers, Lily Knight as Gronx, Bob Morrisey as Crazy #1, Amber Benson as Tara\n\nSPECIAL GUEST STARS: Joel Grey as Doc, Kristine Sutherland as Joyce Summers\n\nCO-STARS: Todd Duffey as Murk, Alexandra Lee as Young Buffy, Paul Bates as Crazy #2, Carl J. Johnson as Crazy #3, Matthew Lang as High Priest Minion\n\n#### THE PLOT THICKENS:\n\nIt's been over a half hour since Glory took Dawn. Buffy is still in her catatonic state, Giles is still in his weakened condition, Xander and Spike are about to come to blows, and no one seems to remember that Ben and Glory are one and the same. Suddenly a calm and controlled Willow takes charge, ordering the team back to Sunnydale, where Xander will take Giles to the hospital, Anya will look after Tara, Spike will check in on Glory, and Willow will try to help bring Buffy back.\n\nWork is taking place at a construction site where minions and the people Glory has \"touched\" have gathered. The god is beginning to feel her mortal half fighting for control of their body as the veil between the two sides begins to weaken.\n\nWillow takes a trip into Buffy's mind, where she is met by a six-year-old version of Buffy waiting at home for her parents to return from the hospital with her new sister, Dawn. The dream images continue as Willow follows to find a grown-up Buffy replacing a book on a shelf at the Magic Box. Then Willow is thrust out to the desert, where she learns of Buffy's recent discovery that \"death is her gift.\"\n\nAfter helping Giles get patched up at the hospital, Xander goes along with Spike to see if the demon who helped Dawn with the spell to reawaken her mom knows anything about Glory. As it turns out, the demon, Doc, is aware of Glorificus and fights against Spike and Xander to protect a wooden box. The guys manage to take out the demon and take the box. Meanwhile, Willow continues her head trip, visiting Joyce's bedroom, where the bed has been replaced by her grave, and then on to Dawn's room to watch Buffy smother her sister, citing that \"death is her gift.\"\n\nGlory and Ben continue to battle for control of their body, with the god finally gaining the upper hand when she convinces Ben to realize that either he dies or Dawn does. Willow continues round and round through Buffy's mind until she pieces together the puzzle with the help of the Slayer's dream selves. In a brief moment of past weakness while putting away a book in the Magic Box, Buffy realized that Glory was going to win. In that moment, Buffy wanted Glory to win so it could all be over. And that moment of giving up is the reason she blames herself for Dawn's death.\n\nWillow reminds the Slayer that her sister isn't dead yet, and all this wallowing is only going to make her fear come true. This snaps Buffy out of her state, and she and Willow go to rally the troops, where Giles informs them of what he has learned of Glory's plan based on scrolls found in the mystery box. The god intends to enact a ritual bloodletting using Dawn's blood to open the demon dimensions, but the only way to stop it once the gate is open is to kill Dawn.\n\n#### QUOTE OF THE WEEK:\n\nGLORY: \"Funny, 'cause I look around at this world you're so eager to be a part of, and all I see's six billion lunatics looking for the fastest ride out. Who's not crazy? Look around\u2014everyone's drinkin', smokin', shootin' up, shootin' each other, or just plain screwing their brains out because they don't want 'em anymore. I'm crazy? Honey, I am the original one-eyed chicklet in the kingdom of the blind 'cause at least I admit the world makes me nuts. Name one person who can take it here. That's all I'm asking. Name one.\"\n\nDAWN: \"Buffy.\"\n\n#### POP-CULTURE IQ:\n\nSpike is likely drawing a parallel to The Patty Duke Show, a TV series from the sixties in which the main characters were identical cousins played by the same actress:\n\n\"Ben. Glory. He's a doctor. She's the beast. Two entirely separate entities, sharing one body. It's like a bloody sitcom!\"\n\nThe script refers to the three Buffys as \"Buffy,\" \"Young Buffy,\" and \"Bookshelf Buffy.\"\n\n#### CONTINUITY:\n\nThe events of this episode begin a half hour following the end of \"Spiral.\" However, no one except Spike seems to remember that Ben and Glory are the same person, because of some mojo that makes them forget, just like Dawn forgot about it in \"Blood Ties.\" Doc was first seen in \"Forever.\" Willow visits the vision Buffy had during her quest in \"Intervention.\" The moment in the Magic Box where Buffy briefly wanted it all to be over is just the type of thing Spike had been talking about during his lesson on the deaths of Slayers in \"Fool for Love.\"\n\n#### DRAMATIS PERSONAE:\n\nBuffy's state is the almost natural conclusion to all of the grief she has endured this season, from finding out she didn't really have a sister to losing Riley, from her mother's death to her father being effectively missing, and from dropping out of school to finally having Dawn stolen away (and believing it's her fault).\n\n#### FROM THE ORIGINAL TELEPLAY:\n\nBuffy's intro in this episode reads as follows in the script:\n\nWe cut to see Buffy. Sitting, staring off into dead space, not hearing her friends, eyes open but deaf, dumb, and blind to the world around her.\n\n### The Gift\n\nEpisode 5.22\n\nWRITTEN AND DIRECTED BY: Joss Whedon\n\nGUEST STARS: Clare Kramer as Glory, Charlie Weber as Ben, Amber Benson as Tara\n\nSPECIAL GUEST STAR: Joel Grey as Doc\n\nCO-STARS: Todd Duffey as Murk, Craig Zimmerman as Minion #1, Josh Jacobson as Teen, Tom Keische as Vampire\n\n#### THE PLOT THICKENS:\n\nIt could be just another night in Sunnydale. A random vamp attacks a random teen and the Slayer comes to the rescue. However, this slay is especially odd since the vamp has never heard of the Vampire Slayer. The teen remarks that she's \"just a girl,\" which is what Buffy keeps saying! But she's not \"just a girl,\" and this is not just a regular night\u2014it could be the end of the world. Then again, that does happen fairly often in Sunnydale. Buffy goes back inside.\n\nThe mood is tense in the Magic Box because this apocalypse is just a little worse than the ones that have almost come before. Dawn is still being held by Glory, Tara is still babbling incoherently, and the team doesn't know what to do about any of it. Giles reviews the facts: if Dawn's blood is spilled, it will break down the walls between dimensions and all manner of Hell will be unleashed on Earth.\n\nGiles tries to get Buffy to see the cold, hard reality that Dawn may have to be killed for the world to survive. But the Slayer will not hear of it and refuses to let anyone even try to harm her sister. The team is still lacking for ideas when the biggest surprise of the night comes: Anya suggests two pretty helpful thoughts: using the Dagon's Sphere and Olaf the troll's big, powerful hammer.\n\nTara has been mildly sedated up until now, content to mutter about the time and how she has places to be. Buffy and Willow realize that Tara is responding to some unheard call from Glory for help.\n\nThe Ben and Glory show continues to freak Dawn out as they prepare for the ritual bloodletting, which will involve putting Dawn atop rather tall scaffolding. In the meantime, Xander tries to calm Anya down with a little lovin' in the Magic Box basement and then an oddly timed marriage proposal. She accepts, and then they go upstairs to share another idea, but not the good news.\n\nBuffy and Giles prepare for the coming fight, aware that his insistence on the possibility that Dawn might have to die to save everyone else has put some distance between them. Buffy admits to being tired and wishing her mom was there. Then she tells Giles that if they make it through this, she quits. She doesn't know how to live in this world anymore if this is the price that is asked of her.\n\nBuffy heads home with Spike to get some supplies. She has to let the vampire back inside to do that, and then she asks him to look after Dawn for her while she fights.\n\nThe team regroups at the Magic Box and finally lets Tara go where she's been feeling a pull to go all night: to join the rest of those infected by Glory. Before she departs, Tara looks at Giles and calls him a killer.\n\nThe Scoobies follow her to the construction site. When Tara and Glory are in close proximity to each other, Willow works the mojo to return her girlfriend's mind and weaken Glory slightly. Then Buffy comes in using the Dagon's Sphere to further weaken the god while Giles, Anya, and Spike handle her minions and crazies. The plan is to keep Glory busy so that she misses her window of opportunity to perform the bloodletting on Dawn. The plan goes well, until the Slayer is decapitated.\n\nIt turns out that they were using the Buffybot (requisitioned by Spike in \"I Was Made to Love You\") as a diversion, and now the real Slayer steps up with the troll hammer to continue the beating up and down the scaffolding. When she loses the hammer, Xander comes in with a good blow from a wrecking ball. The battle continues as someone new seems to be atop the scaffolding with Dawn. Willow sees this and telepathically instructs Spike to go up, and she clears the way for him with her magick. When he gets there, he finds Doc prepared to fill in for Glory. The two fight and Spike is thrown for a big fall.\n\nBuffy manages to pummel Glory back into Ben but doesn't finish the job. As she goes off to help Dawn, Giles comes in quietly and puts an end to Glory by ending Ben's mortal life. Atop the scaffolding, Buffy takes out Doc, but it's too late\u2014he's already started cutting Dawn. Dawn's blood has spilled, creating a ball of energy that is mixing other dimensions with Sunnydale. All around the world beneath them they can see hell dimensions bleeding into Sunnydale: the town hall, Main Street\u2014everywhere demons are beginning to run loose.\n\nA resigned Dawn goes to stop it, but Buffy prevents her. The Slayer realizes that all the messages she has been receiving over the past several months have led to this moment, this gift. Knowing that she and her \"sister\" are linked by blood, Buffy bids farewell to Dawn and throws herself into the ball of energy, shutting it down for good and joining her mom in the afterlife.\n\n#### QUOTE OF THE WEEK:\n\nBUFFY ANNE SUMMERS\n\n1981\u20132001\n\nBELOVED SISTER\n\nDEVOTED FRIEND\n\nSHE SAVED THE WORLD A LOT\n\n#### LOVE IN VEIN:\n\nWillow has been focusing on spells to reverse Tara's madness rather than working specifically on the Glory problem. Luckily, she finds a way to help with both issues.\n\nAt first Anya refuses Xander's proposal, afraid that he's only asking her to marry because he thinks the world is going to end. He tells her that the world isn't going to end and that he does want to marry her when it doesn't end. She accepts, although she refuses to wear the ring until the world doesn't end. She later sacrifices herself to injury by pushing Xander out of the way of falling debris. When they are alone in Buffy's house gathering weapons, Spike tells Buffy he knows she will never love him, but she treats him like a man, not a monster, and that's enough for him. Buffy does not respond. As the gang gathers around Buffy's body on the wreckage of the site, an injured Spike collapses to his knees, crying.\n\n#### POP-CULTURE IQ:\n\nSpike makes reference to an address given by the king to his troops in Shakespeare's Henry V:\n\n\"Not exactly the St. Crispin's day speech, was it?\"\n\nThe actual quote from Henry V's speech was \"we band of brothers\":\n\n\"We band of buggered.\"\n\n#### CONTINUITY:\n\nSo much of the fifth season led to this episode that it would be ridiculous to try to list them all here. Okay, let's try: Dawn was introduced in \"Dracula vs. Buffy\" and we learned that she was a little . . . different . . . in \"No Place Like Home.\" However, the team did not learn the majority of their information about The Key and the bloodletting ritual until \"Tough Love\" and \"The Weight of the World.\" We discovered that Ben and Glory were one and the same in \"Blood Ties,\" although the gang didn't realize it until \"Spiral\" (or, actually \"The Weight of the World\"). Buffy first dealt with the concept of killing a loved one to save the world in \"Becoming, Part Two,\" when she thrust a sword into Angel's chest and dumped him into Hell. This will come up again in season six with Willow, and season seven with Anya. Xander suggests joining essences like they did in \"Primeval.\" Anya suggests the Dagon's Sphere that Buffy found in \"No Place Like Home\" and the mighty troll hammer they took from Olaf in \"Triangle.\" They also use the Buffybot created for Spike in \"Intervention.\" With all the stress on her, Buffy wishes her mom were there, but she passed away in \"The Body.\" (Well, technically in \"I Was Made to Love You.\") Xander and Anya's engagement follows their love affair that began when she asked him out in \"The Prom.\" Anya takes a stuffed bunny as a bad omen, since her fear of the little furry creatures was established in \"Fear, Itself.\" Buffy reminds Willow that she was able to use magick to hold Glory off in \"Blood Ties,\" \"Tough Love,\" and \"Spiral.\" Willow enacted the de-invite spell against Spike in \"Crush.\" Tara was brain-sucked in \"Tough Love.\" Doc made his first appearance in \"Forever.\" And those references are really just the tip of the iceberg. Moving on . . . it's the end of the world and they know it: Buffy and Giles note that this is at least the sixth apocalypse for them. As of this episode they've faced the potential end of the world in \"Prophecy Girl,\" \"Innocence,\" \"Becoming, Parts One and Two,\" \"The Zeppo\" (although we never really know what's going on in that one), \"Graduation Day, Parts One and Two,\" and \"Doomed.\"\n\nThe \"Previously on Buffy the Vampire Slayer\" preview to the episode features an explosion of clips from the show's history.\n\n#### DRAMATIS PERSONAE:\n\nThough she told Giles she didn't know how to live in this world, Buffy's good-bye speech goes as follows: \"Dawn, listen to me, listen. I love you. I will always love you. This is the work I have to do. Tell Giles . . . tell Giles I figured it out . . . and I'm okay. And give my love to my friends. You have to take care of them now. You have to take care of each other. You have to be strong. But Dawn, the hardest thing in this world is to live in it. Be brave. Live. For me.\"\n\nXander credits any remotely heroic act that he may do to what he's learned from being Buffy's friend.\n\nWillow is uncomfortable with the fact that Buffy considers her the \"big gun.\" But the Slayer reminds the witch that she is the only one who has been able to hold Glory off.\n\nGiles argues with Buffy over the need for Dawn to die. He later explains to Ben what makes Buffy different from the two of them, then kills him.\n\nAnya reminds Xander that historically, in case of apocalypse, she usually skedaddled out of town. But now she loves him so much that she has inappropriately timed sex and tries to think of ways to fight a god and then does a lot of worrying.\n\nDawn, as The Key, needs to be \"poured\" into a specific place at a specific time to break down the walls between dimensions. If it stops, the energy is depleted and the walls come back up. Buffy notes\u2014this is important\u2014that the monks made Dawn out of her. Dawn is a part of her.\n\n\"The Gift\" is the one hundredth episode of the series. It was also the last episode to air on the WB, since the show moved to UPN the following season.\n\n#### FROM THE ORIGINAL TELEPLAY:\n\nJoss Whedon has a little fun with preconceived expectations for Giles (and Anthony Stewart Head) in the following stage direction:\n\nHe looks up at her. It's possible\u2014I'm not saying it'll definitely happen, but it's POSSIBLE\u2014he may take off his glasses. Play with them somehow. Could happen.\n\nJoss Whedon has a little more fun with stage directions, this time at the expense of supervising producer David Fury:\n\nAnd Spike jumps over the whole defensive crazy line to land in the thick of minions, just fists and fury. (Fists, in fact, OF fury.) (Not David Fury.) (Though his fists are formidable.) (What, no I'm not sleepy! Hey, I'm in CHARGE here!)\n\nIn the interest of keeping the true ending of this episode from leaking, there were several different scripts, all with slightly different endings, circulated. Here is how the script for one alternate episode ends:\n\nANGLE: IN THE SKY\n\nA rift opens and a huge dragon flies out, screaming as it sails past the girls.\n\nDAWN (CONT'D): \"Buffy\u2014\"\n\nBUFFY: \"I don't care! Dawn, I won't lose you\u2014\"\n\nDAWN: \"You have to! You have to let me go! Blood starts it, and until the blood stops flowing, it'll never stop. You know you have to let me. . . .\"\n\nON BUFFY\n\nAs she takes in Dawn's words, knowing it's true.\n\nON DAWN\n\nAs, slowly at first, she takes a few steps away from her sister, toward the end of the platform.\n\nON BUFFY\n\nWho does nothing to stop her.\n\nON DAWN AGAIN\n\nA few more steps, faster this time, gaining speed until she is running toward the edge of the platform.\n\nANGLE: ABOVE THE END as Dawn reaches it and SWAN DIVES right out and down toward the ball of energy.\n\nCLOSE ON: DAWN\n\nAs she starts down.\n\nCLOSE ON: BUFFY\n\nAs she watches, crying. . . .\n\nANGLE: THE BALL OF ENERGY\n\nAs Dawn's body sails down into and disappears in a white light, causing the energy to go even wilder.\n\nCLOSE ON: The group, as they look in vain to see what has happened.\n\nCLOSE ON: DAWN'S FACE\n\nAs she floats in the center of the maelstrom, being hit with the equivalent of a million jolts of electricity\u2014\n\nBUFFY\u2014unable to leave the platform. . . .\n\nDAWN\u2014her eyes slowly closing. . . .\n\nTHE ENERGY BALL\u2014exploding and suddenly contracting out of existence . . .\n\nDawn disappearing with it.\n\nCLOSE ON BUFFY'S FACE\n\nBLACK OUT.\n\nEND OF SHOW.\n\n## CATCHING UP WITH THE CAST AND CREW\n\n### CLARE KRAMER (GLORY)\n\nYou were one of the founders of GeekNation, one of the best geek-culture sites on the Web. How did GeekNation come about, and what is its mission going forward?\n\nCLARE: \"Our original thought was to not just be a voice for someone inside the industry or a voice of a fan\u2014[who] normally is outside of the industry\u2014but [for] both. We're all filmmakers and work in TV, but we're also fans, so we sought to deliver a voice from both perspectives. That's been our mission and that is what we'll continue to do as long as we have people listening.\n\n\"As for moving forward, we hope to continue spreading our voice, while at the same time adding new sectors to our company that provide completely different offerings to the user, yet accompany one another. One of those new offerings to our users will be our new ticketing platform, called FanFix (fanfix.com), which specializes in ticket sales for conventions and film fests. We're also launching an app that we started building last year that could completely change the ways in which people attend events. We're very excited about the trajectory of the company and where things are moving forward.\n\n\"We also just sold our first show to [the network] Decades. Then Again with Herbie J. Pilato, which basically interviews classic TV stars. We also have several other shows in development.\"\n\nAs part of your work with GeekNation, you've executive produced a number of Web series. How do you decide what you think is going to work?\n\nCLARE: \"It's not easy\u2014you certainly gain a newfound respect for studio execs. Luckily for me, a bad decision won't cost me my job, so I have more freedom to what we're willing to take a risk on. If I make a bad decision\u2014which I never look at that way anyway\u2014I can only blame myself, and it's always a risk and potential loss of revenue that I'm willing to take.\n\n\"You're always asking yourself, 'What's everyone going to like?' and unfortunately, it's not always the choice you'd make yourself. It's like choosing a pie for a party, hoping everyone will like the same flavor, with the caveat that there's a good chance that not every pie will taste good. Luckily, we're surrounded by an abundance of crazy-talented people that help make our decisions for us.\"\n\nOriginal series for the Web continue to be influential, but where do you see Web-original entertainment going in the future?\n\nCLARE: \"For a long while, even up to as little as five years ago, many in the industry were preaching 'the death of TV.' Most people believed that the advent of online content would be the end for TV. . . . It was popular, inexpensive, and effective, not to mention for the first time in history (aside from theater) a fan could engage with the creator. Then came shows like Game of Thrones and The Walking Dead that completely changed the game. Ad dollars rose, budgets increased, and now you have film-quality television. TV is amazing now! Then Netflix, Hulu, Amazon, HBO Go, Shudder, and others alike proved you can have both.\n\n\"Now I think seeing the future is simple: TV and Web content are one and the same, starting with House of Cards, Marco Polo . . . It is an amazing time we're living in. We have without question found ourselves in an entertainment revolution, and I'm loving every minute of it!\"\n\nYou shared the screen with fellow Buffy alum Eliza Dushku in the cheerleading classic Bring It On, which has gone on to have its own dedicated fandom and a long life. Any thoughts on the experience of making that film and its continued popularity?\n\nCLARE: \"Bring It On is without a doubt the most fun I've had making a movie! We were all hired to play sixteen-year-olds, so we made sure we stayed in character throughout the filming process. (That was a joke.) Two of my best friends in the world, Eliza and actress Bianca Kajlich, I met on that movie. This may be some fun news for some, but Eliza ended up being best friends with my sister while staying in my apartment in New York. Not to mention, Huntley Ritter is now one of my husband's buddies. We all gained a lot from that film, including some great memories, some we can't share!\"\n\nYou got to be the Big Bad for all of season five of Buffy\u2014and Glory was the one who managed to kill Buffy, even though loads of villains had tried. Does that make Glory the Biggest Bad of all?\n\nCLARE: \"Of course, I may be a bit biased here, but yes . . . I am the Biggest Bad of all! Ha-ha-ha!\n\n\"Seriously, though, I've caught bits of the show since, and it really was lightning in a bottle; it was perfect! From Joss's creation, to the writers, and to the choices all those fabulous actors made were just perfect . . . across the board perfect! Nothing makes an artist or actor happier than to be a part of something that touches so many people in so many ways. At the end of the day, we're only on this marble for a certain amount of time, and it feels good to know you'll be remembered for something amazing. It really does make you grateful to everyone, especially the fans!\"\n\nWhat stands out to you about the process of being cast as Glory\u2014about the audition or your first look at the script, or both?\n\nCLARE: \"Trust other artists and sometimes great things happen! That's really it. It was my first time delving into TV, and for someone who likes to control their environment and surroundings, especially when I had reps telling me not to do the show and to stick with only film, I had to trust, and I'm glad I did.\"\n\nSo much time has passed. What are your favorite behind-the-scenes memories of your time on Buffy?\n\nCLARE: \"As I've stated before, it was my first time filming a TV show. Not that it's much different than filming a movie, other than getting to know your crew a lot better, so that was fun. I stay in touch with my stunt double, and I've also gotten to know so many other actors that I didn't even work with, just by having that connection to a show\u2014having those people in my life has made it all the more special for me.\n\n\"My favorite memory would be [accidentally] punching my stunt double straight in the forehead and knocking her out. It was terrifying at the time, but now we both find it hysterical; I'd never punched any more than a punching bag prior to that! It was a late-night filming; we were all exhausted, and I pushed when I should have pulled.\"\n\nEveryone says that working on a long-running TV series is a lot like high school, with circles of friends and then those people you wish you'd hung out with more. Who do you wish you'd hung out with more while working on Buffy?\n\nCLARE: \"This may seem like an obvious answer, but maybe Sarah. I think we both really liked one another, worked really well together, and we definitely respected one another. By the time I came in, it was definitely important to me to keep things as professional as possible\u2014I feel like that's what she needed from me at the time so that's what I wanted to give.\n\n\"Acting is give and take, knowing your place, and knowing what your co-actors need from you. In hindsight, I probably could have been more personable, and we probably would have become the best of friends. I really like her. With that said, I have zero regrets. It was a 100 percent amazing experience from the beginning\u2014even to now.\"\n\nAs a child, you were Wendy in a series of TV commercials for Wendy's. What's the best burger you've ever had?\n\nCLARE: \"Since we're talking fast food, I'm going to have to go with what I've learned from my Texas side of the family, since I married a Texan, and say Whataburger. Early in our relationship his family would pick us up at the airport and we'd head straight to their lake house, and on the way that was always our first stop. Those are fond memories . . . and great burgers!\"\n\nWhat are you working on now, and what does the future hold for Clare Kramer?\n\nCLARE: \"Directing! I truly feel that I've matured enough in my career that I can focus on directing\u2014I've done a lot of Web directing in preparation for narrative, and I'm ready to make the jump. I've been offered some nonscripted [projects], but I'm not sure I want to begin my directing career that way. Sometimes you can start in a direction and it gets difficult to break away, so I just want to be cautious and focus mainly on what interests me\u2014for now, anyway.\n\n\"I also have a little passion project, which is a feature film that I want to shoot in Texas. I'm also developing a few things with Roddenberry (the Star Trek franchise), and as I stated earlier, we're pitching shows we've developed to TV networks. Furthermore, we have a product that we are currently developing that distributes a certain type of content, and it's so secretive right now that I can't even say more than that. It is very exciting!\n\n\"The future is bright career-wise, but mainly, I'm enjoying life with my family and kids.\"\n\n### AMBER BENSON (TARA MACLAY)\n\nYou've written, directed, produced, and edited your own independent films in the past, but you've recently segued into writing for television. How much can you say about the TV projects you're writing?\n\nAMBER: \"All I can say at the moment is that I'm working on a true-crime project for Lifetime, and I just sold my first pilot about a female serial killer.\"\n\nYou're a screenwriter, a director, a novelist, and many other things. A Renaissance woman philosophy. How do you decide what projects you want to work on?\n\nAMBER: \"It's just whatever moves me and is entertaining and interesting. As I've gotten older, I've decided I only want to work with nice people. Life is too short, so if a project isn't interesting to me and the people aren't nice, I'm not going to do it. I only want to work on stuff that gets me excited creatively and projects that will mean working with people with whom I can enjoy collaborating.\"\n\nThat philosophy has never seemed strategic, but more instinctive. Has that changed? Is there a strategy involved now?\n\nAMBER: \"There has never been a strategy to how I do business, I just go by my gut. If my intuition tells me I'm going to have fun doing something, or if I'm scared of something, I'll do it. I'm one of those people who runs toward things that frighten me. I think that was the thing with Ghosts of Albion, the original BBC Web series that you and I did. That was terrifying. To think that we were going to go to the UK, and that you and I were basically going to make this thing kind of on our own with the help of people at the BBC we'd never met before . . . that was absolutely terrifying. I could've walked away and said that I'm not doing it, but I run toward those scary projects. Plus, I was doing that stuff with you, so at least I knew I would have one person who would have my back, and that even if it turned out to be a disaster, at least we would have a good time doing it.\"\n\nYou've been narrating audiobooks for a while too, and I know that you enjoy that work. Is that just fun in its own right, or does that come from you being such a voracious reader?\n\nAMBER: \"It partly comes from being an audiobook listener. I'm a big reader, but I definitely inhale audiobooks because I do a lot of driving. If you live in Los Angeles, you're in the car a lot. Of course, the other motive is my health insurance. It's the only acting I do these days, so it's how I keep my health insurance up through SAG and AFTRA. It's really fun. It's a good way to be creative without having to get dressed in anything other than your scuzzy clothes, and you don't have to take a shower if you don't want to, because you're sitting in a little booth by yourself.\"\n\nLooking back now, what stands out to you about the process of being cast as Tara, the audition or the script, or both?\n\nAMBER: \"I had these pants\u2014I think they were my sister's pants. I cut them off and they were too big, so I belted them and they kind of were hanging. They were weird, and I don't know why I decided 'I'm wearing this to the audition.' I just wore that and a T-shirt. I just did not dress up for it. I didn't do anything specifically makeup-wise. I just went as me. I think I'd just hit a point where I was thinking, I hate this business, chasing auditions and trying to be an actor. I don't care anymore, so I'm just going to be myself. I went in, and I did not look like any of the other girls in the waiting area. They were all dressed nice and I was sort of a bum, and I think maybe there was something to that. The 'not caring.' The older I get, the more I think that if you don't give a crap about what other people think, people are more interested in working with you. They think you know something they don't, and they're willing to go on the journey with you.\n\n\"And I know that [executive producer] Marti Noxon was instrumental in me getting the part. I think Joss had seen someone who was a little more sylphlike, very tiny and sort of puckish and fairylike. And I am none of those things. So I know Marti basically said, 'We like the one in the weird pants. The one wearing cutoff pants that are three sizes too big for her and hanging around her butt.' That was me.\"\n\nTara and Willow's relationship was what I consider an earthquake in pop culture, a truly groundbreaking LGBT relationship on television. Did you know the relationship with Willow was in the cards when you auditioned?\n\nAMBER: \"Not at all. I was just supposed to be [in] one or two episodes to play her friend from Wicca group and that was it. And then they just kept adding episodes. The crew kept saying, 'You guys have such great chemistry,' and I had no idea what they were talking about. Then the producers took us aside, each of us separately, and said, 'Okay, you guys are going to be a couple,' and I realized what the crew had meant about our chemistry.\"\n\nI have seen so many people cry when meeting you\u2014I've heard people tell you that you saved their lives.\n\nAMBER: \"I've definitely had a lot of people who've reached out because of Tara. A big part of it is the writing. I'm only a piece of the puzzle. She's had that impact because of who she was, how she was written, how she was shot and put together. I have the face\u2014she's my face, and I guess my empathy, because I guess that comes across\u2014but it was a group effort. There wasn't a character like her around in the world until she was brought into life in the Buffyverse. It was an honor to get to walk in Tara's shoes.\"\n\nYes, it's a collaborative effort\u2014creating a character\u2014but when you have all of these personal one-on-one experiences with people who have poured themselves out to you, it has to have an impact on you.\n\nAMBER: \"Yeah, of course. It makes you feel very responsible to people and makes you think about how you approach things. It's part of the reason I've kind of pulled away from social media. It makes you feel very vulnerable to know how easily things you can say can be taken out of context, and because there are people who feel very strongly about this character, I started to feel like maybe it's better to take a step back and not make myself so open to both the good and the bad. But there are those moments when I meet somebody face-to-face and they tell me, 'I didn't kill myself, because I saw a couple fall in love who were like me. And there's nobody like me in this small town in the Midwest where I grew up, so I felt like it was okay to be me.' Then I'm reminded that playing Tara is the greatest thing that I've done as an actor. It's the most powerful and will probably be the thing that will go with me to the grave. It will be on my tombstone, you know? So it makes you feel responsible, but it's a wonderful responsibility.\"\n\nI know you get recognized in public often, even so many years later. Have those encounters changed?\n\nAMBER: \"It waxes and wanes. Yes, people always look at me, because they think they know me from somewhere and they can't quite place it. But it's actually become more common recently. I was at the mall, and a girl came over to ask me if I was 'that girl from Buffy.' We talked a little and she showed me that she'd looked me up on her phone, just making sure, confirming. I think Netflix and cable have created a new wave of Buffy fans.\"\n\nMany years have passed, but when you think back, what are your favorite behind-the-scenes memories of working on the show?\n\nAMBER: \"Um . . . gosh. For me, just making the musical was so amazing. Getting to sing with Tony Head, who is wonderful. You don't get to do something like that very often. It was really magical and truly was like being part of a family. A seventeen-hour day was not out of the norm\u2014and that's a long-ass day\u2014but we went to work and we were just happy to see everybody. You really got to know people well. For me, the saddest part of not being on the show anymore was not getting to hang out with the crew and the cast and the writers and no longer being part of that Stewart Street family. In fact, the Stewart Street studio doesn't really exist anymore. The place where we shot all of those episodes doesn't exist anymore, which is really sad.\"\n\nEveryone says working on a long-running TV series is a lot like high school. There are circles of friends and then there are always those people you wish you'd hung out with more. Who do you wish you'd hung out with more?\n\nAMBER: \"I have a great relationship with Emma Caulfield now. Creatively, we've toyed around with working together on stuff, and she's brilliant and just so much fun, but I didn't really spend a ton of time with her on the set. So I wish I'd had more time with Emma.\"\n\nYou've written two successful urban fantasy novel series, but you've got so much on your plate at the moment. Do you have plans for more novels in the not-so-distant future?\n\nAMBER: \"The End of Magic\u2014the third novel in my Witches of Echo Park series\u2014came out in May 2017, and now I'm taking a little sabbatical. I got burnt out. A novel is a hundred thousand words. A hundred thousand words is a lot of words. I'm not taking my toe out of the water, but I'm taking a break.\"\n\nSomehow, no matter how long the line is, or how exhausted you are, you always seem to make every single fan at a convention feel like they got to share a moment with you. What's the secret?\n\nAMBER: \"I've been at the end of the line. I know what it's like to want to have a moment with somebody and them not be amenable to that, and it's shitty. I don't want to make anyone else feel that way. I'm sure there are people who have walked away unhappy, because how could there not be? But I would say ninety percent of the people who come to say hello have a positive experience and walk away feeling pretty good. And I think that's a big win. It's why I'm there.\"\n\nYou don't do a lot of conventions, but you've done your share over the years. What are the best fan moments you can recall?\n\nAMBER: \"There have been so many nice ones, people coming up and saying thank you for being part of the show, and for playing that character, and for being part of the LGBTQ world and being an ally in that world . . . that's the best stuff. When someone brings their kid up and their kid says, 'I'm trans and I feel like it's okay to be me because of your show,' that is amazing. You have someone who wasn't even born who is comfortable with gender fluidity because of an openness that we offered fifteen or sixteen years before, and that makes me happy.\"\n\nYou've worked in all sorts of film and TV projects in the years since Buffy, including guest spots on major network shows, including Supernatural and Grey's Anatomy, and lead roles in Lifetime movies that we love in our house, like Holiday Wishes and 7 Things to Do Before I'm 30. Then there are the indies like The Killing Jar, Strictly Sexual, and the unforgettably weird Dust Up. What's your favorite post-Buffy acting role?\n\nAMBER: \"Post-Buffy is hard. . . . It's easy to pick something pre-Buffy, because that would be King of the Hill. That's my favorite. This is tough. 7 Things to Do Before I'm 30 was actually really fun and really good. That was a lovely experience. And Latter Days is great. It is a love story between two guys that is super positive and important. It transcended what the genre had been doing until then. When I read the script, my reaction was just: 'Wow. I would do craft service on this; it's really important.' But probably the weirdest one\u2014it makes me laugh every time and people seem to really connect to it\u2014is One-Eyed Monster. When I had Ron Jeremy's fake, animatronic penis on my shoulder looking at me . . . I mean, come on. I'm the big winner. You can climb no higher.\"\n\n### DAVID FURY (WRITER AND CO-EXECUTIVE PRODUCER)\n\nYou've written for and\/or produced some of the biggest series on TV, including Lost and 24, and some of the most popular shows in pop culture and the geek community, including Buffy, Angel, Fringe, Hannibal, Homeland, and the short-lived Terra Nova, which was a favorite in my house. Do you come from a love of TV in general, a love of genre, or both (and give us some of that history)? What brought you to writing, and to writing these particular series?\n\nDAVID: \"I spent way too much time watching television in my youth, mostly comedy and sci-fi\/fantasy. But I wouldn't say I 'loved' TV\u2014I saved that love for movies\u2014but there were a couple of shows that easily inspired me: Twilight Zone and Star Trek. Both could be funny, scary, touching . . . and, even at a very young age, I recognized them as allegories for the human condition. The former got me reading Bradbury, Matheson, Asimov, and others whose work later informed a different phase of my creative life. While working sporadically as an actor, I tried my hand for a few years as a stand-up and improvisational comedy performer.\n\n\"When I first started writing sketches, they were often rooted in allegorical storytelling: an in-denial Frosty the Snowman learning from his agent that he's melting; three mermen bemoaning the fact that all of their women keep dumping them for humans (or 'leg-boys' as they derisively refer to them); an existential fruit fly trying to fathom the meaning of a less-than-twenty-four-hour life span . . . comedy, fantasy, sci-fi allegory. That was my sweet spot. When people encouraged me to write for television, I partnered with my then girlfriend, Elin Hampton, on several comedy shows. But it wasn't until we met Joss at his office while he was developing BTVS that I found a project that was everything I was looking for, with a genius at the helm who would let me do my thing.\n\n\"Buffy led to simultaneously consulting on Angel, where I met Howard Gordon, who would later bring me into the 24 franchise. The final season of Angel brought Ben Edlund into my life, leading to my partnership with him on the new Amazon incarnation of The Tick. After Angel, I was fortunate enough to be hired by J. J. Abrams and Damon Lindelof (who were fans of several Whedonverse writers) to come onto the first season of Lost. I always tried to be discerning when it came to the shows I wanted to work on, but my experience on Buffy opened up far more possibilities and gave me the confidence to say no more often than yes.\"\n\nLike so many of the Buffy writers, you'd written episodes for a handful of series before you came onto Buffy, but it certainly seems to have been the launching pad for you. Do you remember what it was like getting hired for the first time? How did that come about?\n\nDAVID: \"My writing experience before Buffy was exclusively in the comedy world. Sitcom scripts are largely group-written with entire staffs, regardless of what the final credits say. But in an hour show like Buffy, I discovered that we each have ownership over our scripts. Others might sometimes contribute or a showrunner may take a pass at a few scenes at first, but ultimately, the voice largely belongs to the credited writer. I think that may be the main reason my name came to be more recognized.\n\n\"At the time Elin and I met with Joss, we were just finishing up our stint on a short-lived attempt to bring Pinky and the Brain to prime time. Joss was looking for comedy writers and pitched us what the series was going to be. We'd also just had a meeting for another potential job on a more conventional sitcom at ABC, scheduled between Roseanne and Home Improvement. But after meeting with Joss, we knew his was the show we wanted to do. Our agent told us we were crazy\u2014Buffy's initial order was for only six episodes, airing mid-season on a fledgling network called The WB. There was no future in it. Trusting his judgment, we took the job on the ABC sitcom. . . . It was canceled after eighteen episodes. Meanwhile, Buffy's now twelve-episode season was an almost instant cult hit. So we fired our agent and landed at another agency, which coincidentally represented Joss. When our new agents asked what we'd like to do, our first request was to try to get a second chance with him.\n\n\"Near the start of season two, we went in to see Joss and David Greenwalt, and pitched them a few ideas for a possible freelance stand-alone story. They bought the first one, which eventually became the episode 'Go Fish.' Joss and David were so happy with the first draft that came in that an offer was made for us to come on as producers the following season. We were elated by their effusive response and offer. Only problem was, my partner and wife, who didn't share my affinity for horror and occult fantasy, wanted to remain in the sitcom world. So she accepted a writer\/producer position on Mad About You, while I had to settle for writing a new freelance Buffy episode by myself to convince Joss that I was capable. That episode became season three's 'Helpless.' Again, they were so happy with the draft, more freelance gigs followed. Wheels were already spinning for me to officially come onto the staff in season four, as well as help develop and write the second episode of Angel, which was slated to begin concurrently. It was a long, winding road. . . . But Joss once graciously said that he thinks of me as being there from the very beginning of both series. It's a sentiment I share and could not feel more grateful for.\"\n\nI'm fascinated to see that you wrote episodes of Pinky and the Brain and The Wild Thornberrys. Do you think about animation when you're considering future projects? Is there something you'd like to do as an animated series?\n\nDAVID: \"I don't generally think about animation projects, largely because I see it as a medium for real artists to expand the boundaries of their imaginations and budgets. I feel like the best comic-book writers can actually draw, themselves. And I couldn't draw a stick figure. In truth, I'm more a product of the theater in that my stories tend to be more character-based . . . my ideas are more contained\u2014quirky, but hopefully smart\u2014rather than big and epic. In the scripts we wrote for Pinky and the Brain and The Wild Thornberrys, there was almost no reason to animate them, except that they concerned talking lab mice and wild safari animals. Strip that out and the stories still work.\n\n\"That said, there was a book I found a long time ago that I thought I'd like to one day write and direct as an animated film. It's called Freaks' Amour by Tom DeHaven, a love story set in a post-apocalyptic world where people have developed strange physical mutations. Just lent the book to one of my sons, who is in film school. Maybe someday I'll produce and he'll direct, or vice versa.\"\n\nSome of the show's writers engaged regularly with fans and others didn't. It's no exaggeration to say that the Buffy fandom\u2014particularly the core fans on posting boards like The Bronze\u2014basically invented modern fandom. How much do you still interact with fans of the many shows you've worked on, and what are your thoughts on the relationship between modern TV and its fans?\n\nDAVID: \"The Bronze was really amazing. Joss told me about it when I came aboard and encouraged me to go on after my first episode. You have to remember this was before 'live tweeting' or any social media. . . . To be able to interact with fans in real time, answer questions, have debates . . . it was the first time a lot of us felt like a part of the ever-enlarging geek community. And unlike the kind of fan interaction that's done now, this wasn't about pimping and promoting shows. These were like pen pal relationships. Then, of course, every year there'd be a Bronze party in LA, and we'd get to meet so many people we'd been conversing with all season long. I loved the experience so much, I arranged for the site operators of The Bronze to bring the same thing to Lost. It was called The Fuselage. I imagine it continued on after I left the series, but I don't really know. The fact is, I never found any site as warm and comforting as The Bronze, so I don't have much fan interaction anymore\u2014with the exception of occasional nice notes on Facebook or Twitter.\"\n\nYou were a big part of the original 24 and now you're involved with the continuation, 24: Legacy, which seems to be both a straight continuation of the series but with a different main character and sort of a reboot as well. Do you think such a thing would ever be possible for Buffy, and what other shows you've worked on would you love to see return, either as a reboot or a continuation (and which would you prefer)?\n\nDAVID: \"My involvement with 24: Legacy is minimal at best. The executive producers just asked me to write a couple of freelance episodes to help them keep pace with production and I was happy to do it. As for reboots and multiseason runs, I have kind of a minority opinion on that\u2014I don't believe any series should go beyond five seasons. (Six or seven if it's really exceptional and episode count is minimal.) I fall in love with shows too, but I'd rather see them end in their prime than drag out with diminishing returns. I miss Buffy, but to try to revive it or reboot it will only lead to disappointment. Like that recent attempt with The X-Files.\n\n\"I believe every new film set in the Star Wars universe will diminish the specialness of that series. I get it, no matter how much we get, we want more. Which is why J. K. Rowling is putting out new books in the Harry Potter universe. I wish she wouldn't. I wish limited series and movies could be allowed to harden into cherished jewels of memory, untarnished by futile efforts to re-create the magic. But then, I'm only a capitalist up to a point.\"\n\nYour Halloween episode \"Fear, Itself\" remains one of my favorites. What's your favorite among the episodes you wrote for the series, and why?\n\nDAVID: \"Thanks for that. I'm always a little surprised how often people tell me that's one of their favorite episodes, when I find season two's 'Halloween' episode so perfect. As for my favorite, I guess it will always be 'Helpless,' if only because it was my first solo effort. It was unique and disturbing writing Buffy as a terrified, powerless girl. And I'm responsible for getting Giles fired, which set the stage for Wesley and everything else that followed. That still blows my mind.\"\n\nI've heard so many people talk about Buffy changing their lives\u2014in many cases saving their lives. How do you feel when you hear that sort of thing, and have you had similar reactions to other series you've worked on?\n\nDAVID: \"I'm always incredibly humbled and moved when fans tell me how much Buffy meant to them. Their stories are sometimes staggering, telling me how bullied or abused they were as children . . . how difficult it was when their parents split up . . . and how Buffy made them feel somehow empowered, or just took them away from their lives for an hour every week. We, the writers and actors, all came to realize the responsibility we had to say something hopeful about relationships, about life. I also meet so many people who became inspired to become writers from the work we did . . . not unlike how the writers of Twilight Zone and Star Trek inspired me.\"\n\nI've heard it said that working on a long-running TV series is a lot like high school, with circles of friends and then those people you wish you'd hung out with more. Who do you wish you'd hung out with more from your Buffy days?\n\nDAVID: \"I can't think of anyone on Buffy that I missed getting to hang with. We were a pretty tight group, going to movie matinees, playing office golf . . . I enjoyed each and everyone's company from time to time, but I suppose I'll always wish I got to hang more with Joss. All the cool kids in show business gravitated toward him and you always wanted to be included. Fortunately, he was generous and included us more often than not.\"\n\nYou're incredibly busy, always, but what do you have coming up that we don't know about yet?\n\nDAVID: \"Well, in addition to writing two episodes of 24: Legacy, as I mentioned, I'm executive producer with Ben Edlund on his newest and bestest series of The Tick for Amazon Prime.\"\n\n## SEASON 6\n\n### Bargaining, Part One\n\nEpisode 6.1\n\nWRITTEN BY: Marti Noxon\n\nDIRECTED BY: David Grossman\n\nSPECIAL GUEST STAR: Anthony Stewart Head as Rupert Giles\n\nGUEST STAR: Franc Ross as Razor\n\nCO-STARS: Geoff Meed as Mag, Mike Grief as Klyed, Paul Greenberg as Shempy Vamp, Joy DeMichelle Moore as Ms. Leftcort, Robert D. Vito as Cute Boy, Harry Johnson as Parent #1, Kelly Lynn Warren as Parent #2, Hila Levy as Pretty Girl\n\n#### THE PLOT THICKENS:\n\nIn a Slayer-less Sunnydale, the Slayerettes manage to do an impressive job filling in for their dearly departed friend. It's been months since Buffy sacrificed herself to save her sister and the world. Willow is the new leader, by unanimous decision, and she's using her magick to guide the team through battle with demons. They've enlisted the rebuilt Buffybot to keep word from spreading that Sunnydale is now Slayer-free. It's also beginning to look like it's going to be Watcher-free, as Giles plans to move home to England.\n\nThe Buffybot manages to maintain the human facade for parent\/teacher day at Dawn's school, but she's still not the old Buffster. While Spike looks after Dawn and continues to lament the fact that he watched Buffy die, plans are being hatched to alter that reality. Willow, Xander, Tara, and Anya are collecting ingredients for a spell to bring the Slayer back to life. Things are coming together just in time, because the Buffybot gets a little beating from a littler vamp and her circuits are exposed to him. The demon world at large is about to learn that the Slayer is not what she used to be.\n\nWillow's not her old self either. Blinded by the need to bring back her friend, the witch keeps a few things secret from even Xander and the others about the resurrection spell, like the fact that she is off in the woods sacrificing a fawn for the necessary blood. When she returns to the Magic Box with the last ingredient, the gang is surprised to find that Giles is gone and has only left a note of good-bye, but the Scoobies know that's not going to fly and hurry for a farewell scene at the airport.\n\nThe gang is a bit wary of reviving the Slayer with the Watcher gone, but they go ahead anyway. Although Willow indicated that she would be \"tested\" while performing the spell, she failed to prepare her lover and friends for just the extremeness of those tests.\n\nIn the meantime, a demon biker gang comes to Sunnydale in search of the faux Slayer, and they easily inflict some damage on the bot.\n\nAs Dawn and Spike watch the demons take over the town, Buffybot takes her damaged self to the cemetery to find Willow. Unfortunately, the demons follow and crash the spell-casting party. The gang is forced to scatter as Xander takes a semiconscious Willow to safety. As she comes around, Willow is upset that the spell didn't work. But that's not quite true.\n\nTrapped in her coffin, under layers of dirt, the Slayer has come back to life.\n\n#### QUOTE OF THE WEEK:\n\nSpike pokes fun at Giles's life, or lack thereof:\n\n\"Oooh. Poor Watcher. Did your life pass before your eyes? 'Cuppa tea, cuppa tea, almost got shagged, cuppa tea . . .' \"\n\n#### LOVE IN VEIN:\n\nTara and Willow have moved into the Summers home and taken over Joyce's old bedroom to look after Dawn. Spike is still torn up over Buffy's death. He is now extremely uncomfortable when the Buffybot makes with the flattering that she was originally programmed to do around him. Xander and Anya still have not announced their engagement. Xander wants to put it off until things settle down, which frustrates Anya, because, really, when does life in Sunnydale ever settle down?\n\nTODAY'S LESSON:\n\nDawn's class is reading Henry David Thoreau's Walden.\n\n#### POP-CULTURE IQ:\n\nXander refers to the 1978 Brian DePalma movie in which children with paranormal abilities are trained to become killers in war conditions:\n\n\"But I saw The Fury and that way lies spooky carnival death.\"\n\nUpon hearing the Buffybot's weird way with words, Spike compares her to the artistic movement in which artists playfully worked to shock their audience in protest of the traditional forms of expression:\n\n\"What's with the Dadaism, Red?\"\n\nAnya made a deal for the important spell ingredient on the online auction site:\n\n\"You found the last known Urn of Osiris on eBay?\"\n\nThe master negotiator also added a collectible from the bubblegum boy band to the deal:\n\n\"I finally got him to throw in a limited edition Backstreet Boys lunch box for\u2014\"\n\nAnya makes reference to the oft-mentioned science and nature cable channel, indicating that this group is really into the educational television:\n\n\"Discovery Channel has monkeys.\"\n\nThe loserlike vampire is described only with the name of the least capable Stooge in The Three Stooges, a comedy television series based on a series of movies that began airing in 1959:\n\nShempy Vamp\n\nThe Shempy Vamp tries to play it cool with the biker demons by referencing the 1993 film Menace II Society:\n\n\"She's a menace to our society.\"\n\nAmong the parting gifts for Giles, Tara gives him a little monster finger puppet and says, \"Grrr, arrgh!\" echoing the lines of the Mutant Enemy logo from the show's end credits.\n\n#### CONTINUITY:\n\nWillow's powers continue to grow and she now communicates with the entire gang telepathically as she had done with Spike in \"The Gift.\" Even Tara is unaware of the power Willow wields over the forces necessary to resurrect someone. The Buffybot was built in \"Intervention\" and Willow's rebuilt her twice now (following \"Intervention\" and \"The Gift,\" in which the bot was decapitated). Dawn's father has apparently been located since his disappearing act last season, although it's clear that he still hasn't made a trip to Sunnydale to check in on his daughters since Joyce's death. Giles first mentioned possibly leaving at the beginning of the fifth season in \"Buffy vs. Dracula.\" Tara reminds everyone that reviving the dead is wrong, however, since Buffy died an unnatural death, it might work, in comparison to Dawn's use of magick to revive Joyce in \"Forever\" (and, later, Willow's attempt to bring back someone else at the end of the season). Anya clarifies that zombies only eat brains when instructed by their zombie master, as the gang had sort of found out in \"Dead Man's Party.\" Willow assumes that Buffy could be trapped in some hell dimension like Angel had been between seasons two and three. She'll later learn that's incorrect.\n\nThe Shempy Vampire, in what's likely an effort to show his absolute \"Shempiness,\" wears a T-shirt from the \"MMMBop\" pop group Hanson.\n\n#### DRAMATIS PERSONAE:\n\nGiles is still coming to terms with the fact that he did \"what any good Watcher would do\" and got his Slayer killed in the line of duty. But now that his job is over, he finds it hard to leave Sunnydale. He also finds it difficult to depart for fear of making a very un-British-like scene.\n\nWillow was elected head of the Scoobies following Buffy's death when Xander nominated her and suggested a vote. The choice was unanimous. She programmed the Buffybot with a homing device so it could locate Willow whenever it was in need of repair.\n\nAnya is placed in charge of the Magic Box in Giles's absence, but she has a difficult time waiting to assume her new role when he continually puts off leaving.\n\nDawn reminds Spike that she's no longer The Key\u2014or at least, if she is, she doesn't open anything anymore. She and Spike are thrown together more often as the Scoobies become secretive about their resurrection plans.\n\nSpike is just an accepted part of the gang's world now, even though Buffy's gone.\n\n#### FROM THE ORIGINAL TELEPLAY:\n\nThe script ends with the following description:\n\nNow, we are inside Buffy's coffin. We can see Buffy's corpse. Suddenly, its eyes snap open and the corpse morphs back into live Buffy. Then her breath starts to come fast, horrified. . . .\n\n### Bargaining, Part Two\n\nEpisode 6.2\n\nWRITTEN BY: David Fury\n\nDIRECTED BY: David Grossman\n\nGUEST STAR: Franc Ross as Razor\n\nCO-STARS: Geoff Meed as Mag, Mike Grief as Klyed, Richard Wharton as Homeowner\n\n#### THE PLOT THICKENS:\n\nThe Scoobies scatter when they come under attack by the biker gang literally from Hell, unaware that Buffy has risen from the dead, trapped in her grave. Buffy claws her way out of the ground while the demon bikers lay waste to Sunnydale.\n\nSpike realizes that it's not safe in the Summers home with the demons about, so he takes Dawn and hits the streets of town on a stolen demon bike. At the same time, a shell-shocked Buffy wanders through the streets, looking quite confused.\n\nAnya and Tara make it to the Magic Box and are worried for their respective loves, so Tara sends a locator light to guide Willow and Xander home. The little light finds them as Xander tries to get Willow to stop avoiding his talk about the seriously dark magick she was using.\n\nThe demons grab the Buffybot and bring her into town too. Just before they chain their bikes to the robot and pull her apart, she sees the real Buffy has come home. The Scoobies also run into the Slayer reborn, but the conversation is limited. Obviously they're thrilled to see their friend, until Xander realizes that they brought her back from death but didn't dig her out of the ground. The demons attack, forcing Buffy into fight then flight.\n\nDawn and Spike come across bits of Buffybot. The robot is still talking and reveals that she saw the \"other\" Buffy, which sends Dawn off to search. She eventually finds her sister atop the scaffolding where Buffy was last seen alive. Buffy wants to jump again and wonders if this is Hell. Dawn tries to convince Buffy to stay, but only when the scaffolding starts to fall and Dawn's life is in peril does Buffy snap out of it in time to save her sister. The scaffolding collapses as Dawn weeps in a stoic Buffy's arms.\n\n#### QUOTE OF THE WEEK:\n\nAnya does what she can to keep her store and her money safe as the demons terrorize Sunnydale:\n\n\"Already been looted! Sorry! Try the appliance store down the block! They've got great toasters!\"\n\n#### LOVE IN VEIN:\n\nTara notes that she and Anya would both know if anything had happened to their respective loves.\n\n#### POP-CULTURE IQ:\n\nXander does a riff off a line of the song \"Ya Got Trouble\" from the musical The Music Man:\n\n\"Yep. We got trouble. Right here in Hellmouth City.\"\n\nXander likens the robotic form of Buffy to Robo-Cop, the central character in the similarly titled movie, television, and animated series:\n\n\"And our very own Robo-Buffy led them right to us.\"\n\nXander suggests using one of the strongest adhesives known to man to fix the Urn of Osiris;\n\n\"A little tape . . . a dab o' Krazy Glue . . .\"\n\nXander mistakes a little light for the fairy with an attitude from Peter Pan:\n\n\"And how long have you known your girlfriend was Tinker Bell?\"\n\nXander kicks up the testosterone when comparing the Magic Box to the North American Aerospace Defense Command Center and alludes to the national Defense Condition's highest alert status:\n\n\"I mean, this place is NORAD when we're at DefCon One.\"\n\nXander accidentally calls himself by a name more familiar as a brand of sauce used in sloppy joes:\n\n\"I happen to be a very powerful man-witch myself.\"\n\n#### CONTINUITY:\n\nTara conjures up a light to guide Willow that's rather similar to the one that Willow conjured up in \"Fear, Itself.\" The tower was last seen in the climactic battle scenes of \"The Gift.\" Buffy flashes back to scenes from that battle, specifically the final moments of her life. Buffy wonders if she is in Hell. The reason for that confusion will come out in \"After Life.\"\n\n#### DRAMATIS PERSONAE:\n\nWillow, fearing the spell was a failure, finally breaks down and mourns the loss of her best friend.\n\nTara fears that the demons showed up when they did because Willow and the gang should never have been messing with such dark magicks in the first place and invoking forces they had no right to call. Her caution is well-founded, but too late. This tension will only grow as the season progresses.\n\nBoth parts of \"Bargaining\" aired as a two-hour premiere for Buffy on its new home, UPN.\n\n#### FROM THE ORIGINAL TELEPLAY:\n\nThe Buffybot meets her untimely demise as portrayed in the stage directions:\n\nThe Buffybot opens its mouth to say something to Buffy when the chains go taut and the robot is suddenly (as described) really REALLY violently torn apart. Drawn and quartered. The crowd howls with delight.\n\nOn Buffy, her anguish and terror at seeing her own horrific death wells up inside her and explodes into a scream . . .\n\n### Once More, with Feeling\n\nEpisode 6.7\n\nDo we really need to spell this out for you? (Maybe we should sing it.) \"Once More, with Feeling\" is the musical episode, featuring songs written by Joss Whedon and performed\u2014for better or worse\u2014by the entire cast. By turns funny, adorable, scary, silly, sexy, and heartbreaking, \"Once More, with Feeling\" is in many ways the ultimate distillation of what makes Buffy the Vampire Slayer one of the greatest shows in TV history. After the overlong episode made its debut on November 6, 2001, the soundtrack for the musical became a hit on the Billboard charts and could be heard playing from half the booths and stalls at various pop culture conventions around the world for several years thereafter. The episode also spawned a host of imitations, as other series attempted musical episodes with mostly disappointing results. Though mainly remembered for its music, the episode also features a dramatic reveal, when Buffy finally tells her friends that after she died\u2014and they resurrected her\u2014she'd been in Heaven, and they'd pulled her out. Heady stuff, but it sets the stage for everything that comes after.\n\nWRITTEN AND DIRECTED BY: Joss Whedon\n\nSPECIAL GUEST STAR: Anthony Stewart Head as Rupert Giles\n\nGUEST STAR: Hinton Battle as Sweet\n\nCO-STARS: David Fury as Mustard Man, Marti Noxon as Parking Ticket Woman, Daniel Weaver as Handsome Young Man, Scot Zeller as Henchman, Zachary Woodilee as Demon\/Henchman, Timothy Anderson as Henchman, Alex Estronel as Henchman, Matt Sims as College Guy #1, Hunter Cochran as College Guy #2\n\n#### THE PLOT THICKENS:\n\nIt looks like an atypically calm Sunnydale morning in the Summers home as the girls get up and start their day. Tara even finds a little sprig of flower under her pillow. But that night, things take an even more atypical little twist when Buffy starts singing about how her life seems empty and she's just going through the motions. The next morning she finds that she was not the only one to burst into song.\n\nThe choral group gets to work trying to find out who is behind the song stylings that only Tara and Willow seem to be enjoying. The power of the music forces Xander and Anya to admit things that normally they'd never tell each other, but it would seem that forced honesty is just the peskier side effect of the spell. Giles informs them that a man apparently got so worked up in a dancing frenzy the previous night that he literally burst into song and spontaneously combusted.\n\nTruth continues to come out in lyrics as Spike asks Buffy to let him rest in peace. But it's truth of a different form that comes out when Tara learns that she had a fight with Willow that she doesn't remember. Tara leaves Dawn alone as the witch confirms her suspicion that Willow's got her under a spell.\n\nDawn is abducted and taken to Sweet, the demon behind the music who intends to make her his bride. When the demon learns that his sister-in-law-to-be is the Slayer, he sends a henchman to inform her of the coming nuptials. The Slayer tries to rally the troops, but Giles feels that he's standing in her way so she must face the demon alone. As Buffy walks through the fire to get to her sister, the gang does rally to her side just in time to learn the one awful truth.\n\nBuffy admits in song that they did not save her from a hell dimension, but ripped her from Heaven. She follows up the admission with a dance of death that Spike ends by physically stopping her. Dawn echoes her sister's words from before her death: \"The hardest thing in this world is to live in it.\"\n\nYet another truth comes out when it's revealed that Dawn hadn't summoned the demon; it was actually Xander because he just wanted to find out if he and Anya would have a happy ending. The deal is nullified as the gang is left to wonder where they go from here. Buffy ditches the finale as she goes out to thank Spike. Admitting that she knows it's not real, Buffy just wants to feel and expresses that by kissing the soulless vampire.\n\n#### QUOTE OF THE WEEK:\n\nAnother Tuesday in Sunnydale. . . .\n\nDAWN: \"Oh my God, you will never believe what happened at school today.\"\n\nBUFFY: \"Everybody started singing and dancing.\"\n\nDAWN: \"I gave birth to a pterodactyl.\"\n\nANYA: \"Oh my God! Did it sing?\"\n\n#### LOVE IN VEIN:\n\nXander and Anya open up to each other about their fears, although it's entirely against their will. Anya worries that Xander will not love her when she gets old, since she really didn't have to deal with aging issues as a demon. While on the subject, her history as a vengeance demon gives her understandable trust issues with her man. Xander, meanwhile, worries that he'll be too boring for her and she's just a bit too greedy. Tara learns how deeply Willow betrayed her by using a spell on her mind.\n\n#### POP-CULTURE IQ:\n\nXander does a riff off the philosophy of Tom Cruise's character in the film Magnolia:\n\n\"Respect the cruller. And tame the donut!\"\n\nAnya's probably referring to Carmen Miranda\u2013style tropical dance numbers popularized in the Twentieth Century Fox musicals of the 1940s:\n\n\". . . and a dance with coconuts.\"\n\nThe demon known as Sweet refers to a song from the musical The Band Wagon:\n\n\"That's entertainment!\"\n\nAnya is referring to the practice in which most plays and television shows are set up so the audience is watching the action through a nonexistent \"fourth wall\":\n\n\"I felt like we were being watched, like a wall was missing from our apartment, like there were only three walls, no fourth wall.\"\n\nMichael Flatley, famous Irish dancer whose stage show was titled Lord of the Dance, became an international sensation in the nineties. Apparently he frightens Tara (and probably more than a few others):\n\n\". . . some Lord of the Dance\u2014but not the scary one, just a demon.\"\n\nThe Beatles originally released the song \"Twist and Shout\" in 1963:\n\n\"I'm the Twist and Shout!\"\n\nSpike compares one of the demon's wooden puppet henchmen to Pinocchio:\n\n\"Someday he'll be a real boy.\"\n\nBuffy echoes a line from the Stephen Sondheim musical Into the Woods (Joss Whedon admits to being a huge fan of the famous Broadway composer):\n\n\"Wishes can come true.\"\n\nBuffy also repeats a line from one of the most popular Disney songs from the movie Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs:\n\n\"Whistle while you work.\"\n\nSpike does a bit off the famous folk song often sung round campfires and the Rolling Stones record Get Yer Ya-Ya's Out:\n\n\". . . get your KoombaYa-Ya's out.\"\n\nSpike refers to the most well-known march song from the musical The Music Man:\n\n\". . . there'll probably be a parade. Seventy-six bloody trombones.\"\n\nThe man singing about the dry cleaner getting the mustard out of his suit was co-executive producer David Fury. The woman trying to sing her way out of the parking ticket was executive producer Marti Noxon.\n\nThe behind-the-scenes footage used in UPN's promos for this episode were taken from David Fury's tapes of the rehearsal process.\n\n#### CONTINUITY:\n\nLethe's Bramble, the weedlike flower Tara finds under her pillow, is from Willow's spell to make Tara forget the argument they had in \"All the Way.\" Anya sings about the time Xander's \"penis got diseases from a Chumash tribe,\" that happened during \"Pangs.\" Dawn keeps her stolen items in a jewelry box in her room, which will come into play in \"Older and Far Away.\" Buffy originally told Dawn about \"the hardest thing in this world\" in \"The Gift.\"\n\nAside from all that singing and dancing, this episode was also different because it was eight minutes longer than traditional episodes, it was shown in letterbox format, the opening credits were changed as well as the theme song, and the monster in the Mutant Enemy logo sang its \"Grrr, arrgh!\" (For more information on the making of this episode, including all of the song lyrics, see Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Musical Scriptbook, \"Once More, with Feeling.\" Also, the complete soundtrack is available.)\n\n#### DRAMATIS PERSONAE:\n\nBuffy still has not spoken with her sister regarding the incident at Halloween, because the Slayer expected Giles to deal with it entirely.\n\nGiles acknowledges to himself in song why he needs to leave Buffy so she can grow into an adult without leaning on him.\n\nDawn's kleptomania continues as she steals the necklace Xander used to summon the demon and later covers up the theft by saying she had put it on while cleaning and forgot to take it off.\n\n#### FROM THE ORIGINAL TELEPLAY:\n\nIn a line cut due to length, Sweet's henchman reveals that Buffy is not the only thing the demon wants:\n\nGILES: \"What does he want?\"\n\nHENCHMAN: \"Her . . . plus chaos and insanity and people burning up, but that's more big-picture stuff.\"\n\n### Tabula Rasa\n\nEpisode 6.8\n\nWRITTEN BY: Rebecca Rand Kirshner\n\nDIRECTED BY: David Grossman\n\nSPECIAL GUEST STAR: Anthony Stewart Head as Rupert Giles\n\nGUEST STAR: Raymond O'Connor as Teeth\n\nCO-STARS: Geordi White as Vamp #1, Stephen Triplett as Vamp #2, David Franco as Vamp #3\n\n#### THE PLOT THICKENS:\n\nBuffy runs into Spike in one of Sunnydale's many cemeteries. He wants to talk about their kiss, but she would rather just forget about the whole thing. Luckily, a very literal loan shark interferes, searching for a kitty collection from Spike.\n\nThe Slayer's friends don't know how to deal with finding out that Buffy was in a heaven dimension and Willow thinks it would be a great idea to make the Slayer simply forget. This doesn't sit well with Tara, who tells her girl that she knows Willow used the same spell on her. Tara thinks they need some time apart, but Willow promises to take a week off from magick. Giles also tells Buffy that it's time for some time apart, as he's going back to England so she can learn to live life on her own.\n\nWillow's promise lasts until the next morning when she works the memory mojo on both Tara and Buffy, but the spell misfires and spreads to all the Scoobies, knocking them unconscious at the Magic Box. One by one the gang awakens with mass amnesia, trying to figure out just who they are. Xander, Willow, Giles, Anya, Tara, and Dawn figure out their names, more or less, but since Buffy doesn't have a name she calls herself Joan. Spike, dressed incognito in a tweed suit to hide from the loan shark, thinks his name is Randy and believes himself to be Giles's son. Although the others know their names, they don't really know their identities, as Willow and \"Alexander\" think they're dating and Giles and Anya think they're engaged to one another.\n\nAs the gang heads to the hospital for help, a gang of vamps comes looking for Spike. Of course, the clueless ones don't know what the vampires want, nor do they know what to do with the evil creature. They try to hide in the Magic Box while their personalities start to reassert themselves, but not their memories.\n\nJoan takes charge, sending Willow, Alex, Tara, and Dawn down through the tunnels to the hospital while Giles and Anya try to work some magick. Joan and Randy plan to distract the vamps by leading them away from the Magic Box, but the plan shifts when Joan, who thinks she's a superhero, runs from Randy after finding out he's a vamp too.\n\nThings start to look good for the forgotten few as their lives are beginning to take very positive turns. Willow and Tara grow closer and Joan is happy with herself for the first time in a while. But then Willow's spell is broken, and reality floods back into their lives. Tara packs her things and leaves the house and Willow. Giles hops a plane for England again, and Buffy tries to wallow alone in her misery but winds up making out with Spike.\n\n#### QUOTE OF THE WEEK:\n\nSpike (soon to be Randy) makes a horrifying realization:\n\n\"He's got his crust all stiff and upper with that Nancy-boy accent. You Englishmen are all so . . . bloody hell . . . sodding, blimey, shagging, knickers, bullocks . . . oh no. I'm English!\"\n\n#### LOVE IN VEIN:\n\nTara gives Willow an ultimatum in their relationship, but the powerful witch ignores it and the relationship comes to an end. Buffy first tells Spike that she will never ever touch him again, but fails to hold true to that promise, much to the vampire's relief.\n\n#### POP-CULTURE IQ:\n\nSpike likens his kiss with Buffy to being of the level of the famous 1939 film based on Margaret Mitchell's book of the same name:\n\n\"We kissed, you and me, all Gone with the Wind with the rising music and the rising . . . music.\"\n\nAnya refers to the host of Candid Camera, who often put people in strange situations to film their reactions:\n\n\". . . and I don't see Alan Funt.\"\n\nSpike compares Giles to the famous nanny from the similarly titled book and movie:\n\n\"Oh, listen to Mary Poppins.\"\n\nSpike quotes The Book of Common Prayer:\n\n\"From dust . . . to dust.\"\n\n#### CONTINUITY:\n\n\"Tabula Rasa\" deals with the truths learned in \"Once More, with Feeling.\" Buffy and Spike officially begin their fling that was merely a kiss in the previous episode, Giles makes good on his desire to return to England, and Tara finally reaches her limit with Willow's abuse of magick. Spike owes the loan shark Teeth \"forty Siamese\" from gambling debts incurred in kitten poker. Spike correctly assumes that Giles has (or had) a \"classic midlife crisis transport: something red, shiny, shaped like a penis.\" There is a trapdoor in the basement to the Magic Box that leads to the sewers and is most likely the way Spike gets in and out of the shop during the day as he did in \"Life Serial.\" Willow unknowingly echoes her line about her double in \"Doppelgangland\" when she says, \"I think I'm kind of gay.\"\n\nTabula rasa is Latin for \"Clean Slate\" and is the name of a philosophy introduced by John Locke stating that at birth the human mind is blank and awaiting information gained through life experience.\n\n#### DRAMATIS PERSONAE:\n\nBuffy immediately starts looking after Dawn when they lose their identities, even though she doesn't know the youngest victim is her sister. She also takes charge fairly quickly and enjoys being Joan the Vampire Slayer until the weight of her world comes crashing back into her mind.\n\nWillow is taking Buffy's admission of being ripped from Heaven the hardest, blaming her own selfishness. She knows that she messed up and wants to be the one to fix it by using magick. Willow and Tara instinctively reach for each other a couple of times when they don't remember who they are.\n\nXander continues to be his normal manic self during the amnesia-fest. His relationship with Anya is the one relationship that does not really seem to exert itself through the amnesia.\n\nAnya may forget who she is, but she does not forget her fear of bunnies, or her need to \"protect the cash register\" during their emergency, or her desire to \"take vengeance\" on Giles when he upsets her.\n\nTara compares Willow's actions to Glory violating her mind in the previous season, explaining what she referred to as being \"through hell\" during her song reprise in \"Once More, with Feeling.\"\n\nSpike unknowingly compares himself to Angel, assuming that he too is a vampire with a soul on a \"mission of redemption.\" It's also a bit of foreshadowing for the journey he takes in the seventh season.\n\n#### FROM THE ORIGINAL TELEPLAY:\n\nThe demon Teeth gets the following intro in the stage directions:\n\nThe demon has the head of a shark; smooth, pale flesh split by an unctuous smile. Several rows of teeth glisten. He wears a tight sharkskin suit and stacked heel boots which bring him up to about 5'2\". He never stops moving, ever; he's always pacing, always smiling. Smooth and dangerous, somewhere between Christopher Walken, Truman Capote, and, well, a shark.\n\n### Normal Again\n\nEpisode 6.17\n\nWRITTEN BY: Diego Gutierrez\n\nDIRECTED BY: Rick Rosenthal\n\nGUEST STARS: Danny Strong as Jonathan, Adam Busch as Warren, Tom Lenk as Andrew, Dean Butler as Hank, Michael Warren as Doctor, Kirsten Nelson as Lorraine, Kristine Sutherland as Joyce\n\nCO-STARS: Sarah Scivier as Nurse, Rodney Charles as Orderly, April Dion as Kissing Girl\n\n#### THE PLOT THICKENS:\n\nWith a list of recent Sunnydale rentals in hand, Buffy goes door to door in search of Warren, Jonathan, and Andrew's new lair. The trio sees the Slayer's approach through their video surveillance system and summons a demon to defend their home. The demon attacks and sticks the Slayer with a long needle protruding from its hand. Moments later, Buffy is in a mental hospital being strapped down.\n\nAs Willow sees Tara at school with another girl, Buffy sleepwalks her way through work, glimpsing flashes of herself in the mental ward. Buffy eventually gets home and comforts Willow over what may or may not have been a misunderstood Tara sighting. In the midst of their general gabber, Xander returns from his post-wedding fleeing, in search of the now missing Anya.\n\nThat night the gang of three goes on patrol, where they run into Spike. A fight between the boys takes place, but it's stopped when they see Buffy doubled over in another flash. This time she isn't alone in the hospital. She's with her mom and dad.\n\nBuffy tells Xander, Willow, and Dawn about her mind trips. She is going into an alternate reality in which she was in a hospital for the past six years and never came to Sunnydale. In her dream world, vampires, demons, her friends, and Dawn don't really exist. In the real world, the gang swings into research mode to figure out what the demon with the long needle did to her.\n\nWillow finds out about the demon with the name as long as its needle: Glarghk Guhl Kashma'nik. The stinger also carries an antidote, so Xander and Spike reluctantly team up to bring the demon home for some experiments and chain it up in the basement. In the meantime, Buffy's fictional world starts to take on more and more of a pleasant outlook and she doesn't take her friends' antidote. Then the doctor in her mind instructs her that the only way to be free for good is to break down the safeholds in her reality, namely her friends.\n\nIn a daze Buffy rounds up Willow, Xander, and Dawn and ties them up in the basement. Then she lets loose the demon to rid her of her ties to this reality. Xander manages to break free of his binds, but he's no match for the demon. In the midst of the battle, Tara comes looking for Willow and uses magick to free her and Dawn, but they still cannot overwhelm the demon.\n\nBack in the altered state, Joyce gives her daughter words of encouragement hoping that it will free her mind. The talk helps, but not in the way Joyce had hoped. The real side of Buffy asserts herself and she comes to her friends' defense, killing the demon. Buffy apologizes to her friends and asks for another batch of antidote. Until then, she flashes back one more time to the mental hospital where the doctor announces that they've lost her.\n\n#### QUOTE OF THE WEEK:\n\nJONATHAN: \"We rented the whole house. Can't we at least sleep upstairs?\"\n\nANDREW: \"We're on the lam. We have to lay low. Underground.\"\n\nJONATHAN: \"That's figurative, doofus.\"\n\n#### LOVE IN VEIN:\n\nWhen Xander returns, he finds that Anya's suitcase is gone and the Magic Box is closed, which chills him to the bone. Apparently she left a couple of days ago but didn't tell Willow or Buffy where she was going. Anya had spent most of her time crying since the canceled wedding. Xander reveals that he still loves Anya, but it was the concept of marriage that overwhelmed him. Willow sees Tara kiss another girl, but can't be sure if it's just a friendly smooch or something more. Spike tells Buffy that he knows she's addicted to the misery because otherwise she would tell her friends about having been with Spike so, one way or another, she would have to deal with it publicly rather than suffer privately.\n\n#### POP-CULTURE IQ:\n\nThe doctor unintentionally makes an allusion to the 1998 film Gods and Monsters:\n\n\"Not gods or monsters.\"\n\nSpike is narrating his and Xander's hunt by recapping recent events, much like sports announcers do when hosting a game:\n\n\"Spike, we need muscle here, not color commentary.\"\n\nWillow references the book turned movie One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest in comparison to Buffy's mental ward mental state:\n\n\"No more cuckoo's nest?\"\n\n#### CONTINUITY:\n\nIn the real world, it's been \"weeks\" since Jonathan and the guys were forced to move out of their former underground lair following \"Dead Things.\" In the fantasy world, Buffy's doctor explains that in her schizophrenia she believes herself to be some type of hero and has created an \"intricate latticework to support her primary delusion.\" She has made herself the central character in a fantastic world and surrounded herself with friends, many of whom have their own supernatural powers. \"Together they face grand, overblown conflicts against an assortment of monsters, both imaginary and rooted in actual myth.\" Buffy later inserted Dawn into her delusion, \"actually rewriting the entire history of it to accommodate her need for a familial bond.\" Of course, the doctor notes, that action created inconsistencies in her world. Previously she used to create \"grand villains to battle against,\" but the doctor takes it as a sign that she's ready to give up the fantasy because her latest evil is \"just three pathetic little men who like to play with toys.\" The doctor also mentions that she had a momentary reawakening last summer, but her friends pulled her back in.\n\n#### DRAMATIS PERSONAE:\n\nBuffy likes to have a little ice put on the back of her neck, according to Spike. She admits to Willow that back when she saw her first vampires she got so scared that she freaked out and told her parents. They thought there was something wrong with their daughter so they sent her to a clinic for a couple of weeks. Buffy stopped talking about the vampires and was released. Eventually her parents just forgot.\n\nDawn tries to cover up the fact that Willow's been doing her chores when Buffy calls her on it.\n\nJonathan is growing more and more paranoid over Warren and Andrew's duolike attitude.\n\n#### FROM THE ORIGINAL TELEPLAY:\n\nThe episode ends with the following haunting stage directions, leaving one to wonder whether it was all a dream:\n\nThe camera pulls back slowly, down the hall. Leaving the doctor and Buffy's parents helpless, and Buffy lost in a distant delusion.\n\n### Villains\n\nEpisode 6.20\n\nWRITTEN BY: Marti Noxon\n\nDIRECTED BY: David Solomon\n\nGUEST STARS: Danny Strong as Jonathan, Adam Busch as Warren, Tom Lenk as Andrew, Jeff Kober as Rack, Amelinda Embry as Katrina\n\nCO-STARS: James C. Leary as Clem, Steven W. Bailey as Cave Demon, Tim Hodgin as Coroner, Michael Matthys as Paramedic, Julie Hermelin as Clerk, Alan Henry Brown as Demon Bartender, Mueen J. Ahmad as Doctor, Jane Cho as Nurse #1, Meredith Cross as Nurse #2, David Adefeso as Paramedic #2, Jeffrey Nicholas Brown as Vampire, Nelson Frederick as Villager\n\n#### THE PLOT THICKENS:\n\nFollowing a shocking conclusion to the previous episode, this one opens with the paramedics arriving at Buffy's house. Xander rushes them to Buffy in the backyard to treat her bullet wound, totally unaware that Tara was also shot inside the house. Willow's cries for Tara to live go unheard, so she calls on the powers of Osiris to bring back her love. There is a reply in the form of an imposing demon that tells Willow she cannot undo a death by mortal hands, as opposed to her reincarnation of Buffy. Unwilling to believe that, she destroys the powerful entity and goes in search of more power and revenge.\n\nWarren couldn't care less that his former partners are currently in jail as he goes to a demon bar to celebrate the death of the Slayer. There he learns that he's getting his party on a little too soon, because the news has shown that the report of her death has been slightly exaggerated.\n\nWillow stops by the Magic Box and Anya is powerless to stop her as the witch drains all the books on dark magicks and her hair turns as black as her eyes. Willow then goes to the hospital to remove the bullet from her friend and get the Slayer back on her feet.\n\nAt the den of the magick dealer, Warren learns that he has made a powerful enemy in Willow. He pays Rack for some magickal aid and flees town on a bus. Willow traces his essence and takes her increasingly concerned friends out to the desert to stop him, but it turns out it was a robot mixed with magick that had led her astray. Thinking Willow is distraught over the shooting of Buffy, Xander and Buffy take the moment to try to calm Willow, who finally tells them that Tara is dead.\n\nAfter Willow disappears, Buffy and Xander return home to find Dawn watching over Tara's body. Buffy tries to calm her sister, who would also like to see Warren dead. Xander, having presided over the removal of Tara's body by the authorities, notes that he's had the blood of his friends on his hands all day. His concern for Warren's well-being is waning too. The Slayer explains why they can't kill a human and then goes to take Dawn to Spike, but has to leave her with Clem since the vampire has surprisingly left town for parts unknown.\n\nThose unknown parts turn out to be halfway around the world as Spike arrives in an African village in search of a cave-dwelling demon with the request to restore him to the way that he was. The demon chides Spike for letting the Slayer get to him in such a way, but agrees to help so long as the vampire passes a series of tests.\n\nBuffy and Xander meet up with Anya at the Magic Box, where the proprietress informs them of Willow's dark magick act and the fact that she too has returned to her demon ways. As such, Anya is able to track Willow into the woods, where the powerful witch has finally chased down Warren.\n\nThe murderer uses a combination of magick and technology to keep Willow at bay, but it ultimately proves useless as she catches up with him by binding his arms and legs in roots and branches. Willow conjures up Warren's ex-girlfriend to haunt him and then takes the bullet she removed from Buffy's body and has it slowly burrow into his chest. Buffy, Xander, and Anya arrive just in time to watch the torture end as Willow skins Warren alive. As his body bursts into flames, Willow turns to her friends and hauntingly says, \"One down.\"\n\n#### QUOTE OF THE WEEK:\n\nXander turns to humor in the face of tragedy:\n\n\"You've got to stop doing this. This dying thing is funny once, maybe twice . . .\"\n\n#### LOVE IN VEIN:\n\nWillow's motivated solely by seeking revenge on Tara's death. Buffy is surprised to learn that Spike has left and asks if Clem knows when he'll be back. Xander is quietly devastated to learn that Anya has reverted to her old ways, and because of him.\n\n#### POP-CULTURE IQ:\n\nXander likens Willow's magical overpowering of his car to the 1989 horror movie (he'll have a spiffy new adultlike car in season seven):\n\n\"Fine! Fine! Puppet Master wants to drive? Go right ahead!\"\n\n#### CONTINUITY:\n\nThe episode picks up minutes after \"Seeing Red\" left off. The demon that speaks to Willow in the opening clarifies that when she resurrected Buffy she raised \"one killed by mystical forces,\" however, Tara was taken by natural order by human means. Andrew lamely suggests that he and Warren weren't going to just jet away and leave Jonathan behind after their failed armored car heist\u2014Andrew was going to carry him. Warren goes into the same demon bar in which Spike played kitten poker back in \"Life Serial.\" Rack's back\u2014he and his magickal dealer's pad were introduced in \"Wrecked.\" Warren is shocked to hear that no one in the demon community has heard of him or \"the Trio,\" or his robots and freeze ray. Right before Willow kills Warren, she echoes the signature phrase of her evil doppelganger, Vampire Willow, by saying, \"Bored now\" (\"The Wish\" and \"Doppelgangland\").\n\nClem mentions that he's been dying to see The Wedding Planner. It's the appropriate choice, considering that the film was directed by Adam Shankman, the choreographer for \"Once More, with Feeling.\"\n\n#### DRAMATIS PERSONAE:\n\nBuffy explains to Dawn and Xander that she can't kill Warren because he's human and the human world has its own rules for dealing with people like that. Although sometimes those rules don't work, she and her friends can't control the universe. If they could, the magick wouldn't change Willow the way it does and they'd be able to bring Tara and their mom back.\n\nWillow is called \"the new power\" by Rack, who also says, \"anyone with intuition can feel it. She's going to blow this town apart.\" She has the ability to sense Warren's essence. When Xander reminds her that the magick's too strong and \"there's no coming back from it,\" Willow informs him that she's not coming back.\n\nAnya, being a demon again, can sense that something terrible has happened to Tara. Normally she would have to go to Willow to help her exact vengeance, but Willow wants to do it on her own.\n\n#### FROM THE ORIGINAL TELEPLAY:\n\nThe African villager warns Spike off with the following words translated into English:\n\n\"You can't go in there, it's very dangerous. . . . Stop! You'll die! Stop!\"\n\n### Grave\n\nEpisode 6.22\n\nWRITTEN BY: David Fury\n\nDIRECTED BY: James A. Contner\n\nSPECIAL GUEST STAR: Anthony Stewart Head as Rupert Giles\n\nGUEST STARS: Danny Strong as Jonathan, Tom Lenk as Andrew\n\nCO-STARS: Steven W. Bailey as Cave Demon, Brett Wagner as Trucker\n\n#### THE PLOT THICKENS:\n\nGiles keeps Willow at bay with magick borrowed from a very powerful coven in Devon. The coven alerted him to the problems in Sunnydale and he teleported there immediately to help. Giles and Buffy reunite, but Willow uses her mind to control Anya, and the demon releases the witch from her magickal binding.\n\nXander tries to lead Dawn, Jonathan, and Andrew to safety, but his lack of leadership skills exerts itself. Dawn contrasts his inaction with Spike's ability to act, which causes Xander to slip about the attempted rape. In the meantime, Spike continues to undergo his torturous tasks to get what he needs to make him into his former self.\n\nThe magick battle between Willow and Giles rages on, tearing apart the Magic Box. Willow ups the ante by sending a fireball to attack Jonathan and Andrew and whomever they may be with. Buffy is forced to leave Giles's side to save Dawn, Xander, and the others. The battle weakens Willow, and really takes its toll on Giles, but there's still enough for Willow to siphon an incredible amount of magick from him to recharge her powers.\n\nBuffy beats the fireball to the cemetery and pushes Jonathan and Andrew out of the way as it hits. The impact sends Xander headfirst into a headstone and causes the earth to open and swallow Dawn and Buffy. Knowing an opportunity when they see one, Jonathan and Andrew hightail it for Mexico.\n\nWith Giles's borrowed power, Willow has access to more power than any mortal ever before. It gives her a direct link to all of humanity and she really feels their pain. Her new mission is to end that pain by ending the world, and she blows out of the Magic Box to do so.\n\nGiles can see through Willow's eyes and tells Anya the witch's evil plan. The demon teleports into the deep hole that Buffy and Dawn are in to share the news while the revived Xander listens from above. Willow has gone to Kingman's Bluff to exhume the buried temple of the she-demon Prosperexa to bring about the end of the world. Giles has said that no magickal or supernatural force\u2014including the Slayer\u2014can stop her. Anya then returns to Giles, because his own future does not look promising either.\n\nBuffy calls for Xander to send down a rope, but he doesn't reply. Willow senses that the Slayer will not give up and sends some demons made of the earth to Buffy to ensure that the Slayer dies in battle. With too many demons to handle, Buffy finally realizes that she can no longer shelter her sister from the world and the duo fights side by side to stay alive.\n\nWillow directs her power at the effigy atop the temple to set about the end of the world, but Xander interrupts with his usual brand of humor. He tells her that he's not going to stop her, but if she's going to end the world then he, as her best friend since childhood, deserves to be the first to go. As the pure magick Giles hoped she would drain from him starts to affect her, the real Willow begins to resurface. Xander insists that he loves her no matter what and his words are enough to break down the dark magick and return her hair, eyes, and self to normal.\n\nIn the end Giles recovers under Anya's watchful eyes, Buffy and Dawn climb out of their \"grave\" to see the world together, and Xander and Willow begin the healing process. Meanwhile, Spike completes his tasks and gets a reward, though it's not the one he had expected: the demon restores Spike's soul.\n\n#### QUOTE OF THE WEEK:\n\nXANDER: \"The first day of kindergarten you cried because you broke the yellow crayon and you were too afraid to tell anyone. You've come pretty far, ending the world, not a terrific notion, but the thing is, yeah. I love you. I loved crayon-breaking Willow and I love scary veiny Willow. So if I'm going out, it's here. If you wanna kill the world, well then, start with me. I've earned that.\"\n\nWILLOW: \"You think I won't.\"\n\nXANDER: \"It doesn't matter. I'll still love you.\"\n\nThis episode was originally shown on UPN with \"Two to Go\" as the series's two-hour season finale.\n\n#### LOVE IN VEIN:\n\nIn the end, it's Xander's love for his best friend that saves the world, finally making him the hero.\n\n#### POP-CULTURE IQ:\n\nWillow references the movie Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore:\n\n\"Willow doesn't live here anymore.\"\n\nWillow echoes the wicked witch from The Wizard of Oz:\n\n\"Fly, my pretty. Fly.\"\n\nAnya quotes cartoon mouse Speedy Gonzales:\n\n\"Holy Frijole!\"\n\nXander alludes to the Van Morrison song \"Brown-Eyed Girl\":\n\n\"Hey, black-eyed girl.\"\n\nXander suggests an end befitting many Looney Tunes characters, most notably Wile E. Coyote:\n\n\"Well, I was going to walk you off a cliff and hand you an anvil, but it seemed kind of cartoony.\"\n\n#### CONTINUITY:\n\nWillow refers to the fight she and Giles had in \"All the Way,\" in which he called her a \"rank arrogant amateur.\" Giles notices that Buffy cut her hair and that Anya has colored her hair and is now blond. Giles informs Buffy that the Council doesn't have a clue about what's going on, or \"much of anything really.\" Buffy updates Giles on all that he's missed, including Willow's abuse of magick, Dawn being a total klepto, Xander leaving Anya at the altar, and Anya becoming a demon again. She also admits that she's working at the Doublemeat Palace and sleeping with Spike, and there was a period of time she thought the real world was a dream and she lived in an insane asylum. After spending two years trying to protect Dawn by shielding her from the world, Buffy realizes the better way is to show her the world.\n\n#### DRAMATIS PERSONAE:\n\nGiles was contacted by a powerful coven in Devon that sensed a dangerous magickal force in Sunnydale that was fueled by grief. A seer in the coven told him about Tara. They then imbued him with their powers.\n\nAnya says that mind control mojo doesn't work on vengeance demons, but Willow's extreme power proves her wrong.\n\nDawn insists that her sister can't really protect her from everything, especially the fact that people she loves keep dying.\n\nANDREW WHO?\n\nWillow: \"You probably think you're buying escape time for Jonathan and the other one.\"\n\n#### FROM THE ORIGINAL TELEPLAY:\n\nGiles describes the true essence of magick in a line cut due to length:\n\n\"Which comes, in all its purity, from the Earth itself.\"\n\n## CATCHING UP WITH THE CAST AND CREW\n\n### TOM LENK (ANDREW WELLS)\n\nYou've had all sorts of roles since you last appeared on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, from appearances in Cabin in the Woods and Much Ado About Nothing to a recurring role on Witches of East End and guest spots on series like Transparent, Episodes, and How I Met Your Mother. Which of those other roles would you hope Buffy fans would track down and watch, if they haven't seen it?\n\nTOM: \"It would have to be my role as Alex Moore in Buyer and Cellar, which is a one-man play that I have performed at regional theaters, so you can't actually track it down. Sad panda! It's a fictional piece inspired by Barbra Streisand's book, My Passion for Design, and the single actor plays all the various characters, including Babs herself. It's a nonstop, one hour and forty-five minute tour de force, no intermission, and it was the most fun and most challenging thing I have ever done. My favorite moment was crying tears out of my right eye as Barbra, and then immediately flip-flopping to the dry side of my face as the lead character, Alex. So much fun! Just reading Jonathan Tolins's wonderful play will make you howl out loud to yourself, so check it out!\"\n\nYou have a theater background, including the role of Franz in the Broadway production of Rock of Ages and many others. You also do live comedy at Groundlings, Upright Citizens Brigade, and more, and your website is loaded with your comedy videos. What's your first love, or are they all a part of the same love for performance?\n\nTOM: \"I grew up doing community theater, and it's definitely where I fell in love with performing. The wonderful thing about film\/TV is that it's about capturing a special moment on film to be shared over and over with people, and live performance is all about that special moment between you and the audience that can never be captured again. (Wow, am I a poet now? Hashtag blessed.) Both are satisfying in different ways, and I feel lucky to get to do both all the time.\"\n\nLooking back, do you have a particular memory that stands out about auditioning for the role of Andrew?\n\nTOM: \"I remember practicing the lines in my car and [feeling like] I knew exactly what to do . . . yet at the same time I had no idea how I was going to do it. That probably makes no sense, but I think it was something that took me a while to rediscover again, years later\u2014the art of auditioning, which is to go into an audition room trusting that you get to perform for someone . . . do a mini play just for them . . . and you've learned the words as best you can, but you have no idea how you're going to say it. Because in real life, people don't plan how they are going to say things, right? So I guess it's all about giving yourself permission to just let it happen, and if it's terrible, it's terrible. 'Overpreparing kills the magic,' right? What I remember most about that audition was that I had worked on it just enough and I was able to trust that I could surprise myself in the room with something I hadn't planned.\"\n\nDid you have any idea after that first episode that Andrew would be back, or that he'd become a Big Bad?\n\nTOM: \"I got signed on to do ten episodes with Danny Strong and Adam Busch for that season, and everything after that was a sweet surprise!\"\n\nHow often do you get recognized in public? Do you enjoy it, or do you want to hide?\n\nTOM: \"Frequently enough to inflate my ego ever so slightly, and not frequently enough to deflate it about the same amount? It's fun when people let you know that you made them laugh or they enjoyed your performance! Sometimes people aren't sure where they recognize me [from], so I give them the option of 'same high school [or] same gym'? And then I go to: 'I'm an actor, so you may have seen me in something,' but I do have a policy against listing my credits until you hear something you recognize, because that's what googling me after I walk away is for. Technology!\"\n\nAndrew has played a big role in Joss's official comic-book continuation. Have you read those stories, and, if so, what did you think?\n\nTOM: \"I checked out the first few. It was cool to see myself in comic-book form! I feel like they really captured my nose!\"\n\nEveryone says that working on a long-running TV series is a lot like high school, with circles of friends and then those people you wish you'd hung out with more. Who do you wish you'd hung out with more?\n\nTOM: \"It was more like middle school for me, as I was only there two years and I spent most of my time anxiously trying to get everyone to like me and praying that no one would ever toss the football to me. And by 'football' I mean large bottle of fake blood. That stuff is so sticky, you don't want to touch it. Looking back, I wish I had spent less time worrying if I was going to get killed off and spent more time appreciating every moment of being on such a historic TV show!\"\n\nWhat are you working on now, and what does the future hold for Tom Lenk?\n\nTOM: \"Well, now that I'm an 'influencer' in the world of FASHUN\/COMEDY\/CRAFTING via Instagram and the #LenkLewkForLess, I spend my days running my EMPYRE. The Lenk Lewk TV show is now in development and hopefully by the time this book is printed it's on your basic cable channel. Pray for me.\"\n\n### ADAM BUSCH (WARREN MEARS)\n\nYou've had all sorts of roles since you last appeared on Buffy, from Point Pleasant to Men at Work, and numerous guest spots. And, of course, you started your career with a role in L\u00e9on: The Professional and then as Noah in the landmark Nickelodeon series The Mystery Files of Shelby Woo. Not including your role as Warren on Buffy, what has been your favorite role? And which role would you hope Buffy fans would track down and watch, if they haven't seen it?\n\nADAM: \"I've made a number of films with Stephen Elliott. He's one of my favorite authors and has become a very interesting filmmaker. When James Franco turned [Stephen's] novel The Adderall Diaries into a film, Stephen made his own film about that experience, very much like Bukowski's Hollywood. Authors who have had their novels turned into films appear in the film as themselves\u2014Jerry Stahl, Susan Orlean . . . Denis Johnson didn't want to appear on camera but gave [Elliott] the rights to his poems and journals, so I got to play him. I like films that shed a light on things and don't pussyfoot around. Amber [Benson] and I made a film called Drones, and it was our lumpy love letter to the Buffy fandom and fan culture. We both grew up as fans of television, music, and politics, and can successfully see it from all angles. We tried to put that into Drones, and I would steer any Buffy fan with interest in that direction.\"\n\nYou've got a film coming up called Rebel in the Rye, about author J. D. Salinger. The film is written and directed by Danny Strong. How was it working with your old friend in his first turn as director?\n\nADAM: \"My relationship with Danny Strong and Tom Lenk is something I'm grateful for and unnecessarily protective of. It's important to me. Their opinions have always held so much weight with me. They're both brilliant examples of a thing that Felicia Day said best: 'If you're honest about what makes you happy and work harder than anyone else at it, people will recognize that, they'll relate, and they'll find you.' They're so different and so talented. Working on Danny's projects is the most fun I've ever had as an actor, and they are the performances I'm most proud of. He truly brings out the best in me. How he sees me, how I appear in his eyes, is something I will continue to strive to match. He can just give me a look and I know what he wants. His capacity for understanding human behavior and the conviction of his perspective know no bounds. He continues to reflect back at us honest emotion and real struggle in everything he creates. I would follow Danny Strong anywhere. I would race him to the bottom.\"\n\nLooking back now, what stands out to you about the process of being cast as Warren\u2014about the audition or your first look at the script, or both?\n\nADAM: \"Two things. I remember reading Warren for Joss and noticing peripherally that after I'd said a line or two he started nodding his head frantically up and down. I knew he had made up his mind and the rest of this reading was out of politeness. What I didn't know was whether it was good or bad. In those moments, anything is possible.\n\n\"Later, as Warren and the trio continued to make the transition from joke to threat, I couldn't tell if I was changing to suit the writers or if the writers were actively changing me as a person. That I could, when necessary, view any human monster as yet another victim of abandonment and fear. They were asking me to at the very least compartmentalize an unforgivable perspective long enough to focus on the struggle of anyone who feels they are not understood, not heard. Who feels they are acknowledged only when they are told to go away and to hush up. Danny and Tom understand that. It's another reason I'm such fans of them and of Joss. It's rare. We need more of it all over.\"\n\nDid you have any idea after that first episode that Warren would be back, or that he'd come to play a pivotal role in the series?\n\nADAM: \"I never knew until it happened. And sometimes afterward. That's partially on me because I was young and not interested in anything but the truth and Joss's perspective.\"\n\nHow often do you get recognized in public, and when you do get recognized, is it from Buffy, from Men at Work, from Colony? Do you enjoy it, or do you want to hide?\n\nADAM: \"I can always tell what I'm being recognized from by the way the person's face falls once they remember. It's a unique experience that I don't know if many people can relate to. It's not only that they're immediately angry and disgusted at seeing this face they associate with the worst humanity has to offer, it's how comfortable and at ease they are expressing it to me. As if they alone are internalizing this experience. As if it was fair. I do wish I was better at it. I'm constantly searching for something to say or do to make it easier for the person. For both of us. I imagine it's the same for Amanda Knox. She could relate. We would have a lot to talk about.\"\n\nSo much time has passed. What are your favorite behind-the-scenes memories of your time on the show?\n\nADAM: \"We shot for a bit on 9\/11. I was flying back from New York City that morning and went right to the set. We only got through one angle of one scene before the news got around and we shut down. It was a bit where Warren plants something on Tara's sweater at school. It's the only time Amber and I appear on-screen together. 9\/11.\"\n\nEveryone says that working on a long-running TV series is a lot like high school, with circles of friends and then those people you wish you'd hung out with more. Who do you wish you'd hung out with more?\n\nADAM: \"I always admired Tony Head, and it wasn't until he started making records again that we ever connected. Still, it wasn't until this year that I had a chance to spend a few days with him in England, and it just exceeded all expectations. I had recently rescued a pit bull, the first pet I've ever had. My folks never had any animals growing up, and I had no relationship with them to speak of. It was all I wanted to talk about. It turns out he and his wife are these intense and vocal animal advocates, and we just ranted for days about everything from Cesar Millan, Lee Strasberg, Proust, Chekov, Little Britain, and how it all relates to dogs. I could live there like that forever.\"\n\nThroughout your life, you've also been a musician\u2014writing songs, performing, and touring for years as a part of the band Common Rotation. Do you still pursue music?\n\nADAM: \"I continue to produce records and work with Dan Bern and The Best Fest. Recently I've been fronting a rock-and-roll outfit, and honestly it's the most fun I've ever had in music. Coming from this folk world primarily, it's surprisingly liberating. It wasn't until I stopped listening to what friends said that I found my voice. Making money from music feels illegal, but I've got this new thing I've been trying out. When people offer me money, I take it.\"\n\nOverall, how would you characterize the influence of your time on Buffy on your life?\n\nADAM: \"It's the source of the most important relationships in my life.\"\n\nWhat are you working on now, and what does the future hold for Adam Busch?\n\nADAM: \"Grandpa vs. Prowler is hitting the road with Dead Sara. We'll be everywhere from New York City to Texas. I'll be touring the Midwest with Dan Bern after that. I place songs in TV and film and have had a lot of fun with that. I continue to work on Colony for USA. I've been the head of documentary programming for Slamdance for a number of years now, and there are few greater feelings in the world than telling a first-time filmmaker that yes, they have in fact made something. I like spending time with my dog. She's the best I have to offer.\"\n\n### DANNY STRONG (JONATHAN LEVENSON)\n\nWhen you search \"Danny Strong\" on IMDb, the first thing that comes up is \"Danny Strong\u2014Writer.\" I suspect that seems normal now, but is that something you foresaw twenty years ago, when you made your first appearance on Buffy?\n\nDANNY: \"No, when I started doing Buffy, I hadn't started writing yet. It wasn't even on my radar as something that would eventually become my career. I took a number of writing courses in college, as I was interested in it, but when I graduated, I was solely focused on my acting career for several years.\"\n\nYou're the co-creator of the Fox TV hit Empire, and you've written, directed, and produced in TV and feature films some of the most successful films of the past few years, including writing the two-part The Hunger Games: Mockingjay. Your first writing credits include two major successes for HBO, Recount and Game Change, as well as The Butler, directed by your Empire co-creator Lee Daniels. So how does a working actor in Los Angeles go from Buffy and Gilmore Girls to writing major projects for HBO? Am I wrong in thinking producers tend to be dubious about actors who want to be screenwriters?\n\nDANNY: \"The good thing about writing is all that matters is what's on the page. Once someone starts reading a script, they don't care whose name is on it, they just hope it can hold their interest. Also, people in the development world know that actors have the potential to be very good writers if they have the skills for it. Who better to write a document for actors than an actor? So I never encountered any reluctance from people about being a writer because I was an actor. The script would either be good or not, and it didn't matter what else I had done with my life.\"\n\nDespite your success as a writer, producer, and now director as well, you've continued to act in various series in recurring and guest parts, as in Justified, Girls, and Mad Men. Will you always continue to act, no matter how successful you become in your other jobs?\n\nDANNY: \"I love acting, and I do it from time to time when cool parts in cool projects come my way. I spent fifteen years pounding the pavement really hard trying to get any acting job I could possibly land so that I'd be able to pay my rent and qualify for health insurance, so it's really nice now to only act in projects that I want to be a part of. I have no plans to stop acting, but at the same time I'm not actively seeking acting work, as my own projects are my main focus. When neat stuff comes my way, I usually do it if I dig it.\"\n\nWe're a little Gilmore Girls obsessed in our house, and we were all so happy to see you appear in the revival. What was it like to step back into that show as if it had never stopped, and would you take part if there was ever a similar return for Buffy?\n\nDANNY: \"I loved being a part of the Gilmore Girls revival. I'm so proud to have been a character in that wonderful world and ensemble. It was a blast going back, particularly working with Liza [Weil], who I think is one of the coolest people I know. Alexis [Bledel] is such a lovely soul too, and so it was great to see them both again. Also, I'm a huge fan of Amy Sherman-Palladino and Dan Palladino; I'd go anywhere they ask me. As for a Buffy revival, just tell me when and where, and I'll bring the magic bone and jet pack!\"\n\nYour early acting career was full of recurring and guest roles on shows like Saved by the Bell, Seinfeld, Clueless, and Boy Meets World, as well as the film Pleasantville. When Jonathan first shows up in Buffy, he was another one of those parts, but in time he became a part of the world and story of the show that fans counted on to be there. To what do you attribute that evolution, and do you remember when you recognized that the character had become a real part of the fabric of the show?\n\nDANNY: \"The only thing I know is that Joss liked my work and enjoyed having the character on the show. I think he dug that I was the perennial victim. I also heard David Greenwalt was a fan too, so those are pretty great advocates to have in your corner. The first time I realized that the character was a real part of the fabric of the show was at the first Posting Board Party. I showed up not knowing if anyone would even recognize me, and then I was mobbed with people telling me Jonathan had a big following online. I was stunned and blown away. It was the first time I ever had so many people tell me they liked my work. It meant a lot to me, and I went home beaming.\"\n\nOf all the roles you've played that Buffy fans may not be familiar with, which role would you hope they would track down and watch?\n\nDANNY: \"Great question! I have no idea! I've been fortunate enough to have worked on many great TV shows, and they've all been really fun characters for me to play, so I'm not really partial to any of them. There are a few I'd tell people to avoid, but I don't have a particular favorite.\"\n\nYou've recently written and directed Rebel in the Rye, a film about the life of J. D. Salinger, the reclusive author of The Catcher in the Rye. It's the first feature film you've directed, and it is having its world premiere at the Sundance Film Festival. How was that experience?\n\nDANNY: \"It was a wonderful experience and really challenging. The shoot was only twenty-six days, which is very short for a film of this size and ambition, so it was quite a hustle getting it done. I loved finally being in charge of a company. I feel like I've been vice president for ten years, so it was great to get to sit in the Oval Office.\"\n\nLooking back now, what stands out to you about the process of being cast as Jonathan\u2014about the audition or your first look at the script, or both?\n\nDANNY: \"I remember the audition like it was yesterday. I was auditioning for multiple one-line parts in the original pilot presentation for Joss, and I remember on one of the parts I made him laugh. I love getting a laugh (I was a stage actor for years), so the fact that I cracked him up with my one line felt great. He gave me one of those nods that said, \"You nailed it.\" I remember reading the script thinking it was really cool and hip, but I had no idea I was reading the birth of TV history.\"\n\nSo much time has passed. What are your favorite behind-the-scenes memories of your time on the show?\n\nDANNY: \"I loved working with Adam Busch and Tom Lenk. So many of our scenes were with each other, so for a season we were constantly working together. They are both hilarious and such great guys. I also distinctly remember Charisma Carpenter spanking me as I walked by her. I told her to do it again, and her eyes lit up and she whacked my ass really hard. That wasn't just a Buffy highlight, but perhaps a top-five life highlight.\"\n\nEveryone says that working on a long-running TV series is a lot like high school, with circles of friends and then those people you wish you'd hung out with more. Who do you wish you'd hung out with more?\n\nDANNY: \"Charisma Carpenter (see previous answer).\"\n\nWhat are you working on now, and what does the future hold for Danny Strong?\n\nDANNY: \"Right now I'm finishing Rebel in the Rye, writing a new pilot for Fox, working on multiple stage pieces, and I have a great recurring role on a Showtime show for next season [Billions]. My hope is to continue writing, directing, acting, and producing in film, TV, and theater.\"\n\n### DREW Z. GREENBERG (WRITER)\n\nPutting you on the spot now. You're co-executive producer and a writer on Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., and before that you filled those same roles on Arrow. But when you were growing up . . . were you a Marvel kid or a DC kid?\n\nDREW: \"When I was growing up, I was a Love Boat kid. (Seriously, I wasn't a comic-book reader as a kid. I loved, loved, loved Saturday morning cartoons, so I got a healthy dose of the Super Friends and the Batman\/Tarzan Adventure Hour, but that's about as close as it came for me. But that means I get to be neutral in that particular battle.)\"\n\nThere's an element of \"chosen family\" that burns brightly in both Arrow and Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., and Buffy really raised the bar for that sort of character structure. How much of an influence do you think it has been on TV in general, and specifically on those two shows?\n\nDREW: \"I feel that Buffy was the next level up in terms of 'chosen family' stories, a tradition that had previously been redefined by 1970s workplace comedies. Barney Miller, Mary Tyler Moore, M*A*S*H, and their ilk\u2014all those shows about oddballs finding their family on the job, something that had been much rarer in the previous era of warm and idealistic family sitcoms and single-character, square-jawed dramatic heroes. So I feel like Buffy was the inheritor of that genre, only Joss's genius move was making high school the workplace\u2014Buffy and her friends had a job to do, and that job left them rather isolated with only each other to understand what they were going through . . . just like being a cop, a news producer, or a medic in the Korean War. By opening it up to teenagers, it allowed those workplace stories to be filled with the kind of pure, unfiltered emotion that high school students experience before the world teaches them to swallow all their feelings (in my case, with lots and lots of pizza and french fries, but we're all different). But because the kids forming this family had a huge job, the show took them seriously, even with their heartache, their angst, their insecurity. That family they formed was saving the world. And in that way, Buffy raised the bar for other genre shows to explore themes of what it means to be a chosen family even in the face of impending, apocalyptic doom\u2014genuine emotion paired with genuine scares and thrills had a lot more precedent because of the world Joss created.\"\n\nMost Buffy writers had at least a handful of produced episodes, if not runs on other series, before being hired onto the show. You'd had a single episode of Queer as Folk produced. Aside from obvious writing chops, I'm sure a lot of up-and-coming TV writers would like to know, what do you think inspired such confidence?\n\nDREW: \"It didn't feel like confidence at the time, I can tell you that. I was scared out of my mind. But one of the things I had going for me was that I'd taken three years to get my law degree first. So I always knew that once writing didn't work out, I could return home and start practicing law. (Something which, at the time, my mother reminded me. She has since come around.) A lot of people will tell you that if you really want to write, you can't fathom doing anything else. And for them, that reasoning makes sense. For me, knowing my world wouldn't end if I failed at writing allowed me to go all-out gonzo with it, and I'm sure it was that sense of security that helped me find some measure of success. (That and a really good pilot script\u2014if I may say so myself.)\"\n\nDo you remember what it was like getting hired for the first time? How did that come about?\n\nDREW: \"Oh, I remember getting the call about Buffy very, very well. It still ranks as a watershed moment for me. My pilot spec had been making the rounds and was getting me some great meetings that season, including a meeting at Mutant Enemy, which led to my meeting with Joss and Marti Noxon. Everyone had assured me so many times that Buffy wasn't looking for any new writers that year, so I was still thinking of sitting down with Joss and Marti as a friendly general meeting even while I was walking into their offices. Getting the call that they'd made an offer was life changing. I called my parents, and I don't think they totally knew what a Buffy was, but they still seemed happy for me.\"\n\nWhat is your favorite of the Buffy episodes you wrote, and why?\n\nDREW: \"I was partial to 'Smashed,' since it was my first Buffy episode and featured awesome plot developments I'd been waiting to see as a fan. And I was pretty fond of 'The Killer in Me,' because I liked the story and because it was the first chance I had to articulate what I liked about being gay\u2014something that was not very commonly heard on TV up till that point. (And Joss and Marti heartily encouraged me in putting that discussion into the episode, and I always liked that too.)\"\n\nYou've worked on a lot of other fantastic series. What single episode of one of those other series would you love the Buffy fans to hunt down and watch, and why?\n\nDREW: \"I always felt that Warehouse 13 had a lot of Buffy's DNA in it\u2014we did humor, drama, whiz-bang sci-fi, horror, genuine emotion . . . oftentimes all in the same episode. I liked bringing some of that Buffy sensibility to an episode I wrote called 'For the Team,' in which two of our agents, Myka and Claudia, are forced to work with supposed bad guy Helena G. Wells (yes, H. G. Wells was a woman, long and delightful story), and all of our women got to be strong and smart and funny and they fought each other, then they saved each other, and I loved it. And who picks just one? Besides, I just assume all the real Buffy fans have already watched the Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. season two episode 'Face My Enemy,' in which Clark Gregg and Ming-Na Wen get to crack wise, kick ass, break your heart, and also dance. I was pretty proud of that one too.\"\n\nSome of the show's writers engaged regularly with fans and others didn't. How much do you still interact with fans of the many shows you've worked on, and what are your thoughts on the relationship between modern TV and its fans?\n\nDREW: \"Ha-ha, I think I'm skipping this one to avoid getting in trouble, heh.\"\n\nI've heard so many people talk about Buffy changing their lives\u2014in many cases saving their lives. How do you feel when you hear that sort of thing?\n\nDREW: \"What I find incredible is that every show reaches someone. I love it when people feel moved by something we did on Buffy or Warehouse 13 or Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. I understand that kind of reaction\u2014I had the same kind of reaction to Buffy when I watched it at home before I worked on it. (And I reacted that way to My So-Called Life and West Wing and Sports Night and Parenthood and St. Elsewhere, so I feel you.) Something about what these characters are going through speaks to you and the struggle you're experiencing right now in your own life, and you take comfort in it. But what I love about TV is how far-reaching it is\u2014you just know that somewhere out there, someone has dedicated the entirety of their fan energy to worshipping, like, Trapper John, M.D. Or Dynasty II: The Colbys. Television gets to so many people on so many different levels, and in ways some of us might overlook in our zeal for our own particular object of TV affection, and you never know what's going to impact people. Or how.\"\n\nSo much time has passed. What are your favorite behind-the-scenes memories of your time on the show?\n\nDREW: \"I have so many fond memories of working on Buffy. I loved the day Doug Petrie tried teaching me how to throw a football. I loved ordering pies with Jane [Espenson] and Rebecca [Rand Kirshner] and sitting on the floor in Jane's office to eat them. I loved the day Joss came back from working on the musical episode with scripts and a demo CD, and we all sat in a room reading till we got to a song, then he'd play the demo for us, then we'd keep reading. But more than anything, I loved what a hands-on education it was. Joss made sure that every Buffy writer stayed involved in the episode from the initial story break all the way through production and then through post-production. And that's not always the case on every show. So I got to learn how every department works to make an episode of TV happen, and that's knowledge I took with me to every show I've been on since. It's invaluable.\"\n\nYou're incredibly busy, always, but what do you have coming up that we don't know about yet?\n\nDREW: \"More Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.! The show has some cool turns coming this season.\"\n\n## SEASON 7\n\n### Help\n\nEpisode 7.4\n\nWRITTEN BY: Rebecca Rand Kirshner\n\nDIRECTED BY: Rick Rosenthal\n\nGUEST STARS: Azura Skye as Cassie, Zachary Bryan as Peter Nichols, Glen Morshower as Mr. Newton, Rick Gonzalez as Tomas, Kevin Christy as Josh, Sarah Hagan as Amanda, Beth Skipp as Lulu, Anthony Harrell as Matthew, Jarrett Lennon as Martin, DB Woodside as Principal Wood\n\nCO-STARS: J. Barton as Mike Helgenburg, Daniel Dehring as Red Robed #1, AJ Wedding as Red Robed #2, Marci Lynn Ross as Dead Woman\n\n#### THE PLOT THICKENS:\n\nBuffy is still settling into her new job counseling Sunnydale students with their varied problems. For the most part, she deals with everyday issues\u2014quiet girls, disenfranchised boys\u2014but when a girl named Cassie admits that she's going to die next Friday, Buffy realizes that she's in way over her head.\n\nCassie clarifies that she doesn't intend to commit suicide, but she sometimes knows things that are going to happen, and one of the things she knows about is her coming death. Buffy immediately reports the situation to Principal Wood, who shares her concern but admits that there's only so much they can do. While they talk, Buffy spills some coffee on her shirt, which was another thing that Cassie knew was going to happen.\n\nThe problem now seems more in the area of the mystical, and Buffy assigns Dawn the task of befriending Cassie to see if she can help. She also sets the team to work on what could be after this precog girl. After reading Cassie's journal and dark poetry postings online, they come up with info on her alcoholic father.\n\nThe Slayer goes to deal with the drunken dad, but it doesn't look like that's the right path, especially when she finds Cassie waiting outside her dad's house thanking the Slayer for help but telling her not to bother. Buffy refuses to sit back and do nothing, while at the same time, a group of red-robed figures are preparing some kind of ritual at the school.\n\nDawn throws herself into the role of spy but quickly becomes close to Cassie. Dawn's prime suspect\u2014a possibly lovelorn male friend of Cassie's\u2014only confirms that Cassie isn't counting on having a future.\n\nBuffy continues her search, pumping Spike for garbled\u2014and useless\u2014information. In the meantime, a jerk of a classmate distracts Dawn while Cassie is kidnapped and brought to the library by the group of red-robed students who want to use her to summon a demon. Buffy arrives in time to stop the sacrifice, but not the demon summoning. It attacks. She defends with an assist from Spike and manages to save Cassie. She even saves the girl again when a booby trap goes off as they leave. But the Slayer can't save Cassie from a heart defect, and the girl passes on, just as she knew she would.\n\nUnsure how to deal with the real problems of life that her new job presents, Buffy returns to work, accepting the fact that she might not be able to help everyone.\n\n#### QUOTE OF THE WEEK:\n\nWillow lets Xander down gently when he discovers that she once wrote poetry about him:\n\n\"I'm over you, sweetie.\"\n\n#### LOVE IN VEIN:\n\nWillow visits Tara's grave for the first time. Cassie tells Spike that \"someday she'll tell you.\"\n\n#### POP-CULTURE IQ:\n\nXander refers to the slogan for Dwight D. Eisenhower's presidential campaign and the tagline of the National Dairy Council:\n\n\"From beneath you it devours. . . . It's not the friendliest jingle, is it? It's no 'I like Ike' or 'Milk, it does a body good.' \"\n\nWillow explains the finer points of the Internet to a guy clearly still looking at linoleum:\n\nWILLOW: \"Have you googled her?\"\n\nXANDER: \"Willow! She's seventeen!\"\n\nWILLOW: \"It's a search engine.\"\n\nWillow reveals a little about her adolescence and the stories she used to make up about the teenage doctor played by Neil Patrick Harris in the TV series Doogie Howser, M.D.:\n\n\"Look, all I'm saying is this is normal teen stuff. You join chat rooms, you write poetry, you post Doogie Howser fan fic.\"\n\nCassie lists skating at the famous rink in New York as one of the things she would like to do before she dies:\n\n\"I'd love to ice-skate at Rockefeller Center.\"\n\nBuffy mixes up her shellfish when referring to the band Blue Oyster Cult:\n\n\"I bet it's 'cause you forgot the boom box blaring some heavy metal thing like . . . Blue Clam Cult.\"\n\nAccording to Tara's headstone, she was born October 16, 1980, and died May 7, 2002.\n\n#### CONTINUITY:\n\nDawn references Willow's disappearing act in \"Same Time, Same Place,\" noting that their friend is not \"part of the gang here\" in the funeral home on patrol. Amanda, the girl who was sent to Buffy because of her shyness (and for beating the crap out of a guy for picking on her), will play a larger role in fighting the new Big Bad later in the season. Cassie tells Buffy that she will make a difference, but it's unclear just what she means. Buffy rebuffs Peter's clumsy advances, but soon\u2014under the influence of a letterman's jacket\u2014she won't care about age differences (or legality!).\n\n#### DRAMATIS PERSONAE:\n\nBuffy's office hours are from ten to four.\n\nWillow worries that she will not be able to deal with the coming evil and is, frankly, scared of what she might do.\n\nDawn is taking a ceramics class at high school (following her excellent\u2014and ironic\u2014grasp of negative space in her junior high art class).\n\nPrincipal Wood claims that he's from Beverly Hills.\n\nIn keeping with Jewish tradition, Willow places stones on top of Tara's headstone to mark her visit.\n\n#### FROM THE ORIGINAL TELEPLAY:\n\nAnya mistakenly counsels a scorned woman instead of helping her seek vengeance in a scene cut due to length:\n\nANYA: \"What a creepazoid. It's like he didn't just forget your birthday, but the day on which, in keeping with modern American tradition, one's life is celebrated. One's very self. He didn't celebrate your self.\"\n\n(But later . . .)\n\nANYA: \"But anyway, this boyfriend of yours\u2014it sounds like maybe he was just trying to do what you wanted.\"\n\n(And later still . . .)\n\nLULU: \"Thanks, you've been a big help.\"\n\nShe exits. Anya smiles. Until she realizes that she didn't wreak any vengeance. She looks up, but Lulu is gone.\n\nANYA: \"Wait . . .\"\n\n### Selfless\n\nEpisode 7.5\n\nWRITTEN BY: Drew Goddard\n\nDIRECTED BY: David Solomon\n\nGUEST STARS: Abraham Benrubi as Olaf, Andy Umberger as D'Hoffryn, Kali Rocha as Halfrek, Joyce Guy as Professor Hawkins, Jennifer Shon as Rachel\n\nCO-STARS: Taylor Sutherland as Villager #1, MaryBeth Scherr as Villager #2, Alessandro Mastrobuono as Villager #3, Daniel Spanton as Viking #1, John Timmons as Viking #2\n\n#### THE PLOT THICKENS:\n\nXander continues to worry about Anya's well-being as a newly restored vengeance demon but takes her recent act of reversing the giant-worm curse as a good sign. Unfortunately the signs are all bad at a fraternity house at UC Sunnydale, where the bodies of about a dozen frat brothers lie with their hearts ripped out around a blood-soaked Anya.\n\nCut to Sjornjost, AD 880. Olaf the pre-troll returns from a rough day of pillaging to his woman, Anya\u2014or actually, Aud. Although Olaf would rather talk of breeding, Aud steers the conversation to the fact that she doesn't really fit in with the townsfolk and then talks about the load-bearing serving wench, who seems to catch Olaf's eye. He denies it, of course, professing love for his rabbit-raising girl.\n\nMeanwhile, it's time for Willow to go back to school, where she runs into Anya coming out of the frat house with blood literally on her hands. Not deterred by Anya's pathetic cover-up attempts, Willow goes to investigate and finds the carnage, along with a girl huddled in a closet. Through her babbling the recently dumped girl manages to tell Willow that she had made a wish that her ex and his friends would know what it felt like to have their hearts ripped out. Anya conjured the demon to do just that, but it's still around and Willow is forced to tap into a little dark magick to repel it.\n\nBack in the past, Aud has had enough of her cheating Olaf and turned him into a troll. Her work got the attention of D'Hoffryn, with an offer to make her a vengeance demon named Anyanka.\n\nSpeaking of demons, Willow alerts Buffy to the new one on the loose. As the witch goes to confront Anya, the Slayer takes Xander in search of the spiderlike heart stealer. They find it, kill it, and return home, surprised to learn from Willow that Anya was the one who summoned it. Buffy realizes that the time has come. She must kill Anya.\n\nXander tries to hold her off, reminding her of all the other demons she's spared. But Buffy counters that this is different. This is what she has to do, and while it's never easy, it's necessary.\n\nSt. Petersburg, 1905. Anyanka has worked her demonic ways to get revenge and start a rather impressive Russian revolution. As she and Halfrek enjoy the carnage around them, Anyanka simply notes that \"vengeance is what I am.\"\n\nXander catches up with Anya at the scene of the bloody crime just moments before Buffy arrives. Even though Xander won't accept the truth, both the Slayer and the demon know what must be done, and a fight ensues in which Anya is stabbed through the chest. She then flashes back to a year ago, when she sang a song of love and finally found her new identity as Mrs. Anya Christina Emmanuella Jenkins Harris.\n\nBut vengeance demons don't die that easily.\n\nAs the battle continues, D'Hoffryn arrives after being summoned by Willow. He asks what Anya wants to do. She reveals she wants to reverse the horrible spell, even though she knows that the exchange is the life of a vengeance demon. What Anya didn't count on was that D'Hoffryn takes Halfrek's life instead, going for the hurt instead of the kill.\n\nAnya is made human once again, although she no longer knows who she is.\n\n#### QUOTE OF THE WEEK:\n\nOlaf tells Anya why he loves her:\n\n\"You speak your mind, and are annoying.\"\n\n#### LOVE IN VEIN:\n\nSpike is still speaking with a manifestation of Buffy, although the real Buffy cannot see the other one. Xander admits that he still loves Anya and doesn't understand how Buffy would want to kill her since the Slayer spent the better part of the last year \"boning\" a demon that was just as murderous. Eventually the conversation shifts to how Buffy did kill Angel when she had to in \"Becoming, Part Two.\" Buffy is seen professing her love for and belief in Spike, but when the real Buffy shows up, Spike thinks he's imagining a Buffy who says what he wants to hear. The real Buffy only tells him to get out of the basement before it kills him.\n\n#### POP-CULTURE IQ:\n\nSpike makes a reference to Edgar Allan Poe's The Cask of Amontillado:\n\n\"Scream 'Montresor' all you like, pet.\"\n\nD'Hoffryn notes that the bodies of the college boys looks slightly reminiscent of ads for the clothing store (plus the blood and gore, naturally):\n\n\"It's like somebody slaughtered an Abercrombie and Fitch catalog.\"\n\n#### CONTINUITY:\n\nXander brings up his recent interaction with Anya in \"Beneath You\" and \"Same Time, Same Place.\" Olaf the troll and former boyfriend was introduced in \"Triangle.\" Anya reminds Willow of her flayage in \"Villains.\" Willow retrieves the talisman D'Hoffryn gave her in \"Something Blue\" to call him up for help. Anya asks Buffy if she has any friends left that she hasn't tried to kill, making reference to \"Normal Again.\" Anya flashes back to a scene not seen in \"Once More, with Feeling,\" in which Xander mumbles in his sleep that he just wants a \"happy . . . ending . . .\" and the neighbors complain about a stain, wondering if the dry cleaner will be able to get the mustard out. (David Fury and Marti Noxon reprise their singing roles as \"Mustard Guy\" and \"Ticket Lady.\") Anya wears the same dress in the musical number that she wore in her non-wedding. Hallie wasn't killed when she was run through with a sword in \"Older and Far Away.\" Xander and Buffy butt heads over how to handle this situation. An additional truth almost comes out when Buffy reminds Xander that he had come to her with a message from Willow to \"Kick his [Angel's] ass.\" Needless to say, Willow's surprised by that little piece of information. D'Hoffryn's actions remind the gang (and viewers) that despite his levity at times\u2014such as at the non-wedding\u2014he is still evil, something Spike spent the better part of a year trying to remind them when he was fully chipped. When Anya notes that D'Hoffryn should have killed her, he repeats the now common phrase \"From beneath you, it devours,\" warning that all good things come in time, as a potential major piece of foreshadowing.\n\nALL ROADS LEAD TO LA . . .\n\nAndy Umberger (D'Hoffryn) played Ronald Meltzer in the first-season Angel episode \"I Fall to Pieces.\"\n\n#### DRAMATIS PERSONAE:\n\nWillow, understandably, suffered a bit of a drop-off in her grades in the middle of her last semester but managed to turn that around and ace all her finals, like magick (well, similar to magick, but not really).\n\nAnya, back when she was Aud (pronounced \"Odd\"), had quite a little bunny collection. She also thought nothing of freely giving away rabbits, exchanging them simply for goodwill and not goods and services. Even back when she was Aud, Anya was known for being most aggressive in her not fitting in with people and her tendency to speak her mind. As Anyanka, nothing really interested her besides her work as a vengeance demon. Anya, in song, claims that she likes to bowl and is good at math.\n\nBasements are bad for Spike.\n\n#### FROM THE ORIGINAL TELEPLAY:\n\nWhen Willow summons D'Hoffryn, the script gives the following translation of the Latin she uses to call him up:\n\n\"Blessed be the name of D'Hoffryn. Let this space be now a gateway to the world of Arashmaharr.\"\n\nWhen D'Hoffryn tells Anya she must pay a price for reversing the spell, Xander comes up with an alternative suggestion in a line cut due to length:\n\n\"Something that involves grueling, hard labor. At fair market value, taking into account your project's special needs.\"\n\n### Conversations with Dead People\n\nEpisode 7.7\n\nWidely considered the high-water mark for season seven, \"Conversations with Dead People\" is also a fantastic reason to peek behind the curtain of the series's production. In a reported crunch for time, and with scheduling conflicts for some cast members, the writers hatched the idea to do an episode in which characters would be split up for their own solo adventures, each story line penned by a different writer, and all contributing to the titular theme. Buffy has an amiable graveyard conversation with a vamped-out classmate before dusting him; Dawn receives a message from her late mother's ghost; Spike walks a woman home from a bar and kills her in front of her own home; influenced by the spirit of Warren, Andrew murders Jonathan; and Willow is visited by a \"ghost\" who encourages her to take her own life, and who is eventually revealed to be \"The First,\" a.k.a. The First Evil. Despite the quietness of the episode, it remains one of the series's most chilling and sets the stage for the climactic episodes to come.\n\nWRITTEN BY: Jane Espenson and Drew Goddard\n\nDIRECTED BY: Nick Marck\n\nGUEST STARS: Danny Strong as Jonathan, Adam Busch as Warren, Tom Lenk as Andrew, Jonathan M. Woodward as Holden Webster, with Azura Skye as Cassie, Kristine Sutherland as Joyce Summers\n\nCO-STARS: Stacey Scowley as Young Woman\n\n#### THE PLOT THICKENS:\n\nIt's a minute after eight p.m. on November 12, 2002. Another typical Sunnydale night. Buffy's on patrol, Spike is drowning his sorrows at the Bronze, Willow's at the library, and Dawn's home alone. But isn't it usually the typical nights when something happens?\n\nThe first sign of trouble comes when Jonathan and Andrew return to town. Granted, they're usually a minor threat, but it only takes minutes before they're breaking into the new Sunnydale High on a mysterious mission to hopefully get themselves on the Slayer's good side. Too bad Jonathan doesn't realize that Andrew is speaking with a very deceased Warren as the two living members of the former trio dig up the Seal of Danzalthar in the school basement.\n\nWillow also gets a late-night visit from one of the recently departed. Cassie, the girl Buffy tried to keep from a premature, predestined death makes an appearance at the campus library, claiming that Tara's sending messages through her. Willow needs to stop all magick for good or else she will put everyone in danger again.\n\nIn the meantime, Dawn is under attack in her own home. The spirit of her mom seems to be trying to reach her, but evil forces are conspiring against Joyce. As the house rumbles and nearly falls apart, Dawn resorts to magick to save her mom and try to make contact.\n\nThings are a little more calm in the graveyard as Buffy comes across a new vamp in the form of an old acquaintance from high school. Holden Webster, former student of psychology, is a little thrilled by his new power and the fact that he and the Slayer are now mortal enemies. Between trading punches, his schooling kicks in and he manages to get Buffy to open up about things she won't even tell her friends.\n\nAs each of the vignettes spirals out of control, startling discoveries are made around Sunnydale. The being in the form of Cassie reveals its true identity as the one everyone's been talking about with the \"From beneath you, it devours.\" Joyce appears to tell her younger daughter that when things are very bad, Buffy will not choose Dawn. Andrew stabs Jonathan over the Seal of Danzalthar and his blood spills across the symbol. And just as Buffy kills Holden, she learns that Spike was the vampire's recent sire . . . while Spike is busy feasting on a female victim's neck.\n\n#### QUOTE OF THE WEEK:\n\nAndrew confuses the translation of a now familiar phrase:\n\n\"It eats you, starting with your bottom.\"\n\n#### LOVE IN VEIN:\n\nBuffy's high school ex-boyfriend Scott Hope told everyone that she was gay after they broke up. Ironically enough, Scott apparently came out of the closet last year. She tells Holden that her father was the reason for her parents' splitting up because he cheated\u2014or at least, she thinks he cheated. Cassie tells Willow that the reason she's not allowed to see her girlfriend is because the witch killed people.\n\n#### POP-CULTURE IQ:\n\nJonathan reminds Andrew of the ease with which he picked up the language of one of Star Trek's most popular alien races. (And yes, there really is a Klingon dictionary.):\n\n\"You learned the entire Klingon dictionary in two and a half weeks.\"\n\nBuffy makes yet another reference to the 1982 film directed by Sam Raimi:\n\n\"Yeah, I really need emotional therapy from Evil Dead.\"\n\nAndrew echoes a line from Back to the Future when comparing Jonathan to Michael J. Fox's character, Marty McFly:\n\n\"Think, McFly.\"\n\nOnce again, Warren refers to Jonathan as the character from Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom:\n\n\"Short Round pulls off his end of the bargain, we'll both be gods.\"\n\nAndrew refers to the Clive Barker film from 1987:\n\n\"I feel like we're in Hellraiser. . . . I hate Pinhead.\"\n\nWith the return of the geeks, Star Wars references once again abound:\n\nJONATHAN: \"Echo Two to Echo One.\" (The Empire Strikes Back)\n\nWARREN: \"C'mon! 'If you strike me down . . .' \"\n\nANDREW: \" '. . . I shall become more powerful than you can possibly imagine.' \" (Star Wars: A New Hope)\n\nANDREW: \"That boy is our last hope.\"\n\nWARREN: \"No. There is another.\" (The Empire Strikes Back)\n\nSIX DEGREES OF . . . LA\n\nJonathan M. Woodward (Holden) appeared in the fourth season finale of Angel as (X), a lab guy who shows Fred around the research department at Wolfram & Hart. She becomes his boss once the gang accepts the invitation to run the law firm, and his character carried over to season five of Angel.\n\n#### CONTINUITY:\n\nJonathan and Andrew return after fleeing to Mexico in \"Grave.\" Dawn is on the phone with her friend Kit from \"Lessons.\" Cassie reappears after having died in \"Help.\" Joyce appears lying dead on the sofa just as she had in \"The Body.\" Dawn echoes her sister's words when Buffy found her mother there: \"Mom . . . Mom . . . Mommy?\" Andrew suggests that if their plan works, they could maybe join the Slayer's gang and even hang at her house, which does kind of happen, for him at least. Cassie tries to convince Willow that everything Giles told her about magick in \"Lessons\" and \"Beneath You\" is false. Spike is killing people again. Buffy chose Dawn when she threatened to let the world end if Dawn was harmed in \"The Gift.\" As Willow unmasks \"Cassie's\" true face and intent, everyone begins to learn they can't trust anything or each other.\n\nThe episode title appears on-screen at the opening. The only other time this happened was \"Once More, with Feeling.\" The title of the episode is a play on the bestseller Conversations with God, by Neale Donald Walsch.\n\n#### DRAMATIS PERSONAE:\n\nBuffy helped Holden move a light board when he was the lighting designer for their junior year production of Pippin. He dropped the board on her foot. Buffy tells Holden that she behaved like a monster during her \"relationship\" with Spike. She ultimately admits that many of her problems stem from the fact that she feels superior to everyone, simply because she is the Slayer. She is able to be completely open with Holden.\n\nJonathan finally realizes that high school wasn't really as horrible as he remembers. In fact, he now misses everyone from his past, whether they even knew him or not. He wants to know how they're all doing, because no matter what they may think of him (or not even think of him at all), he cares about them. That's why he came back to Sunnydale to stop whatever it is he is trying to stop.\n\n#### FROM THE ORIGINAL TELEPLAY:\n\nIn the original teleplay Tara actually visited Willow in person. However, arrangements to have Amber Benson return for the episode were unsuccessful. Here's a brief piece of their original exchange.\n\nTARA: \"I'm sorry to wake you.\"\n\nWILLOW: \"Ha . . .\"\n\nTARA: \"Ha\u2014what?\"\n\nWILLOW: \"Is that like a dream joke thing? You're sorry to wake me, but I'm clearly not awake and if I was awake and you really were here, would you be sorry to wake me? I mean, after all this time and\u2014oh God, I'm babbling. I'm dream babbling and it's the best dream of my life and I'm wasting it and\u2014\"\n\nTARA: \"I just meant, I liked watching you sleep.\"\n\nAlso, although the new Big Bad has yet to be mentioned by name in dialogue, the script already refers to it as \"The First.\"\n\nThe date and time at the opening of the episode corresponds with the date and time the episode originally aired.\n\n### Showtime\n\nEpisode 7.11\n\nWRITTEN BY: David Fury\n\nDIRECTED BY: Michael Grossman\n\nSPECIAL GUEST STAR: Anthony Stewart Head as Rupert Giles\n\nGUEST STARS: Tom Lenk as Andrew, Iyari Limon as Kennedy, Clara Bryant as Molly, Indigo as Rona, Amanda Marie Fuller as Eve\n\nCO-STARS: Camden Toy as Ubervamp, Lalaine as Chloe, Felicia Day as Vi\n\n#### THE PLOT THICKENS:\n\nA new Potential named Rona arrives in Sunnydale and is immediately under attack by a trio of Bringers. Buffy comes to Rona's aid and welcomes the girl to the Hellmouth. The rest of the gathered Potentials\u2014Kennedy, Molly, Chloe, and Eve\u2014along with the Scoobies try to settle in for a restless night's sleep.\n\nWhen Buffy returns, Giles informs her that there is an oracle called Beljoxa's Eye that might be able to help them with information on The First, but Anya is reluctant to seek it out. The ex-demon eventually agrees to take Giles to a demon contact to open the gateway to the oracle's dark dimension. Meanwhile, The First continues to taunt its captive Spike with visions of the Slayer. The vampire cannot immediately tell the difference.\n\nWillow receives a call from her old coven friends and learns that a Potential arrived in Sunnydale two days ago, which sends Buffy and Xander in a rush to find the girl. They arrive way too late, but are more surprised to find that the dead girl is one of the Potentials they've already found: Eve. At the same time, Eve is in the basement with the other Potentials, spreading gloom and doom.\n\nBuffy hurries home and threatens The First in the form of Eve to leave, although there is little the Slayer can actually do. The First knows it has done its damage and leaves the Scoobies and the truly freaked Potentials with the threat that it will be sending the Turok-Han that evening.\n\nMeanwhile, in another dimension, Giles and Anya learn why The First has chosen now of all times to make its move. When Willow and the Slayerettes resurrected Buffy the year before, they irrevocably altered the mystical forces surrounding the Chosen line, making it prime time for The First to strike.\n\nAs darkness approaches, the Potentials get more and more stressed about the coming evil. Buffy loads them with weapons as Willow reluctantly readies with the magick to create a barrier to keep the ubervamp out. The Bringers take positions around the house as the ubervamp arrives.\n\nThe Turok-Han easily smashes into the house and nearly overpowers Willow's barrier with its strength. Seeing no other option, Buffy instructs everyone to run and they battle their way past the Bringers and out into the night. Buffy splits from the rest of the team, hoping the ubervamp will follow her, but it goes off after the Potentials.\n\nXander leads the gang to a construction site, where they are attacked by the ubervamp. Buffy arrives moments later, causing Dawn to realize that this was set up so the Potentials could see Action Buffy take on the Big Baddy. The Slayer uses her power to fight off the ubervamp and decapitate it, turning the demon to dust. She then leaves an impressed group of Potentials to go and release Spike.\n\n#### QUOTE OF THE WEEK:\n\nKENNEDY: \"How's evil taste?\"\n\nWILLOW: \"A little chalky.\"\n\n#### LOVE IN VEIN:\n\nKennedy continues to make subtle moves on Willow. Once again Anya is turned down after an offer of sex. Last time it was with Spike in \"Sleeper.\" This time it's with her demon contact, Torg.\n\n#### POP-CULTURE IQ:\n\nAndrew compares the lack of excitement to his apparent reaction to the film Star Wars Episode One: The Phantom Menace:\n\n\"I'm bored. Episode One bored.\"\n\nXander makes reference to Edgar Rice Burroughs's novel The Land That Time Forgot:\n\n\"The vampire that time forgot?\"\n\nBuffy's threat to her captive dissolves under Andrew's appreciation for the work of Stephen King:\n\nBUFFY: \"Did you see the movie Misery?\"\n\nANDREW: \"Six times. But the book was scarier 'cause instead of crushing his foot with a sledgehammer, Kathy Bates chopped it off with . . .\"\n\nAndrew continues the James Bond discussion he had with Warren and Jonathan in \"Life Serial\":\n\n\"License to kill . . . pretty cool. You know, Timothy Dalton never got his props. . . .\"\n\nIt can only be assumed that Andrew is referring to \"Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon,\" the game in which all actors can be linked to Kevin Bacon in six movie roles or less:\n\n\"You wanna play Kevin Bacon?\"\n\nAndrew refers to the DC Comics team of heroes:\n\n\"Where would the Justice League have been if they hadn't put their differences aside to stop the Imperium and its shape-shifting alien horde?\"\n\nAndrew makes with more Star Wars references:\n\n\"Um . . . deflector shields up. . . . Deflector shields up!\"\n\nBuffy's battle with the ubervamp is reminiscent of the gladiator-like arena in the 1985 film Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome:\n\nBUFFY: \"Welcome to Thunderdome.\"\n\nANDREW: \"Two men enter, one man leaves.\"\n\nBuffy greets Rona by saying, \"Welcome to the Hellmouth,\" which is the title of the show's premiere episode.\n\n#### CONTINUITY:\n\nGiles has the coven in England working on locating potential Slayers. Anya learns that she and her friends are essentially the ones to blame for The First's awakening and committing murders because they revived the Slayer in \"Bargaining.\" Willow is scared to use her magick, not only because of her past slip into the dark magicks, but because the last time she used a spell in reference to The First in \"Bring on the Night,\" it turned it against her. Xander takes the gang to the future site of the new public library that's scheduled to open May of 2003, if he ever gets back to work (although he needn't worry about missing that deadline).\n\n#### DRAMATIS PERSONAE:\n\nBuffy, Willow, and Xander speak telepathically to set up their plan to take out the ubervamp. In the past Willow has been the one to initiate telepathy (\"The Gift\" and \"Bargaining\"), but this time Buffy makes the first thought.\n\nAnya is still coming under attack from some members of the demon community. She spent a night with her demon contact, Torg, over three lifetimes ago, although she claims it wasn't so much a date as they both happened to be invited to the same massacre.\n\nKennedy has a half sister and apparently comes from money. Her childhood home had a couple of wings to it, although the family house in the Hamptons only had one wing. She has known how to use a crossbow since she was eight.\n\n#### FROM THE ORIGINAL TELEPLAY:\n\nThe First, in the guise of Eve, leaves one last threat to the Potentials before it disappears:\n\n\"And Chloe, honey . . . you don't have to worry about getting called to be the Slayer before you're ready. You'll be dead before that happens. All o' you.\"\n\n### Storyteller\n\nEpisode 7.16\n\nWRITTEN BY: Jane Espenson\n\nDIRECTED BY: Marita Grabiak\n\nGUEST STARS: Danny Strong as Jonathan, Adam Busch as Warren, Tom Lenk as Andrew, Iyari Limon as Kennedy, Sarah Hagan as Amanda, Indigo as Rona, DB Woodside as Principal Wood\n\nCO-STARS: Alan Loayze as Stressed-Out Boy, Corin Amber Norton as Crying Girl, Sujata DeChoudhury as Shy Girl, TW Leshner as Feral Teen\n\n#### THE PLOT THICKENS:\n\nToday's tale opens in an elegant study where Andrew, dressed in an equally elegant smoking jacket, begins to tell us a story that he likes to call \"Buffy, a Slayer of the Vampyrs.\" In reality Andrew is hogging the bathroom while he records the introduction to his documentary on Buffy and her friends.\n\nBuffy is the only one who seems to mind the video documenting of their lives. In fact, most of the team agrees that it would be nice to have a record of events if they do manage to save the world from the apocalypse. And if they don't, well, then what would be the harm?\n\nAndrew introduces the team one by one and gives a little background on the events in Sunnydale thus far, presenting a bit of a revisionist history on his part in the events. Though he envisions her as a hero, he kind of tunes out while the Slayer lectures the team again with news of her recent vision of ubervamps.\n\nIn the meantime, things are heating up at Hellmouth High. It's like all the problems of the past (and some new ones) are popping up all at the same time, causing the students and faculty to go quite insane. Even Wood briefly gets caught up in the evil when he and Buffy go to check out the Seal of Danzalthar.\n\nAndrew uses the documentary as an opportunity to get a little background on the players and interviews Anya and Xander on their failed romance. This ultimately leads to a sexual reunion for the former fianc\u00e9s that turns out to be more of a momentary thing.\n\nRealizing the answer to combating the evil oozing from the now glowing Seal may rest in Andrew, Buffy interrogates him for information. He again goes into his stories\u2014taking a brief sidetrack to dream about being a god\u2014and drops a hint regarding an important piece of information. The knife he used to kill Jonathan has ancient writing on the handle, which is just the clue they need to lead Buffy and Willow to a solution to their problem.\n\nBuffy takes Andrew to the high school along with Spike and Wood as backup. Things are looking pretty grim as the team battles the unfortunately possessed students to get to the basement. Buffy leaves Wood and Spike to guard the door as she and Andrew head for the Seal. As the two left behind keep the students away, Wood gets the opportunity to kill the vamp that killed his mom, but fails to take it in time.\n\nBuffy is forced to fight a few more students to get to the Seal, where she finally reveals the plan to Andrew. Only his blood will reverse the power of the Seal. Afraid that he's going to die, Andrew starts to tell his stories once more, but reality eventually wins out. As Buffy holds him over the Seal, Andrew finally admits to being a murderer, and his tears of repentance are what actually stop the Seal from its evil glow. He returns home to his video camera, but shuts it off, not wanting to tell any more stories.\n\nThe inscription on the dagger reads \"The blood which I spill I consecrate to the oldest evil.\"\n\n#### QUOTE OF THE WEEK:\n\nAndrew opens the episode, \u00e0 la Masterpiece Theatre:\n\n\"Oh, hello there gentle viewers! You caught me catching up on an old favorite. It's wonderful to get lost in a story, isn't it? Adventure and heroics and discovery, don't they just take you away?\"\n\n#### LOVE IN VEIN:\n\nAndrew sees that Kennedy and Willow seem to be taking steps toward being comfortable around each other again. Later he kind of misses a heavy make-out session between the pair while he appreciates some of Xander's handiwork. It's hinted that Spike isn't the only one in the house that Andrew seems to have a crush on. It was one year ago to the day that Xander and Anya were supposed to be wed. They both admit to still loving each other, and prove it by making love on Spike's cot in the basement. However, it is more of a \"one more time\" type of session than a \"let's get back together\" thing.\n\nThe vampire in the Mutant Enemy logo sings Andrew's lines \"We are as gods\" in place of its usual \"Grrr, arrgh!\"\n\n#### POP-CULTURE IQ:\n\nWood paraphrases Forrest Gump's mother's most famous quote, \"Stupid is as stupid does\":\n\n\"Evil is as evil does.\"\n\nAndrew asks for a drink with a little kick:\n\n\"But it tickles and I'm all tense. Can't I have a cool and refreshing Zima?\"\n\n#### CONTINUITY:\n\nContinuity abounds in this episode as Andrew stands by his \"big board\" and brings the audience up to date on the happenings thus far. He also recalls some rather \"Andrew friendly\" memories of his schemes with Warren and Jonathan, as well as his powerful magick that kept evil Willow at bay in \"Two to Go.\" A handful of students blind themselves with the symbols of The First over their eyes like the Bringers have. As the students are being more and more affected by the Seal, Buffy sees one girl start to disappear like Marcie did in \"Out of Mind, Out of Sight.\" The little unslaughtered pig from \"Never Leave Me\" makes a brief cameo.\n\n#### DRAMATIS PERSONAE:\n\nAndrew reveals that while he was in Mexico he had visions of some of the events to come (including the deaths of Slayers around the world, the Seal opening, and the ubervamp). He can speak Tawarick, the language inscribed on the dagger. Andrew finally admits to himself that he killed Jonathan because he listened to \"Warren\" and was happy to pretend that he thought it was actually his dead friend.\n\nAndrew's revised history of the events in \"Two to Go\" are composed of clips from that episode as well as entirely new material featuring Andrew and Jonathan.\n\n#### FROM THE ORIGINAL TELEPLAY:\n\nAs Buffy and Wood look over the blueprints of the school, the principal notes that Amanda's concern about certain groups in \"Potential\" could be well founded.\n\nWOOD: \"I think our biggest problem is here in the music room. I fear there could be open hostilities between swing choir and the marching band.\"\n\nBUFFY: \"I don't know if we can keep a lid on this all by ourselves. We might need some kind of help.\"\n\nWOOD: \"Like what? Police?\"\n\nLater they do reveal they needed help in more lines cut due to length:\n\nBUFFY: \"We had to call in guards to keep the place from going up like a prison riot.\"\n\nANDREW: \"Oh my.\"\n\nWOOD: \"The guards were still clearing kids out of there when we left.\"\n\n### Chosen\n\nEpisode 7.22\n\nWRITTEN AND DIRECTED BY: Joss Whedon\n\nSPECIAL GUEST STARS: Anthony Stewart Head as Rupert Giles, Eliza Dushku as Faith, Nathan Fillion as Caleb\n\nGUEST STARS: David Boreanaz as Angel, Tom Lenk as Andrew, Iyari Limon as Kennedy, Sarah Hagan as Amanda, Indigo as Rona, DB Woodside as Principal Wood\n\nCO-STARS: Felicia Day as Vi, Mary Wilcher as Shannon, Demetra Raven as Girl at Bat, Katie Gray as Indian Girl, Lisa Ann Cabasa as Injured Girl, Ally Matsumura as Japanese Girl, Kelli Wheeler as School Girl, Jenna Edwards as Trailer Girl, Julia Lang as Potential with Power #2\n\n#### THE PLOT THICKENS:\n\nThe series finale picks up right where the previous episide left off. Satisfying all the fans of Buffy and Angel's romance, Buffy and Angel are kissing. Then Big Bad Caleb gets up and clocks Angel. The Slayer does battle with the evil preacher once more, this time putting an end to him for good by splitting him in two. Spike continues to watch as Angel gives Buffy some files and an amulet meant to be worn by someone \"ensouled, but stronger than human . . . a champion.\" But Spike leaves before he finds out that Buffy is not going to let Angel be the one to wear it or stick around for the fight.\n\nBuffy returns home and gets a swift kick from her sister for sending her away. The Slayer shares the new info with the gang and then goes down to see Spike. The vampire tells her he knows she's seen Angel, but is surprised to learn that she sent tall, dark, and forehead away. When he asks about the trinket Angel brought, she reiterates that it is supposed to be worn by a champion before she hands it over to him. With Faith taking up her bed, Buffy needs a place to stay and\u2014after a slight miscommunication\u2014Spike offers his cot to her.\n\nIn the middle of the night Buffy gets up to pace and gets a surprise visit from The First in the form of herself. It reminds her that into every generation a Slayer is born and that the Chosen One is alone. Spike wakes at the end of The First's ramblings and asks Buffy what's wrong. She replies that she just realized something she never realized before: they're going to win.\n\nThe next morning Buffy shares her new plan with her friends. The gang is shocked by its audacity, but Giles is the first to proclaim its brilliance, even though Willow is afraid that an awful lot of it depends on anther dalliance with the powerful magicks. Buffy shares the plan with the Potentials, telling them that the following morning she's opening the Seal of Danzalthar and going into the Hellmouth along with anyone who chooses to come.\n\nFollowing a night of difficult discussions and unlikely pastimes, the team of Slayers, Potentials, and civilians enters Sunnydale High. As Kennedy goes to the principal's office to set things up for Willow, Faith takes Spike and the Potentials down to the Seal, preparing them to enter the Hellmouth. The plan is to take care of the ubervamps at their source, but if they get up into the school, three teams of Giles and Wood, Anya and Andrew, and Xander and Dawn will keep them from getting out into the world. Dawn refuses to actually say good-bye to her sister and the teams split, leaving Buffy, Xander, Willow, and Giles a moment alone wondering what to do tomorrow; shopping is the choice of the majority.\n\nThe Slayers and the Potentials cut their hands and open the Seal, entering the Hellmouth. It doesn't take long for the thousands of ubervamps to see them and attack. Above them, Willow works a spell on the scythe. Her body flows with white magick as she spreads the power of the Slayer from the weapon to all the Potentials in the Hellmouth and around the world. Kennedy then takes the scythe to Buffy and joins the battle.\n\nThe fight is vicious as dozens of ubervamps and a few of the new Slayers, including Amanda, meet their deaths. Some of the vamps get up into the school and, along with the Bringers, do battle with the upstairs team. Wood is wounded . . . and Anya is killed.\n\nThe First taunts Buffy as she falls with a seemingly mortal wound, but disappears when the Slayer rises again. The talisman around Spike's neck finally takes effect and a beam of destructive energy bursts up through the school. Sunlight comes shining in, filtering through the amulet to kill the ubervamps and destroy the Hellmouth.\n\nFaith calls the retreat, but Buffy refuses to leave Spike. The gang gathers upstairs and hops a waiting school bus out of the deserted town while Buffy reluctantly says good-bye. As the sunlight destroys Spike, Buffy heads to the rooftops to chase the bus as the Hellmouth implodes, taking the town with it. Buffy manages to leap onto the bus and rides it out of town.\n\nOutside the former town limits, the gang stops to take account of what's happened. Wood surprises Faith by not dying. Andrew tells Xander that Anya died a valiant death. But what everyone is wondering is what to do tomorrow now that the Hellmouth is gone and the Chosen One is no longer just one.\n\nBuffy simply smiles.\n\n#### QUOTE OF THE WEEK:\n\nGiles echoes his concern for the world that he expressed at the end of the series opener \"Welcome to the Hellmouth\/The Harvest\" (1.1 and 1.2), following a conversation with Buffy, Xander, and Willow that is also familiar:\n\n\"The Earth is definitely doomed.\"\n\n#### LOVE IN VEIN:\n\nBuffy tells Angel she needs him to prepare a second front in case she fails, but that's only one of the reasons she doesn't want him involved in the battle. Buffy makes it clear that Spike's not her boyfriend, but he is in her heart (although she doesn't see \"fat grandchildren\" in a future with Spike, echoing Jenny Calendar's thwarted wish for her future in \"Amends\"). Buffy finally realizes that, in light of her failed relationships, there's nothing \"wrong\" with her, she's just not ready as a \"whole person\" to be in one yet. And, although she doesn't think far enough ahead to know when she'll be ready for another relationship, she does admit that Angel is in her thoughts. Spike is equally jealous and takes out his frustration on a punching bag with a crude drawing of the vampire who \"wears lifts, you know.\" As Cassie predicted in \"Conversations with Dead People,\" Buffy does tell Spike that she loves him. He knows it's not true\u2014at least not in the way he wants it to be\u2014but appreciates that she said it. Faith worries that Wood thought she was blowing him off when she blew him off after their tryst. The principal makes it clear that he's not up for her \"defensive isolationist Slayer crap\" and some guy out there may be pretty decent if she ever gave him the chance to surprise her, which he does. Willow tells Kennedy that the Potential will have to kill her if the magick takes over. Kennedy is with her the whole time, lending support. In the end Xander worries only about Anya.\n\n#### POP-CULTURE IQ:\n\nAngel notes that the translation regarding the amulet's power was kind of unclear and could have said it had the power of a bathroom cleaner:\n\n\"Has a purifying power . . . or a cleansing power\u2014or possibly scrubbing bubbles . . .\"\n\nBuffy brings up Dawson's Creek, another series that saw its finale in 2003, since Angel acted the same way when she was with Riley:\n\n\"Are you gonna come by and get all Dawson on me every time I have a boyfriend?\"\n\nGiles and some of the gang take time out to play some Dungeons & Dragons as the apocalypse approaches:\n\n\"Could it possibly get uglier? I used to be a highly respected Watcher. Now I'm a wounded dwarf with the mystical strength of a doily.\"\n\nAnya refers to Andrew as the leader\/narrator of a D&D game:\n\n\"So that leaves me and the Dungeon Master in the North Hall.\"\n\nSpike makes reference to the song by Alice Cooper:\n\n\"I think it's fair to say school's out for bloody summer.\"\n\nThe gang mourns the loss of Sunnydale:\n\nDAWN: \"We destroyed the mall? I fought on the wrong side.\"\n\nXANDER: \"All those shops gone . . . The Gap, Starbucks, Toys 'R' Us . . . who will remember those landmarks unless we tell the world of them?\"\n\nFACES OF THE FIRST\n\nThroughout the season, The First took the following forms: Warren, Glory, Adam, Mayor Wilkins, Drusilla, The Master, Buffy, Cassie, Spike, Jonathan, Eve (Potential), Nikki Wood, Chloe (Potential), Betty (Caleb's victim), Caleb\n\n#### CONTINUITY:\n\nSeven seasons of history come into play throughout the episode, which takes up where the last one left off, mid-kiss. Angel notes that the information and the amulet did not come from a reliable source, namely Lilah. He received the information in the season finale of Angel, \"Home.\" Oz smelled Willow's presence in \"Lovers Walk\"; Angel smells Spike on Buffy, just as Spike later smells Angel on Buffy. In \"Conversations with Dead People,\" Cassie foretold that Buffy would \"go someplace dark, underground\" and that she \"would make a difference.\" Buffy's realization that she's going to win comes about in the basement. The \"basement\" (well, actually the Hellmouth below the basement) of the high school finally does kill Spike. Giles mentions another Hellmouth in Cleveland, as was discussed in \"The Wish\" as the place Buffy ends up in the Doppelgangland world, instead of first coming to Sunnydale.\n\nIn fitting tribute, the vampire in the Mutant Enemy logo turns directly to the audience when it says its \"Grrr, arrgh!\" for the last time in the series.\n\n#### DRAMATIS PERSONAE:\n\nBuffy is no longer the Chosen \"One,\" which means she no longer has to bear that mantle of responsibility alone.\n\nWillow turns white with power and Kennedy tells her she is a goddess. She can feel the Slayers wakening to their power all around the world.\n\nXander, after hearing that Anya died protecting Andrew, says, \"That's my girl. Always doing the stupid thing.\"\n\nGiles and Buffy have a moment of reconciliation when he tells her the plan is bloody brilliant and she responds that his opinion does matter.\n\nAnya finds her strength to rally against the ubervamps and the Bringers by calling up her hatred for floppy . . . hoppy . . . bunnies.\n\nDawn refers to herself as Watcher Junior.\n\nSpike feels his soul in the end and knows it's really there.\n\nAndrew wonders why he didn't die.\n\n#### FROM THE ORIGINAL TELEPLAY:\n\nDawn tells the Potentials a bedtime story:\n\nDAWN: \"And the Master grabbed Buffy from behind and bit her. She tried to move, but he was too strong. He fed on her blood and tossed her in the water, cackling insanely as the bubbles rose around her and she slowly drowned to death.\"\n\nVI: \"Do you have any other stories?\"\n\nDAWN: \"She gets up again. It's very romantic. Guys, you gotta stop worrying. It's Buffy. She always saves the day.\"\n\nRobin makes good on his promise to surprise Faith one day, in this case by not dying:\n\n\"Surprise.\"\n\nAnd here's how it ends following Dawn's question, \"What are we gonna do now?\":\n\nBuffy looks at them, looks back at the crater, and we are in full close-up as she considers the question, a small smile creeping onto her lips as she decides on her answer.\n\nBLACK OUT.\n\nEND OF SHOW.\n\nBy the time this episode aired, The WB had already announced that James Marsters, as Spike, would appear on Angel the following fall, thus allaying the fears of many devoted fans that Spike wouldn't survive. After all, as the two shows have often proven, death isn't necessarily the end of anything.\n\n## IT DIDN'T END IN SUNNYDALE\n\n* * *\n\nThe Official Post-TV Seasons\n\nSeveral years after the final episode of Buffy aired, Joss Whedon decided that maybe the show wasn't as over as the series finale had made it seem. Dark Horse Comics had done Buffy comics throughout the TV series run, but those were never considered to be \"in continuity,\" or part of the official story. In 2007 all that changed. Joss teamed up with the folks at Dark Horse to create Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Season Eight\u2014an official comic-book continuation of the television series, with Joss writing the first story arc and overseeing (or \"executive producing\") the whole endeavor. Season Eight, it turned out, was only the beginning, and the Dark Horse Buffyverse currently runs up through Season Eleven.\n\nSo . . . where did Joss and company take your favorite characters in this official continuity? We're very glad you asked. . . .\n\n### SEASON EIGHT\n\nPicking up a year after the conclusion of the TV series, Season Eight presents a startlingly different status quo for Buffy and the now-scattered Scooby Gang. Taking full advantage of the comic-book form, Joss and artist Georges Jeanty reintroduce Buffy and Xander as the leaders of a global network of magick and technology, which they and their team use to combat the forces of darkness around the world. It's established that there are eighteen hundred Slayers in the world, roughly a third of whom work for Buffy, broken down into ten squads. Some of the squad leaders are very familiar to us, including Giles (UK), Andrew Wells (Italy), Vi (New York City), and Faith, among others. Willow has become extraordinarily powerful, thanks in part to the demon Saga Vasuki, who is revealed to be her lover.\n\nA variety of villains present themselves, not least of which is the US government, which paints Buffy and her network as terrorists, and which enlists Sunnydale's original witch, Amy Madison, and Tara's killer, Warren Mears, to try to take them down. We also encounter an evil British Slayer who wants the top position, and a collective of Japanese vampires doing their best to undermine our favorite Chosen One. All these \"Little Bads\" are secretly working in service to Season Eight's Big Bad, a masked mystery man called Twilight.\n\nNumerous subplots weave in and out of the forty issues (and three one-shots) that compose the sprawling Season Eight. Buffy sleeps with a fellow Slayer. Harmony\u2014the much-loved airhead who went from Sunnydale classmate to vampire receptionist at Wolfram & Hart\u2014becomes a reality TV star. Dawn loses her virginity to a guy who curses her, causing her to become a giant, then a centaur, before she eventually realizes that it was Xander she loved all along\u2014and Xander loves her back! Buffy time travels, encountering Fray, a future Slayer whom Joss Whedon introduced in her own miniseries. The core gang visits Oz in Tibet to learn how to hide the magickal nature of both Slayers and witches, due to the fact that Twilight has learned how to track them by their magick, a sort of occult GPS.\n\nThroughout these adventures, the core group begins to splinter again, as they have in the past. Trust is destroyed. In the midst of that atmosphere, Buffy turns to Angel, and despite everything at risk, they give in to their love and longing for each other . . . only to have Angel reveal that he has been Twilight all along . . . or, rather, that Twilight (a sort of Utopian limbo where they can live together forever) has possessed him. Twilight claims to have only admirable motives\u2014but for Buffy and Angel to have their happy ending in this new, beautiful universe, they'll have to allow the old one to be destroyed, along with everyone in it.\n\nAngel manages to shake off Twilight's influence, and\u2014thanks to a tip from Spike\u2014he and Buffy track down the source of Twilight's power: a mystical seed that is also the source of all magick in the world. Giles plans to destroy it, and it seems everyone is on the same page until Twilight possesses Angel again. Under Twilight's control, Angel murders Giles. In grief and rage, Buffy destroys the seed, which defeats Twilight but also extinguishes all magick in the universe. Supernatural creatures (like vampires and Slayers) remain, but witches and sorcerers are left completely powerless.\n\nFaith learns that Giles has left her his estate, with the expectation that she will step up and become the leader he always believed her to be. She brings Angel there and begins the process of trying to help him heal. Buffy, however, gets no such ending. Hated by Slayers and the now-powerless witches, she moves into Xander and Dawn's San Francisco apartment. When we last see her, she has returned to the person she was when we first met her . . . the Slayer, hunting monsters by night.\n\nSeason Eight was written by Joss Whedon, with certain issues by Scott Allie, Brad Meltzer, Jim Krueger, Jeph Loeb, Brian K. Vaughan, and a host of writers from the original television series, including Jane Espenson, Drew Goddard, Steven S. DeKnight, Drew Z. Greenberg, and Doug Petrie. The arc was drawn primarily by Georges Jeanty, with certain issues illustrated by Paul Lee, Cliff Richards, Karl Moline, and Eric Wight.\n\n### SEASON NINE\n\nBuffy the Vampire Slayer: Season Nine consists of two ongoing series (and several miniseries). In addition to the flagship title, Dark Horse launched Angel & Faith.\n\nSeason Nine begins with Buffy patrolling San Francisco, but in addition to the changes already detailed, other things have changed as well. With the death of magick, vampirism itself has been altered. It had previously been established that vampires were humans possessed by a certain brand of vampire . . . but now those demons aren't able to fully inhabit the dead, resulting in abominations Xander starts to call \"zompires.\"\n\nXander and Dawn have settled down together into a life that seems almost ordinary. Likewise, Willow and Spike make appearances, but the now-magickless Willow soon leaves on a quest to try to restore magick to the universe, and Spike departs as well (the less said about his\u2014ahem\u2014spaceship, the better). Buffy teams up with a cop named Robert Dowling, and eventually learns that Anaheed, one of her roommates, is a Slayer who's been assigned to keep an eye on her.\n\nBuffy's enemies this time include a man named Severin, who has the ability to leach magick from Slayers and demons. Among her allies are familiar faces, including Illyria (from Angel) and the vengeance demon D'Hoffryn. But the greatest fallout from Season Eight's destruction of magick is that Dawn\u2014a being created entirely of mystical energy\u2014has begun to fade from existence. If they can't find a way to restore magick, Dawn will die.\n\nThough Willow manages to restore her own powers and returns, she is only able to slow Dawn's dissolution. Soon Buffy, Willow, and Xander end up at the Deeper Well (a prison for ancient demons), where they hope to gather up the dregs of magick . . . enough to save Dawn. Severin and renegade Slayer Simone have done the same. While Severin is unable to handle the magick there, Willow charges herself up enough to form a new seed (like that destroyed in Season Eight). The seed will take a thousand years to restore magick, but Illyria and Willow persuade Severin to lend his power to speed things along. The end result is a massive explosion that restores magick to the world, killing Severin, Illyria, and others.\n\nDawn is saved, but Willow reports that she senses something different about the magick in the world. When we cut to a new vampire rising from the dead, we learn that the age of the \"zompire\" is over\u2014this vampire retains its intelligence. But it is different from the vampires we've seen in the series before. This one can bear the sunlight without burning and can transform itself into a bat.\n\nIn the pages of Angel & Faith, Faith is in London trying to help Angel become the person he once was, even as Angel is trying to gather the fragments of Giles's soul in an effort to resurrect him. Meanwhile, some of those he recruited during his time as Twilight (including Whistler) are hunting him, furious that he betrayed them. While Whistler engages in nefarious deeds, Angel and Faith continue their quest to restore Giles to life . . . and Angel accumulates pieces of Giles's soul inside himself, which begins to influence his behavior, making him more Giles-like. They're aided in their efforts by two of Giles's great-aunts, Lavinia and Sophronia, who use magick to remain young, as well as an old friend of Giles's named Alasdair Coames.\n\nWith help from Willow, Spike, Gunn, and Connor (the latter two from Angel), and after a confrontation with the demon Eyghon (to whom Giles sold his soul, as revealed in the Buffy episode \"The Dark Age\"), Angel and Faith and their sidekicks finally manage to gather together all the pieces of Giles's soul and bring him back to life . . . but there's a twist they didn't see coming: Giles returns with all his memories intact, but he's in the body of his twelve-year-old self.\n\nYoung Giles is not at all happy about his physical state, but he's even more upset that they've been so focused on trying to save him that they've neglected the larger fight\u2014the evil machinations of Eyghon, Whistler, and their allies. With their focus renewed, Angel and Faith soon track down and vanquish the villains, after which Faith and Giles return to the United States. Angel stays behind in London, where he intends to go back to spending his nights fighting the forces of darkness and helping those in need.\n\nSeason Nine also includes three miniseries. Willow: Wonderland reveals the character's journey into a magickal dimension, where she encounters former friends and former enemies, regains her magick, and makes peace with the dark elements of her spirit that once turned her into Dark Willow. The vital part of Spike: A Dark Place is that it destroys Spike's \"spaceship\" and returns him to a more familiar status quo. Love vs. Life\u2014written by Buffy TV writer\/producer Jane Espenson\u2014follows new characters Billy and Anaheed, and presents Billy as the first male character to make a connection to the Slayer mythology.\n\nThe core series had a number of writers, including Whedon, Scott Allie, Drew Z. Greenberg, and Jane Espenson, but the majority of the issues were penned by Andrew Chambliss. Artists included Buffy stalwarts Georges Jeanty, Karl Moline, and Cliff Richards. The Angel & Faith series was written entirely by Christos Gage, and nearly all the issues were drawn by Rebekah Isaacs.\n\n### SEASON TEN\n\nSeason Ten continues to be split into two core titles\u2014Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel & Faith\u2014as the characters deal with fallout from the previous season's finale. The new breed of vampires are more powerful than their predecessors and much harder to kill (and they can walk in daylight!). Buffy is adjusting to the presence of a twelve-year-old Giles, Dawn is dealing with her near-death experience, and Xander is being visited by what seems to be Anya's ghost. Harmony now leads a group made up of most of the world's vampires, and they enter into a mutual nonaggression pact with Buffy.\n\nOne result of the earlier story line was that the book of Vampyr left to Buffy in Giles's will had its pages turn blank. Now Buffy and her friends realize they can write new rules for magick on those pages\u2014a huge opportunity and responsibility. They form an alliance with D'Hoffryn and others to safeguard the book and monitor the new and evolving rules of magick.\n\nCharacters change and grow and there are subplots aplenty, including one in which Andrew resurrects the soul of Jonathan Levenson (the third member of the trio that included the two of them and Warren Mears) . . . but the digital body created for Jonathan is only temporary, and dead Jonathan is enraged. Eventually, this leads to Jonathan becoming the first-ever male vengeance demon.\n\nBuffy and Spike enter into a new relationship and then encounter Archaeus, the ancient vampire who sired the Master (meaning Spike and Angel are of his vampiric bloodline). Buffy and Spike team up with Angel and make peace with him over the past and the present, and together they defeat Archaeus . . . who escapes through something called the Restless Door, a portal into various hell dimensions. The Restless Door is being repaired by a collective of demons who begin to stage demonic invasions of Earth. The military wants Buffy's help to combat these invasions, but Buffy mistrusts them\u2014even though some of her friends, Willow included, are working with them.\n\nWhen, in the midst of battle, fleeing demons destroy the Restless Door, they open a portal that will destroy the world unless Dawn (\"The Key\") goes through and closes it from the other side. She does so, and Xander goes with her, beginning a long odyssey as the two of them attempt to make their way back to the Earth dimension and their friends attempt to find and aid them.\n\nThe Big Bad of the series turns out to be D'Hoffryn, who betrays his initial alliance with Buffy and takes the Vampyr book in an effort to give himself enormous power, hoping to make himself unstoppable. In the end, his own cadre of vengeance demons turns against him, and D'Hoffryn is disempowered and defeated. A new council is formed to take charge of the book and to oversee the magick in the world, including Buffy, Giles, Willow, Riley Finn . . . and Dracula, among others.\n\nSeason Ten also includes a short comics story called \"Where Are They Now?\" The story features Harmony and the fan-favorite, saggy-skinned demon Clem making a documentary that leads to Buffy, Giles, and violence, of course.\n\nMeanwhile, in Angel & Faith, Faith is traveling, trying to figure out what she wants from her life and future. Angel has set himself up as the protector of a London neighborhood that has come to be known as Magic Town, where many residents have magickally mutated into supernatural creatures, including a former Slayer called Nadira, who has become a seer. Nadira claims that Magic Town is sentient and that she can communicate with it.\n\nAngel's adventure leads to encounters with a half demon named Pearl, Amy Madison, and\u2014much to his surprise\u2014Winifred Burkle, whom he knows to be dead. (During Season Nine, the demon Illyria, who had inhabited Fred's body, was seemingly killed.) As it turns out, Fred and Illyria are now sharing the body\u2014but Illyria believes that Angel wants to expunge her from Fred's body. Illyria wreaks havoc until Fred is able to take control of her own body, and of Illyria.\n\nFaith's story takes her first to South America to rescue Riley Finn and his wife, Samantha, from a vampire tribe, and then to London's Magic Town to become head of security for a company researching the magick there. Faith's boss has a particular fascination with the Fred\/Illyria problem. This leads to a team-up between Faith and Fred, who go undercover to a local school, many of whose students turn out to be vampires in service to our old friend Drusilla.\n\nLike Spike and Angel and the Master, Drusilla is part of the bloodline of the ancient vampire Archaeus, who has returned and brought Drusilla into his scheme, which revolves around a girl named Mary. Archaeus seems to want to make a deal with the sentient awareness of Magic Town, and he tries to force the seer Nadira to broker a deal. But when the sentient awareness of Magic Town inhabits a statue and comes to life, it becomes a menace all its own, attacking anyone who comes near.\n\nWhen Archaeus attempts to persuade the sentient Magic to join forces with him, mayhem ensues. Drusilla and an army of vampires face off against the magickal creatures and human residents of Magic Town, but it is only when Archaeus attacks Nadira\u2014who had been a friend to the Magic\u2014that it sees the truth and defends her. In the end, it is the sentient Magic that truly defeats Archaeus, before retreating back to a bodiless existence.\n\nThe Buffy portion of Season Ten was written by Christos Gage, who collaborated on many issues with Xander himself, actor Nicholas Brendon. Most of the run was illustrated by Rebekah Isaacs, with certain issues by Karl Moline, Megan Levens, and Cliff Richards. The Angel & Faith run in Season Ten was written by Victor Gischler (with one issue by Kel McDonald) and illustrated by Will Conrad and Cliff Richards (with one issue by Derlis Santacruz).\n\n### SEASON ELEVEN\n\nAs of this writing, publication of Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Season Eleven is ongoing, but the series is much shorter than previous seasons, running for only twelve issues. The companion series this time is simply titled Angel, but is also considered part of Season Eleven.\n\nHow much longer Buffy's official adventures will continue remains to be seen.\n\nOnly Joss knows for sure.\n\n## WHERE ARE THEY NOW?\n\n* * *\n\nSARAH MICHELLE GELLAR (Buffy Summers) has made numerous film and television appearances since the end of the series. Her most notable film appearances have been in the smash horror films The Grudge and The Return as well as indie movies such as Southland Tales and Veronika Decides to Die. After the birth of her first child with husband Freddie Prinze Jr., Sarah took a two-year hiatus from acting. Subsequently, she's focused more on television roles, starring in two short-lived but fan-favorite series, Ringer and The Crazy Ones. A recent effort to develop a new series based on her earlier film Cruel Intentions seems to have stalled as of this writing. Sarah has also provided her voice to a number of animated projects, most notably the second season of Star Wars Rebels. When not working or spending time with Freddie and their two children, Sarah works on a variety of charitable endeavors, including Project Angel Food and the Make-A-Wish Foundation.\n\nALYSON HANNIGAN (Willow Rosenberg) has become one of the most successful of the series's alumni, thanks to her 206 episodes as Lily Aldrin on How I Met Your Mother. In the years immediately following Buffy, Alyson appeared as a guest star on a number of series, including two episodes of That '70s Show and three of Veronica Mars. She has also been a popular guest star on a variety of animated series, voicing roles on The Simpsons, Robot Chicken, American Dad!, and kids' series Sofia the First. Alyson made her West End stage debut in 2004 in a production of When Harry Met Sally, opposite Luke Perry. In 2009 she won the People's Choice Award for Favorite TV Comedy Actress for her role on How I Met Your Mother. Alyson married Buffy costar Alexis Denisof in 2003, and the couple have two daughters. Alyson and Alexis are the godparents of Joss Whedon's son, Arden.\n\nNICHOLAS BRENDON (Xander Harris) has made numerous film and television appearances post-Buffy, most notably in thirteen episodes of Kitchen Confidential and twenty-one of Criminal Minds. He appeared in multiple episodes of Private Practice and voiced a character on the animated series American Dragon: Jake Long. Nicholas co-wrote many issues of Dark Horse Comics's Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Season Ten.\n\nCHARISMA CARPENTER (Cordelia Chase) followed up Buffy with a move to its sister series, Angel, where she appeared as Cordelia for ninety-two episodes. Charisma has worked consistently in a wide variety of projects, including the first two Expendables films with Sylvester Stallone and numerous made-for-television movies. Her television series roles post-Buffy include the short-lived Miss Match, eleven episodes of Veronica Mars, twenty of The Lying Game, and guest-starring roles in a litany of popular series, including Charmed, CSI, Burn Notice, Supernatural, Blue Bloods, Sons of Anarchy, Scream Queens, and Chicago P.D. Charisma had a son, Donovan, in 2003.\n\nEMMA CAULFIELD (Anya Jenkins) has continued to appear in film and television, including a starring role in the horror hit Darkness Falls and seven episodes of the long-running fantasy series Once Upon a Time. Emma's other television appearances include guest-starring roles on such series as Private Practice, Prime Suspect, Leverage, Royal Pains, and Supergirl, and a recurring role on the TeenNick series Gigantic. Emma has voiced a variety of different roles on the animated series Robot Chicken and was the producer and star of the popular web series Bandwagon. She cowrote the IDW Comics webcomic Contropussy. Emma and her husband, Mark Leslie Ford, welcomed their first child in 2016.\n\nELIZA DUSHKU (Faith Lehane) reportedly turned down a Faith spinoff for her starring role on the series Tru Calling. In the years since, she is perhaps also best known for her starring role in the horror film Wrong Turn and the Joss Whedon series Dollhouse. Eliza has appeared in numerous films, including Bottle Shock and The Alphabet Killer, and in guest-starring roles on series such as That '70s Show, Ugly Betty, The Big Bang Theory, White Collar, and five episodes of Banshee. Eliza has also provided her voice to animated series, including Hulk and the Agents of S.M.A.S.H., Spider-Man Unlimited, Torchwood: Web of Lies, and The Cleveland Show, and five video games, most notably Saints Row 2, as well as voicing Catwoman in two animated films. Her most recent starring role is in the horror thriller Eloise (2017).\n\nMICHELLE TRACHTENBERG (Dawn Summers) moved from Buffy to major roles in the films EuroTrip, Ice Princess (in which she put her real-life figure-skating skills on display), and 17 Again, among others. Michelle found a whole new fan following with her role as the conniving Georgina Sparks on the series Gossip Girl, and appeared in series such as Weeds and Six Feet Under, as well as guest-starring roles in a variety of shows, including Criminal Minds, Sleepy Hollow, NCIS: Los Angeles, and Law & Order: Criminal Intent. She was one of the stars of the short-lived medical drama Mercy and has starred in a variety of TV movies. Like many of her fellow Buffy alums, Michelle has voiced characters in animated series, including roles on Robot Chicken and The Super Hero Squad Show.\n\nDAVID BOREANAZ (Angel) spun out of Buffy the Vampire Slayer to topline his own series, Angel, for five seasons, and went on to star alongside Emily Deschanel for twelve seasons of Bones. Beginning with season four, David was also a producer on the series and has directed at least one episode per year. He starred in the horror film Valentine and has appeared in a number of independent films over the years, including The Mighty Macs and Officer Down. He appeared in the music video for Dido's hit single \"White Flag.\" In animation, David voiced the role of Hal Jordan\/Green Lantern in Justice League: The New Frontier as well as characters on American Dad! and Family Guy (on which he played himself). David and his wife, Jaime, have two children, a son and a daughter. In 2011, he and his father\u2014television meteorologist Dave Roberts\u2014were awarded the Gold Medal of the Pennsylvania Association of Broadcasters, the only time a father and son have been honored with the award together.\n\nSETH GREEN (Oz) made an indelible mark on the series but went on to far greater pop-culture impact as the co-creator, executive producer, and primary voice actor on two-time Emmy Award\u2013winning Robot Chicken. Seth is also the voice of Chris Griffin on the long-running animated series Family Guy and Leonardo on Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and has voiced characters on Star Wars: The Clone Wars, Phineas and Ferb, Hulk and the Agents of S.M.A.S.H., and Avengers Assemble, among many others. In the years since Buffy, he has appeared in such films as The Italian Job, Without a Paddle, Sexy Evil Genius, and The Best Man. On television, he also starred in the series Four Kings and Dads and guest-starred in a wide variety of shows, including Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, Broad City, Community, How I Met Your Mother, Grey's Anatomy, Heroes, My Name Is Earl, and Mom. Seth has also voiced characters in numerous video games, most notably Joker Moreau in three Mass Effect games. Seth and his wife, Clare Grant, were married in 2010.\n\nALEXIS DENISOF (Wesley Wyndam-Pryce) shifted from Buffy to Angel, where he continued to play Wesley until the series finale. Alexis has appeared in numerous films and TV series since, including a starring role in the series Finding Carter, seventeen episodes of Grimm, and ten episodes as obnoxious newsman Sandy Rivers in How I Met Your Mother (which, of course, starred Alexis's wife, Alyson Hannigan). His other TV appearances include guest-starring roles on Private Practice and Joss Whedon's Dollhouse, as well as a role on Bryan Singer's web series H+. Over the years, Alexis has become one of Joss Whedon's go-to performers, and his film work has included parts in Whedon's modern take on Much Ado About Nothing and The Avengers (as Thanos's sidekick, \"The Other,\" a character he reprised in the film Guardians of the Galaxy). Like many of his fellow Whedon alumni, Alexis has done his share of animated voice-over work, including roles in Justice League Unlimited, All-Star Superman, and Robot Chicken. Alexis and Alyson married in 2003 and have two children.\n\n## IN MEMORIAM\n\n* * *\n\nThe family involved in the creation of both Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel has lost several dear friends in the years since Buffy went off the air. Here, we pay tribute to three of them.\n\n#### ROBIN SACHS (Ethan Rayne) (1951\u20132013)\n\n\"Robin and I spent a lot of time together. He was very funny, very witty, very dry. We had great fun, especially in the episode where he turns me into the Fyarl demon, and we're drinking and he slips me a mickey. I really enjoyed that. When we did conventions together, we were always put together because we were sort of a similar generation. I always felt that he had that slight sadness that expats sometimes have when they find themselves creating a life abroad. But he had a wicked sense of humor. I was very fond of him and very sad to say good-bye.\"\n\n\u2014Anthony Stewart Head\n\n\"Robin Sachs was one of the funniest people I've ever met. I'd see him all the time at Buffy conventions and his Q and A's were so hilarious I'd make sure I'd go see him work the room. A terrific guy and a great talent.\"\n\n\u2014Danny Strong\n\n\"Robin and I became friends one long convention weekend, and maintained that friendship until his passing. He was charming as hell, of course, but also a kind, intelligent, down-to-earth man who always put those around him at ease, which is itself a rare talent. The world needs more like him.\"\n\n\u2014Christopher Golden\n\n\"I remember Robin as very intelligent and bright. A sweet, gentle soul.\"\n\n\u2014Cynthia Bergstrom\n\n#### ANDY HALLETT (LORNE, THE HOST\u2014ON Angel) (1975\u20132009)\n\n\"Andy was a family friend and a luminous spirit. The role of Lorne was created not just for, but because of, him. He was nuts. It got the better of him, but he was so dear and delightful and absolutely unique. I've pawned phrases off him that I use every day. He should stop fucking around and come back.\"\n\n\u2014Joss Whedon\n\n\"Andy was a gentle, lovely soul. I first met him when he was Joss's home-based assistant. Later I was happy to learn that he was cast in the role he inspired\u2014The Host on Angel (later renamed Lorne). About my favorite experience while consulting on Angel was writing the Las Vegas episode 'The House Always Wins.' I spent time with Andy in the recording studio as he laid down his vocal tracks for Lorne's Vegas act. I'd never seen him happier. It was a dream come true for him, and he never stopped thanking me for helping to make it happen.\"\n\n\u2014David Fury\n\n\"Andy was a doll. I had him in the first film I directed, Chance, and he was so much fun. He had the biggest heart and really cared about fans and loved his friends and family so deeply. His death was a tragedy. A terrible, terrible loss.\"\n\n\u2014Amber Benson\n\n\"Andy Hallett had a beautiful soul. A true artist in every sense of the word.\"\n\n\u2014Danny Strong\n\n\"Andy was one of those people who shines the brightest in any room. A great loss.\"\n\n\u2014Jane Espenson\n\n\"I remember dancing with Andy at one of our wrap parties. We had so much fun together. He was a great guy. Much love and light to him.\"\n\n\u2014Cynthia Bergstrom\n\n#### JOHN VULICH (Special Makeup FX Supervisor) (1961\u20132016)\n\n\"John was a dear friend and wonderful collaborator. During our association on Buffy, John was always supportive and kind, and I cannot stress how much he will be missed by an entire generation of artists he inspired.\"\n\n\u2014Todd McIntosh\n\n## FINAL THOUGHTS FROM THE CREATOR OF BUFFY\n\n* * *\n\nJoss Whedon\n\nTwenty years after the TV series debuted, and twenty-five years after the movie, Buffy is firmly in the rearview mirror for you . . . or is it? New seasons continue from Dark Horse Comics, talk of reboots or continuations keeps popping up, and new generations of fans are being born every day. Is Buffy really in the past for you, or does it continue along with you in some way, like an ex who never quite stops giving you \"that look\"?\n\nJOSS: \"I don't think you ever stop creating your work in your head. Whether you're fixing it or furthering it. But it's not front-burner stuff. I want to do something new. Well, newish.\"\n\nFrom the outsider's perspective, it seems like Joss Whedon can do pretty much whatever he wants these days. It helps to have written and directed two of the biggest box-office hits of all time. You go back and forth between these huge films and writing smaller films for other directors, and of course trying to save the universe by creating political ads during the 2016 presidential campaign. So if it's true that you can do whatever you want\u2014or near enough\u2014how do you balance out those wants?\n\nJOSS: \"I find the project that has to be next. Not easy to do, but I did. It's a movie unlike anything I've written . . . except that it is, in some ways, the Buffy story. I think everything I do will have an aspect of that.\"\n\nMany of the writers and actors from this show have stories about fans who have come up to them to share stories about Buffy changing their lives\u2014or quite literally saving their lives. I'm sure you've heard it a million times. What does that mean to you, and did you ever imagine the series could have that kind of impact?\n\nJOSS: \"I hoped the series would subtly worm its way into people's psyches, and they would never know how it helped them. Turns out 'subtle' is not in my repertoire. When somebody says it affected them\u2014or, more increasingly these days, their mom\u2014it is every single time a shock and a delight. There's literally nothing an artist dreams of more, besides money. Money is always first. Ooh, delicious money. What was the question?\"\n\nBuffy trailblazed on TV and in pop culture, becoming a symbol of female empowerment. It seems a no-brainer now, but at the time, a TV series with a female lead\u2014in which her male colleagues fell in line and treated her like their leader\u2014was revolutionary. Was setting that example in your mind at all, or was it a happy by-product of your creative process?\n\nJOSS: \"It was a deliberate act, but I didn't think of it as particularly revolutionary. It was how I saw the world, and I didn't think I could be the only one. I wasn't.\"\n\nI think it's safe to assume that most Joss Whedon fans have seen Buffy, Angel, Firefly, Dollhouse, Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog, and the Avengers films, but perhaps aren't as familiar with some of your other work. For instance, I didn't realize In Your Eyes existed until I just watched the trailer on IMDb, and now I've got to seek it out. If you had to name one project that's dear to you for your fans to seek out, from your early days of TV writing to animated films to comics to the smaller films you've done, what would it be and why?\n\nJOSS: \"Toy Story, obviously. . . . Speed is still fun. I thought Parenthood (the first version, with Ed Begley [Jr.]) was underrated. And my comics Astonishing X-Men and Sugarshock in particular.\"\n\nSo much time has passed. What are your favorite behind-the-scenes memories of your time making Buffy? I know there must be a thousand, but it would be wonderful if you'd offer us a few that perhaps you haven't talked much about that stay in your mind after all this time.\n\nJOSS: \"Shooting 'Once More, with Feeling' was a delight. Every day was a different song. Everyone was giving everything they had and [were] enjoying it, which after six seasons is pretty goddamn impressive. We knew it was bigger.\n\n\"And at the end of the series, after my last shot as director, I made myself climb onto the roof of the warehouse we shot in and take a moment. I never do that. But I stood up there and looked down on the Sunnydale street we'd built and told myself, 'Hey, I did this.' Didn't suck.\"\n\nEveryone says that working on a long-running TV series is a lot like high school, with circles of friends and then those people you wish you'd hung out with more. Who do you wish you'd hung out with more while working on Buffy?\n\nJOSS: \"Oh, I got plenty of everyone, thank you. I just wish I could see them more now.\"\n\nDespite that you wrote the musical episode of Buffy and Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog, I suspect many fans don't realize how much music you've actually written, including the much-loved theme from Firefly, \"The Ballad of Serenity.\" You've also written music for your films Much Ado About Nothing and In Your Eyes, a song for Amber Benson's indie film Chance, as well as\u2014in your Disney days\u2014a tune for The Lion King II: Simba's Pride. How important is music in your life, how did you start writing, and do you see yourself expanding your musical efforts in the future?\n\nJOSS: \"I hope to work in every genre of music\u2014I think it's the highest art form. All of my dialogue is deliberately musical. That flow is crucial to how it fits in the mouth\u2014and makes all of my work one insanely long aria, now that I think of it. . . .\"\n\nSo we're back to Joss Whedon being able to do anything he wants. You've got a World War II horror film coming up. We're sure to know more by the time this book comes out, but what can you tell us about that, and what else do you have planned for 2017 and beyond?\n\nJOSS: \"There's not going to be anything beyond 2017. Didn't you watch the election?\"\n\n## \"Restless\"\n\nA Path to Premonitions\n\nTELEPLAY WRITTEN AND DIRECTED BY JOSS WHEDON ADDITIONAL COMMENTARY BY PAUL RUDITIS\n\nDreams have likely been studied and analyzed since the beginning of time. We share stories of our dreams with friends, loved ones, and therapists, looking for hidden meaning and secret desires while wondering what, if anything, they may have to do with our futures and waking lives. Dreams in Buffy the Vampire Slayer explore themes related to the characters and often have some kind of prophetic significance\u2014none more so than the dreams in \"Restless.\"\n\nThe journeys taken by Willow, Xander, Giles, and Buffy in \"Restless\" can be studied in many ways, taking up pages and pages of text exploring the dream imagery, its cultural significance, or its character development. For in-depth insight into what Joss Whedon was thinking as he wrote and directed this episode, there is no better source than the season four DVD with his commentary detailing the motifs he wanted to explore. The episode itself is a unique piece of television, but when looked at as part of the whole, it becomes clear that \"Restless\" lays the groundwork for everything to come in seasons five, six, and seven.\n\nThe dreams in the story delve into the characters' psyches and give just a glimpse of the journeys that will be explored throughout the rest of the series. Whether intentional or not, almost every page of the script includes some piece of foreshadowing of future episodes. What follows is an analysis of the pages from the shooting script (updated to include dialogue from the aired episode) and how the themes and images therein will play out over the rest of the series\u2014an analysis written with the fortunate gift of hindsight, having seen the series through to its end. Varying from the painfully obvious to the more extreme stretches of coincidence, we will explore \"Restless\" as a prophecy of the show itself.\n\nBUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER\n\n\"RESTLESS\"\n\nTEASER\n\nPreviously on Buffy, the gang drifted apart throughout season four while Buffy became more involved with Riley and the Initiative. The part-man, part-demon, part-machine Adam worked, with Spike as his accomplice, to divide the Scoobies. In the end Willow, Xander, Giles, and Buffy magically joined together their strengths\u2014Willow's spirit, Xander's heart, Giles's mind, and Buffy's body\u2014so Buffy could take on Adam. The following comes as a result of that spell. . . .\n\n1 INT. BUFFY'S FOYER\/DINING ROOM\u2014NIGHT\n\nBuffy is at the door saying good-bye to Riley. Willow and Giles are in the dining room, Giles standing near enough to make conversation, not near enough to intrude.\n\nBUFFY\n\nAre you sure you'll be all right. Cause I could be there in the morning\u2014\n\nRILEY\n\nIt's just a debriefing. They're not gonna make me disappear, and they're not pinning anything on me. I got Graham and a lot of the guys testifying I'm the reason they're alive. I might actually get out of this with an honorable discharge.\n\nGILES\n\nIn return for your silence, no doubt.\n\nRILEY\n\nOh yeah. Having the inside scoop on the administration's own Bay of Mutated Pigs is definitely an advantage.\n\nWILLOW\n\nIt's like you're blackmailing the government!\n\n(off Riley's look)\n\nIn a patriotic way . . .\n\nRILEY\n\n(to Buffy)\n\nI'll call you when it's over.\n\nThey kiss.\n\nXander and Joyce emerge from the kitchen. Xander has a bowl of popcorn, Joyce a tray of drinks and snacks.\n\nXANDER\n\nDinner is served! My very own recipe.\n\nWILLOW\n\nYou pushed the button on the microwave that says \"popcorn\"?\n\nXANDER\n\nActually, I pushed \"defrost.\" But Joyce was there in the clinch.\n\nRILEY\n\nYou guys have fun tonight.\n\n(to Joyce)\n\nIt was very nice meeting you.\n\nJOYCE\n\nIt was nice meeting you . . . finally.\n\nHe smiles at Buffy, closes the door.\n\nJOYCE (cont'd)\n\n(to Buffy)\n\nDid you notice how pointedly I said \"finally\"?\n\nBUFFY\n\nNo . . .\n\nThey move into\n\n2. INT. BUFFY'S LIVING ROOM\u2014CONTINUING\u2014NIGHT\n\nXANDER\n\nLet the vidfest begin!\n\nGILES\n\n(to Joyce)\n\nYou sure you won't join us?\n\nJOYCE\n\n(setting down the tray)\n\nNo, you guys have your fun. I'm tired . . . I can't believe you're not exhausted\u2014have you even slept since . . .\n\nGILES\n\nStill feel a little bit wired.\n\nWILLOW\n\nYeah, that spell, that was powerful.\n\nBUFFY\n\nI don't think I could sleep.\n\nXANDER\n\nWell, we got plenty of vid. And I'm putting in a preemptive bid for Apocalypse Now. Heh?\n\nWillow\n\nDid you get anything less Heart-of-Darknessy?\n\nAs they talk, they settle. Buffy and Willow on the couch with blankets, Giles in an armchair, Xander on the floor with pillows, near the TV. Joyce leaves them and heads up the stairs.\n\nXANDER (O.C.)\n\nApocalypse Now is a gay romp! It's the feel-good movie of whatever year it was!\n\nBUFFY (O.C.)\n\n(sternly)\n\nWhat else.\n\nXANDER (O.C.)\n\nDon't worry, I got plenty of chick-and-British-guy flicks too. These puppies should last us all night.\n\nANGLE: THE TV\n\nThe FBI warning is on it. We move in, and up to a clock reading 9:46.\n\nDISSOLVE TO:\n\n9:53\n\nREVERSE ANGLE: THE GANG\n\nFast asleep, to a man. Buffy snores prodigiously.\n\nBLACK OUT.\n\nEND OF TEASER\n\nACT ONE\n\n3 INT. BUFFY'S LIVING ROOM\u2014NIGHT\n\nWe see our four passed-out heroes. Camera moves slowly in on WILLOW, to her sleeping face, and we\n\nDISSOLVE TO:\n\nWillow's dream focuses on her development from shy high school geek to strong, independent woman. Although one might assume the dream deals with the \"secret\" of her sexuality, it is really about her fear that she will one day be revealed as the geek she was in high school. Though she will always have some inherent insecurity, the events at the end of season six will put aside those concerns for good.\n\n4. INT. TARA'S DORM ROOM\u2014DAY\n\nThough you can't tell if it's day or night\u2014the curtains are drawn and the room is lit only by the ambient glow of the Christmas lights. They are all we see at first, hanging out of focus as the camera finds Tara's face, in profile. She speaks almost in whisper, smiling thoughtfully. Lying on her stomach, on the bed.\n\nTARA\n\nI think it's strange . . . I mean I think I should worry, that we haven't found her name.\n\nCLOSE ON: WILLOW\n\nShe is looking down at something, intent on it\u2014we don't know what it is, nor her relation to Tara in the room. She glances up briefly.\n\nWILLOW\n\nWho? Miss Kitty?\n\nANGLE: THE KITTEN\n\nIn the corner, in extreme slo-mo (120 frames per), attacks a red ball of string, framed before a gold pillow.\n\nANGLE: TARA\n\nAlso watches the kitten.\n\nTARA\n\nYou'd think she'd let us know her name by now.\n\nWILLOW\n\nShe will. She's not all grown yet.\n\nSeason five will introduce Buffy's sister, Dawn, who is \"not all grown up yet\" either. Like Miss Kitty, Dawn does not let anyone know her true name, and the fact that she is The Key will be kept a secret at first, even from her.\n\nTARA\n\nYou're not worried?\n\nWILLOW\n\nI never worry here. I'm safe here.\n\nAlthough the dream reference to safety has more to do with Willow's proximity to Tara, it's interesting to note that Tara's bedroom will turn out to be entirely unsafe at the end of season five when Glory begins her final assault on the gang in that location.\n\nTARA\n\nYou don't know everything about me . . .\n\nThis will prove true in \"Family,\" in which Willow does learn more about Tara's secrets, including the fact that Tara mistakenly believes she is a demon. We had a hint of this secret in \"Goodbye Iowa,\" when Tara purposely messed up a spell she and Willow were casting to locate demons.\n\nWILLOW\n\nHave you told me your real name?\n\nTARA\n\n(smiles)\n\nOh, you know that . . .\n\nANGLE: A CALLIGRAPHY BRUSH\n\nAs Willow dips it into a well of ink. We see Willow's face as she moves the brush to where she is writing, very intent.\n\nTARA (cont'd)\n\nThey will find out, you know. About you.\n\nWILLOW\n\nI don't have time to think about that. You know, I have all this homework to finish.\n\nAnd for the first time, we see the room in tableau: Tara lies naked under the covers, her back exposed and covered in fine writing; Willow dips her pen and continues the text to the small of Tara's back.\n\nThe sensual image of Willow writing on Tara's back will be remembered in stark contrast to the scene where Willow's body is covered in writing in \"Villains.\" In that episode Willow absorbs the Magic Box's books on dark magick to avenge the death of her love.\n\nTARA\n\nAre you gonna finish in time for class?\n\nWILLOW\n\nI can be late.\n\nTARA\n\nBut you've never taken drama before. You might miss something important.\n\nWillow starts taking drama at the opening of season five. This is important growth for her character, as she was horrified of being onstage in \"The Puppet Show\" and \"Nightmares.\"\n\nWILLOW\n\nI don't want to leave here.\n\nTARA\n\nWhy not?\n\nWillow moves to the window.\n\nWILLOW\n\nIt's so bright . . .\n\nAgain, this takes us to the end of season five. In \"Tough Love\" Glory tears away the wall to Tara's dorm room, letting in the bright light. It is also the point where Tara reveals Dawn to be The Key by comparing her to light.\n\nANGLE: THE WINDOW\n\nAs Willow pulls the curtain aside to reveal that outside is all DESERT.\n\nThe desert will play a key role in the future of the series on several occasions. Most notably, it is the place Giles will take Buffy when they are trying to contact the spirit of the First Slayer. However, expanding on the dream's relationship with the end of season five, it is also where the gang flees to after Glory discovers that Dawn is The Key.\n\nLight cuts Willow's face, races up Tara's back as she looks back toward the window as well.\n\nWILLOW (cont'd)\n\nAnd there's something out there . . .\n\nANGLE: IN THE DESERT\n\nSomething moves, briefly, out of focus. A human shape, in grey and dirty rags, moving like an animal.\n\n5 INT. UNIVERSITY HALL\u2014DAY\n\nWillow walks along, lost in thought. Passes Oz and Xander, who have been talking.\n\nContinuity Note: Oz left Sunnydale in \"Wild at Heart,\" though he did return briefly in \"New Moon Rising.\"\n\nOZ\n\nHey.\n\nWILLOW\n\nHi, guys.\n\nOZ\n\nHeard you're taking drama.\n\nWILLOW\n\nUh-huh.\n\nOZ\n\nTough course.\n\nWILLOW\n\nYou took it?\n\nOZ\n\nOh, I've been here forever.\n\nShe comes to a bank of lockers that are incongruously placed in the wall, starts her combination.\n\nXANDER\n\nSo, whatchya been doing? Doing spells?\n\n(to Oz)\n\nShe does spells with Tara.\n\nOZ\n\nI heard about that.\n\nThe school BELL rings. Willow becomes a little unnerved by it.\n\nWILLOW\n\nI'm gonna be late.\n\nShe gives up on her combination, hurries away. We hold on Xander and Oz, watching her go.\n\nXANDER\n\n(sheepish)\n\nSometimes I think about two women doing a spell . . . and then I do a spell by myself.\n\n6 INT. BACKSTAGE\u2014DAY\n\nWillow enters into a whirl of activity\u2014the place is crammed with students in costume, obviously getting ready for an imminent production. To one side, at the back of the stage, is a bright, lemon-yellow backdrop, a painted sunrise.\n\nThe \"painted sunrise\" seems a fairly clear foreshadowing of Dawn.\n\nOn the opposite side, at the front of the stage, is an enormous red curtain, which separates them from the audience. A girl dressed as a 20s FLAPPER is sticking her head through the middle to peek at the audience. Pinspots highlight portions of the stage, colored lights occasionally sweeping across the throng. It's disorienting, particularly to Willow, who wades in tentatively, looking for some kind of guidance.\n\nThe first person she recognizes is HARMONY, who is dressed as a milkmaid, hair in braids.\n\nHARMONY\n\nIsn't this exciting? Our first production!\n\nShe hugs Willow with gleeful camaraderie.\n\nHARMONY (cont'd)\n\nI can't wait till our scene! I love you! Don't step on my cues.\n\nWILLOW\n\nProduction?\n\nThe flapper pulls her head back from the curtain\u2014it's BUFFY. Full outfit, short black bob and everything.\n\nLike Harmony (and everyone else here save Will), she's almost TOO excited, almost like a commercial for being here.\n\nBUFFY\n\nOh my God the place is packed. Everybody's here.\n\n(to Will, excited)\n\nYour whole family is in the front row\u2014and they look really angry!\n\nWILLOW\n\nThere's a production?\n\nHARMONY\n\nSomebody's got stage fright . . .\n\nWILLOW\n\nIsn't this the first class?\n\nRILEY\n\nWell you showed up late or you'd have a better part! I'm cowboy guy!\n\nHe is, in fact, sporting a dude-ish cowboy getup just as doofy as his grin.\n\nBUFFY\n\n(to Will)\n\nYour costume is perfect.\n\n(conspiratorially)\n\nNobody's gonna know the truth. You know, about you.\n\nAlthough Joss Whedon notes that this dream is about Willow's past geekiness, and it may also seem to be about her sexuality to some extent, there is also another truth she will keep secret as the series evolves. Throughout season six, Willow will delve deeper and deeper into dark magick, beginning with the spell to revive Buffy. She does manage to keep the truth on that issue from her friends until it becomes almost too late.\n\nWILLOW\n\nCostume?\n\nBUFFY\n\nYou're already in character. I should have done that.\n\nStaying for a moment with the theme of Willow hiding her magick, she is \"already in character\" in that her powers are already growing, though none of her friends is aware just how much.\n\nWILLOW\n\nBut how come there's a\u2014I mean, I was given to understand that a drama class would have a, you know, drama class. We haven't even rehearsed\u2014\n\nHARMONY\n\nWell maybe some people haven't . . .\n\nRILEY\n\n(aside, to Harmony)\n\nI showed up on time so I got to be cowboy guy.\n\nWILLOW\n\nI just think it's really early to be putting on a play. I don't even know what\u2014\n\n(panics)\n\nThis isn't Madame Butterfly, is it? Because I have a whole problem with opera.\n\nContinuity Note: Willow refers back to her dream from the episode \"Nightmares,\" in which she was thrown onstage to perform in an opera she didn't know.\n\nGiles rushes in, clearly in charge of this production. Claps his hands and addresses the troupe.\n\nGILES\n\nAll right, everyone, pay attention. In just a few moments that curtain is going to open on our very first production. Everyone that Willow has ever met is out in that audience, including all of us. That means we have to be perfect. Stay in character, remember your lines, and energy energy energy. Especially in the musical numbers.\n\n\"The musical numbers\" seems a definite reference to the upcoming musical episode, \"Once More, with Feeling,\" in which the energy in those musical numbers leads people to spontaneously combust. Interesting too is the fact that of all the major characters in that episode, Willow is the one who sings the least (though that had more to do with an actor request than plot development).\n\nAs he speaks, and Willow grows more and more unnerved, she notices\n\nANGLE: THE FIGURE FROM THE DESERT\n\nMoving silently and quickly beyond the edge of the crowd. We see it only in glimpses, but slightly better than we did before. We won't catch all of this now, but: It's a woman. She appears to be in soiled rags, not unlike a mummy's. Black hair in coarse dreds\u2014through neglect, not fashion. Face painted in colored clay. Long, almost clawlike nails.\n\nWe'll call her THE PRIMITIVE.\n\nShe carries a long, jagged blade. (Incredibly different from the blade carried by the villain in episode 22 of ANGEL, really I can't stress this enough.)\n\nContinuity Note: The script refers to the Angel season finale, \"To Shanshu in LA,\" which aired immediately following this episode.\n\nWILLOW\n\n(whispers)\n\nDid you guys see\u2014\n\nGILES\n\nRemember, acting isn't about behaving. It's about hiding. The audience wants to find you, they want to strip you naked and eat you alive so HIDE.\n\nThis last line of dialogue is just teeming with potential reference to the future. Aside from referencing Willow \"hiding\" her magick abuse, it also suggests the scene in which she finally reveals herself when she, quite literally, rips Warren's skin (or hide) off and kills him in \"Villains.\" The line takes on an even more literal meaning when applied to the episode \"Same Time, Same Place\": Willow is paralyzed by the Gnarl, and her own hide is stripped away piece by piece as she is eaten alive, while her powers hide her from her friends because she is too ashamed to see them.\n\nHarmony has gone VAMP and is trying to bite Giles, craning at various angles to get a better purchase on his neck. He swats at her as at a buzzing insect as he continues:\n\nGILES (cont'd)\n\nStop that. Costumes. Sets. The things that you . . . you know, things, you hold them and you touch them . . . you use them.\n\nHARMONY\n\nProps?\n\nGILES\n\nNo . . .\n\nRILEY\n\nProps.\n\nGILES\n\nYes. It's all about subterfuge.\n\n(to Harmony)\n\nThat's very annoying.\n\n(to the company)\n\nNow get out there, lie like dogs and have a wonderful time. If we can stay in focus, keep our heads and if Willow can stop stepping on everyone's cues I know this will be the best production of Death of a Salesman we've ever done.\n\n(to Harmony)\n\nStop it.\n\n(to the company)\n\nGood luck, everyone. Break a leg.\n\nHe bustles off and everyone begins talking at once: the nervous excitement of just-before-curtain. Willow looks around her, completely cut off from the energy\u2014a fact that is highlighted when all the SOUND DIES OUT, though everyone continues chattering.\n\nWillow makes her way slowly to the edge of the stage. She looks around, nervous about seeing the figure in rags again. She looks in the wings and sees:\n\nANGLE: THE CHEESE MAN\n\nA skittish, balding, bespectacled little fellow in an old woolen suit. A voice not unlike Peter Lorre's. He says softly, conspiratorially:\n\nCHEESE MAN\n\nI've made a little space for the cheese slices . . .\n\nTILT DOWN to see a row of American cheese slices on a small wooden table. Tilt back up as the Cheese Man smiles, hungry for approval.\n\nWillow looks back at the bustling (still silent) crowd, moves slowly toward the edge of the red curtain. There are in fact two curtains, both red, about two feet apart. Willow hesitates a moment, then moves slowly between them, the camera following her, curtains billowing past lens on either side as she is enveloped.\n\n7 BETWEEN THE CURTAINS\n\nShe journeys a while in this intimate space\u2014it seems to go on a long while. Finally she finds Tara standing, waiting for her. They speak, voices low.\n\nTARA\n\nThings aren't going very well.\n\nWILLOW\n\nWell, NO. This drama class is just, I think they're really not doing things in the proper way, and now I'm in a play and my whole family's out there and why is there a cowboy in Death of a Salesman anyway?\n\nTARA\n\nYou don't understand yet, do you.\n\nWILLOW\n\nIs there something following me?\n\nTARA\n\nYes.\n\nWILLOW\n\nWell what should I do? The play's gonna start soon and I don't even know my lines!\n\nTARA\n\nThe play's already started. That's not the point.\n\nAgain, if we choose to look at this dream in terms of Willow's future magick abuse, one could infer that the reference to the fact that \"the play's already started\" is a comment on the powerful spell Willow cast to combine the gang's essences. In the future both Tara and Giles will warn her that she's doing too much dabbling.\n\n8 ANGLE: ON STAGE\n\nWe see the play in progress. We are wide, taking in the proscenium. It is lit old style, from below. To the right is a plush divan, the only set dressing. On it is draped Buffy, smoking from a cigarette holder with languid boredom.\n\nHarmony stands in the middle of the stage holding her milk pails on an old-fashioned cross-beam-yoke-type-thing, look I can't remember what they're called, I'm not like Joe Dictionary, okay?\n\nRiley enters, from the left. Speaks, as they all do, in a big ol' stage voice.\n\nRILEY\n\nWhy hello, little lady. Can I hold those milk pails for you?\n\nHARMONY\n\nWhy thank you, but they are not very heavy. Why have you come to our lonely small town, which has no post office and very few exports?\n\nRILEY\n\nI've come looking for a man.\n\n(ominously, to the audience)\n\nA sales-man.\n\n9 ANGLE: WITHIN THE CURTAINS\n\nTara and Willow continue to speak.\n\nTARA\n\nEveryone's starting to wonder about you . . . the real you. If they find out, they'll punish you. I can't help you with that.\n\nFollowing Willow's time as Dark Willow, she does worry that Giles and the coven of witches in England, as well as her friends in Sunnydale, will punish her for her actions.\n\nWILLOW\n\nWhat should I . . . What's after me? Is it something I forgot to do? Was I supposed to\u2014\n\nTARA\n\nShhh . . .\n\nShe looks around, worried. Willow does also. Things seem to be moving around them, indistinct whispers buzzing by their ears.\n\n10 ANGLE: ON STAGE\n\nThis time we are close on Buffy and Riley as Buffy spews a rapid-fire, venomous monologue to the unfeeling cowboy man.\n\nIn the background, Harmony is sitting on the divan in tears. A man (high school actor boy) in a black suit lies dead on the stage. Somehow, all of this is in focus.\n\nBUFFY\n\nWhat else could I expect from a bunch of low-rent, no-account hoodlums like you\u2014hoodlums! Yes. I mean you and your friends, your whole sex, throw 'em all in the sea for all I care, throw 'em in and wait for the bubbles. Men, with your groping and spitting, all groin no brain three billion of ya passin' around the same worn-out urge. Men. With your . . . sales.\n\nThough it was likely unintentional on Joss Whedon's part, the Death of a Salesman play in the dream is an interesting parallel to the events of the final season. The ultimate evil of The First appears in the guise of dead bodies, like the one lying on the stage, when a preacher with a western drawl, Caleb, comes to the \"one-Starbucks town\" looking for a slayer. Buffy's vitriolic speech against men comes across as the female version of Caleb's misogynistic comments toward women. And finally, there's the fact that Willow is unsure of what part she plays in the fight against The First until the very end of the season.\n\n11 ANGLE: INSIDE THE CURTAIN\n\nWillow looks around, concerned at Tara's absence. The whispers continue around her. . . .\n\nWILLOW\n\nTara . . . Okay, this really isn't\u2014\n\nThe sentence is not out before a blade SHOOTS through the curtain right in front of Willow's face. It is the ancient, blood-crusted blade of the Primitive.\n\nWillow jerks back with a startled scream as the blade is withdrawn, plunged again just as close. She turns to flee the way she came\u2014but the blade shoots out in front of her again. This time it pulls down, tears the curtain as an arm reaches in, swiping the blade at Willow.\n\nFingernails rip down another part of the curtain and the second arm claws at Willow, tries to grasp her, Willow backs away but the knife slices through her flailing hand, a deep gash on her palm as she stumbles, collapses into herself, crying out, waiting to be cut, to be carved.\n\nA hand GRABS her, and she screams again\u2014taking a good moment before she realizes it's not the Primitive.\n\nShe looks up to see Buffy, back in normal Buffy garb (and hair), reaching through one of the slashes in the curtain.\n\nBUFFY\n\nWillow!\n\nWILLOW\n\nBuffy, oh, God . . .\n\nBUFFY\n\nCome on.\n\nWillow rises shakily, steps through the curtain, Buffy holding on to her hand. Buffy looks around, tensed for action. They are standing in front of the curtain, but as they creep forward we see they are now in\n\n12 INT. HIGH SCHOOL CLASSROOM\u2014DUSK\n\nThe classroom is empty, lit by the last orange shafts of day. The curtain stands at the back, so Buffy and Willow move slowly to the front, ever alert, speaking in whispers.\n\nBUFFY\n\nStay low.\n\nMoving between desks. Buffy leads. She is all business, eyes front\u2014almost brusque in her Slayerness.\n\nBUFFY (cont'd)\n\nWhat did it look like?\n\nWILLOW\n\nI don't know. I don't know why it's after me.\n\nBUFFY\n\nYou must have done something . . .\n\nWILLOW\n\nNo! I never do anything! I'm very seldom naughty. I just came to class, and then the play was starting . . .\n\nWillow's comments about being \"very seldom naughty\" will prove quite untrue by the end of season six, when her actions will be downright evil.\n\nThey've reached the front of the class. Buffy turns to Willow, really regards her for the first time.\n\nBUFFY\n\nPlay's long over. Why are you still in costume?\n\nWILLOW\n\nOkay, still having to explain wherein this is just my outfit.\n\nBUFFY\n\nWillow, everybody already knows. Take it off.\n\nWILLOW\n\nNo . . . No, I need it . . .\n\nBUFFY\n\nOh, for God's sake just take it OFF.\n\nAnd so saying, she grabs at an out-of-frame Willow, shoving her to the front of the class and ripping the outfit from her. Buffy stands, Will's outfit in hand, looking the girl over.\n\nBUFFY (cont'd)\n\nThat's better.\n\nREVERSE ON: WILLOW\n\nAs we saw her once, a long time ago. Long, slightly duller red hair. Plain grey frock that embodies the softer side of you know what. (Uh, Sears, just in case you don't.) A hapless, almost sick expression of embarrassment. She stands by the teacher's desk, looking at herself.\n\nContinuity Note: The \"Sears\" line refers to a comment made by Cordelia about Willow's outfit in \"Welcome to the Hellmouth.\"\n\nAt this point it is revealed that Willow's fear is of being her old self. Interestingly, when she does turn evil due to her abuse of magick, Jonathan\u2014one of her old (geekier) friends from high school\u2014is the first to comment in \"Two to Go\" that she \"packed her own lunches and wore floods and she was always . . . just Willow.\" She too will note that the old Willow is gone.\n\n3 REVERSE ON: THE CLASSROOM\n\nThe curtain is gone from the back of the class. Buffy stands at the front, looking at camera with disinterested contempt.\n\nBuffy (cont'd)\n\nIt's much more realistic.\n\nShe sits behind a desk and we see the class is in fact filled. Among the students, all of whom eye us with contempt, are Xander, Harmony, Anya, Oz, and Tara. Oz and Tara lean in close to each other, as though they've been whispering for some time.\n\nHARMONY\n\nSee? Is everybody very clear on this now?\n\nANYA\n\n(laughing)\n\nOh my God! It's like a tragedy!\n\nOz\n\n(to Tara)\n\nI tried to warn you . . .\n\nTara smirks, leans back in to Oz.\n\nANYA\n\nIt's exactly like a Greek tragedy. There should only be Greeks.\n\nIn Greek tragedy, it is often \"hubris,\" or excessive pride, that brings down a hero. At the end of season six, Willow becomes incredibly boastful of her abilities and is eventually taken down when she arrogantly tries to end her own pain and everyone else's.\n\nWillow tries to stand up straight, tries to get on with class. She is holding a sheaf of loose-leaf papers.\n\nWILLOW\n\n(reciting)\n\nMy book report. This summer, I read The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe . . .\n\nXANDER\n\n(to the ceiling)\n\nOh, who CARES . . . ?\n\nWILLOW\n\nThis book has many themes. One of the first\u2014\n\nIt LEAPS into frame, knocking Willow to the ground. No one even reacts (of course) as Willow thrashes, fighting for her life against the Primitive. It hasn't its knife this time, just struggles to hold the panicked girl down.\n\nWILLOW (cont'd)\n\nHelp! Help me!\n\nANGLE: THE CLASS\n\nDoes nothing.\n\nCLOSE ON: WILLOW\n\nAs a gnarled and filthy hand closes around her throat. The head is lowered to hers\u2014we see its mouth open, dirty brown teeth as its mouth closes over Willow's\u2014then we hear a great RUSH OF AIR as the life is sucked out of Willow, her eyes widen and her skin goes sallow, gaunt, the life force sucked out of her\u2014\n\n13 INT. BUFFY'S LIVING ROOM\u2014NIGHT\n\n\u2014and she lies, unwakening, gasping for air, choking, dying in her sleep.\n\nBLACK OUT.\n\nEND OF ACT ONE\n\nACT TWO\n\n14 INT. BUFFY'S LIVING ROOM\u2014NIGHT\n\nWe are still on Willow, gasping, convulsing slightly. Pan over to find Xander sleeping. He jerks his head awake.\n\nXander's dream is fairly straightforward in that his concern is basically about never getting out of his parents' basement and, more importantly, out of his old life and the trap of his parents' unhappy lives. He takes his first step toward this reality when he does move into his own apartment in \"The Replacement.\" He will continue to struggle with his fear of becoming his parents up through the episode \"Hell's Bells,\" but will finally grow more secure in himself by the seventh season.\n\nXANDER\n\nI'm awake! I'm good. Did I miss anything?\n\nWIDEN to reveal Buffy and Giles are wide awake, Buffy munching on popcorn as they watch what's on TV.\n\nGILES\n\nNothing much at all, really.\n\nBUFFY\n\nBunch of massacring.\n\nXander turns his attention to the TV.\n\nANGLE: ON THE TV\n\nIs the movie. Vietnam flick. It consists of a haggard SOLDIER marching in front of a rear-screen-projection jungle.\n\nContinuity Note: Xander took on the personality of his soldier costume in \"Halloween,\" and some of the knowledge of military tactics stayed with him.\n\nSOLDIER\n\nWe've got to keep going, men! We've got to take that hill.\n\n(keeps walking)\n\nDamn this war!\n\n(walks)\n\nMen? Oh my God, what's happened to my MEN!!!\n\nGILES\n\nI have to say, I really feel Apocalypse Now is overrated.\n\nXANDER\n\n(staring, puzzled, at the screen)\n\nNo, no . . . it gets better . . . I remember that it gets better . . .\n\nBUFFY\n\nYou want some corn?\n\nXANDER\n\nButter flavor?\n\nBUFFY\n\nNew car smell.\n\nXANDER\n\nCool.\n\nHe reaches for the bowl as she holds it out. His posture puts him right by Willow\u2014he looks at her gasping.\n\nXANDER (cont'd)\n\nWhat's her deal?\n\nBUFFY\n\nBig faker.\n\nXander takes a handful, eats as he watches the flick.\n\nGILES\n\nOh, I'm beginning to understand this now. It's all about the journey, isn't it?\n\nXANDER\n\nWell, thanks for making me have to pee.\n\nHe gets up, heads upstairs.\n\nBUFFY\n\nYou don't need any help, right?\n\nThe concept of needing Buffy's help is a recurring theme in Xander's life. He struggles against it from early in the series, and Anya will even sing, \"When things get rough he just hides behind his Buffy\" in \"Once More, with Feeling.\" As he continues to grow more mature, Buffy will come to depend on him more, particularly with regard to her sister.\n\nXANDER\n\nI got a system.\n\nCamera FOLLOWS him up the staircase.\n\n15 INT. BUFFY'S HOUSE\u2014UPSTAIRS\u2014CONTINUING\u2014NIGHT\n\nXander crests the stairs, is heading for the bathroom when he hears something, turns to look.\n\nBehind him is Joyce's bedroom. It's dark, and it's from that dark that Joyce emerges, wearing a burnished red silk robe. Her hair is carelessly tousled, her expression warm, a little sleepy. She looks, well, kinda sexy.\n\nJOYCE\n\nHey.\n\nXANDER\n\nHey, Joyce. Mrs. Summers.\n\nHe moves toward her\u2014he will continue to do so, slowly, throughout their exchange.\n\nXANDER (cont'd)\n\nWe're not making too much noise down there, are we?\n\nJOYCE\n\nOh, no. Anyway, they all left a while ago.\n\nXANDER\n\nOh. I should probably catch up.\n\nJOYCE (smiles)\n\nI've heard that before.\n\nShe leans in the doorway, the opening of her gown sliding up her leg. Xander notices this, and it gives him pause\u2014but both he and Joyce are very calm. Comfortable.\n\nXANDER\n\nI move pretty fast. You know, a man's always after . . .\n\nJOYCE\n\nConquest?\n\nXANDER\n\nI'm a conquistador.\n\nJOYCE\n\nWhat about comfort?\n\nXANDER\n\nI'm a comfortador, also.\n\nJOYCE\n\nI do know the difference. I've learned about boys.\n\nXANDER\n\nThat's cool about you.\n\nJOYCE\n\nIt's very late. Would you like to rest for a while?\n\nAs she says it, the camera drifts off her, into the room, resting on the moonlit bed. The covers are tossed open, rumpled and inviting.\n\nXANDER\n\nUm, yeah. I'd like you. I'm just going to the bathroom first.\n\nA moment before he breaks eye contact with her\u2014he's still drawn to her\u2014then he steps back, heads down the hall to the bathroom.\n\nLOW ANGLE PUSH IN ON JOYCE, affectionately watching him go.\n\nJOYCE\n\nDon't get lost . . .\n\n16 INT. BUFFY'S HOUSE\u2014BATHROOM\u2014CONTINUING\u2014NIGHT\n\nHe enters, shuts the door. Stands over the toilet, unzips his (out of frame) fly. A moment, and he turns toward camera.\n\nREVERSE ANGLE: OVER XANDER\n\nThe bathroom turns out to be a large room in the Initiative.\n\nA group of some fifteen scientists and soldiers are standing politely, watching Xander as though he were a museum exhibit.\n\nA moment more.\n\nXANDER\n\nOkay, I'm gonna find another bathroom.\n\nHe says, zipping his fly back up. Camera leads him back into\n\n17 INT. BUFFY'S HOUSE\u2014UPSTAIRS\u2014CONTINUING\u2014NIGHT\n\nWhere he crosses the (now empty) hall and steps into Buffy's room, which turns out to be\n\n18 INT. XANDER'S BASEMENT\u2014CONTINUING\n\nOnly a couple of lights are on. Xander shuts the door behind him, starts across the room. About halfway, he stops. Hears something.\n\nLooks around. Nothing.\n\nXANDER\n\n(calling out)\n\nI didn't order any vampires . . .\n\nHe moves to the stairs, starts up. Stops.\n\nANGLE: THE DOOR\n\nSomething moves behind it. Scratches at it.\n\nXander stares, clearly frightened.\n\nThe doorknob turns\u2014but the door is locked. The knob rattles as the person behind it begins to get frustrated.\n\nXANDER (cont'd)\n\nThat's not the way out . . .\n\nThe person BANGS on the door. Once. Twice.\n\nXANDER (cont'd)\n\nThat's not the way out . . .\n\nAnd very carefully, so his feet don't creak the stairs, Xander backs off the staircase. He heads back to the door he came in by, throws it open and splits.\n\n19 EXT. PLAYGROUND\u2014DAY\n\nSteadicamming toward the playground. Swings, carousel, sandbox. Buffy sits in the sandbox, idly digging sand with a little plastic shovel. Giles and Spike (who is dressed in a tweedy suit kind of like Giles's) sit on the swings.\n\nBuffy's digging in the sandbox brings up two future scenes. The first is when she is forced to dig herself out of her grave, and the second is one of the final scenes of the series, when Sunnydale is sucked into the desert ground. In the final view of the town it looks like it has been swallowed up in a really big sandbox.\n\nXander joins the group, still a little thrown by his basement experience.\n\nXANDER\n\nHey. There you are.\n\nBUFFY\n\nYou sure it's us you were looking for?\n\nShe smiles secretively at Giles, who returns it. Xander is aware he's missed something.\n\nSPIKE\n\nGiles here is gonna teach me to be a watcher. Says I got the stuff.\n\nGILES\n\nSpike's like a son to me . . .\n\nThis is the only scene that Joss Whedon notes in his commentary as being something they were able to pay off later in the series, although the themes explored in the dreams obviously allowed them to follow up on many other elements. This particular part of the dream comes back in \"Tabula Rasa,\" in which the gang loses their memories and Spike\u2014dressed in the same tweed suit\u2014believes himself to be Giles's son.\n\nThe concept of Spike becoming a Watcher\u2014while far-fetched\u2014does also play out in a way when he regains his soul and tries even harder to work for the side of good in the coming seasons and on Angel.\n\nXANDER\n\nWell, that's good. I was into that for a while, but I got other stuff going on.\n\nHe indicates the nearby road, and we see:\n\n20 ANGLE: THE ICE CREAM TRUCK\n\nWhere Xander is handing out ice cream to a few kids.\n\n21 XANDER\n\nIn the park, watches himself in the truck. Says to the others:\n\nXANDER\n\nGotta have something. Gotta be always moving forward.\n\nBUFFY\n\nLike a shark.\n\nXANDER\n\nA shark with feet. And much less . . . fins.\n\nSPIKE\n\nAND on land.\n\nThis too is a reference to the future episode \"Tabula Rasa,\" in which Spike is on the run from a loan shark demon who actually looks like a shark and walks on land.\n\nGILES\n\nVery good . . .\n\nXander looks down at Buffy in her sandbox. Worried.\n\nXANDER\n\nBuffy, are you sure you want to play there? Pretty big sandbox.\n\nANGLE: BUFFY\n\nIs in the same position and the same clothes, but now she is sitting in the actual desert.\n\nBUFFY\n\nI'm okay. It's not coming for me yet.\n\nXander is still in the park\u2014so is Buffy, for the rest of the scene.\n\nXANDER\n\nI just mean . . . You can't protect yourself from . . . some stuff.\n\nBUFFY\n\nI'm way ahead of you, big brother.\n\nXANDER\n\nBrother?\n\nAs their relationship grows, particularly in the seventh season, Xander will have even more of a brotherly presence in Buffy's life. In a way, she will appoint him as Dawn's big brother, as he is constantly looking out for the girl and effectively given guardianship of her in \"End of Days.\"\n\nShe looks at him, for the first time her air of superiority drains away. They hold a serious look for a moment.\n\nGiles and Spike are swinging higher, enjoying themselves.\n\nGILES\n\nCome on, put your back into it! A watcher scoffs at gravity!\n\nXander looks at Buffy.\n\nFrom the ice cream truck, Xander looks at Xander. From his POV, we see the tableau of the four of them, Xander and Buffy not moving, Giles and Spike swinging as high as they dare.\n\n22 INT. ICE CREAM TRUCK\u2014DAY\n\nA moment more of watching them, and Xander starts to the front of the truck. Anya sits in the passenger seat. The truck is ALREADY MOVING, the suburban streets going slowly by in the windows in what is pretty clearly REAR-SCREEN PROJECTION.\n\nXander gets into the driver's seat.\n\nANYA\n\nDo you know where you're going?\n\nXANDER\n\nNorth. To the mountains. The highest peak, the one they call \"100 percent scary plummeting death.\" The test of a man.\n\nANYA\n\nDo you know where you're going?\n\nXANDER\n\nNo.\n\nANYA\n\nI've been thinking about getting back into vengeance.\n\nAnd Anya will get back into being a vengeance demon following Xander's abandoning her at their wedding in \"Hell's Bells.\" She won't stay a demon for even a full year, however, because her heart is no longer in it.\n\nXANDER\n\nIs that right?\n\nANYA\n\nWell, you know I miss it, I'm so at loose ends since I quit and I think this is gonna be a very big year for vengeance.\n\nXANDER\n\nI don't know . . .\n\nANYA\n\nI've been keeping close tabs on cultural trends\u2014a lot of men being unfaithful\u2014very exciting things happening in the scorned women market. I don't wanna be left out.\n\nXANDER\n\nYeah, but, isn't vengeance kind of . . . depressing?\n\nANYA\n\n(petulant)\n\nYou don't want me to have a hobby.\n\nXANDER\n\nNot a vengeance hobby, no. It's dangerous. People can't just do anything they want. Society has rules, and borders, and an end zone. It doesn't matter if . . .\n\nThrough the end of this, he's become aware of some giggling in the back of the truck. He looks back to see:\n\nANGLE: WILLOW AND TARA\n\nAre standing in the back, dressed kinda trampy. Very close to each other, whispering and looking at Xander.\n\nXANDER (cont'd)\n\nDo you mind? I am talking to my demon.\n\nThe idea of Anya going back into vengeance and the fact that she is \"his demon\" is, again, a concept that will be explored through seasons five and six. He will sing about his concern for \"marrying a demon\" in \"Once More, with Feeling\" and further explore the fear when he meets her demon-friend Halfrek in \"Doublemeat Palace.\"\n\nWILLOW\n\nSorry.\n\nTARA\n\nWe just think you're really interesting.\n\nThey giggle a bit.\n\nXANDER\n\n(bravado)\n\nOh, I'm goin' places.\n\nWILLOW\n\nI'm way ahead of you.\n\nXANDER\n\nIs that right?\n\nWILLOW\n\nWatch this.\n\nShe and Tara move closer\u2014\n\nANGLE: XANDER\n\nWe hold on Xander, pushing in incredibly slowly, while the girls show him something. Whatever that may be, we hold on him for quite a long time, and he remains impressively calm.\n\nThe girls, having (however marginally) separated, smile at Xander.\n\nTARA\n\nDo you wanna come in the back with us?\n\nThey look to the further, darker back of the truck. Xander looks interested, then slightly perplexed. He looks over at Anya. She is still looking out at the road as she says:\n\nANYA\n\nOh, go on.\n\nIn this dream Anya has no problem with Xander joining Willow and Tara; however, her real fears of losing Xander to Willow will be addressed in \"Triangle.\"\n\nXANDER\n\nI don't have to . . .\n\nANYA\n\nI'll be fine. I think I've figured out how to steer by gesturing emphatically.\n\nShe does, waving the truck from drifting off the road, as Xander heads for the back of the truck.\n\n23 REAR OF ICE CREAM TRUCK\n\nANGLE: XANDER is framed in the open back window of the ice cream truck. The rear-projected town drifts by as he pauses, then he heads to the back of the truck. He has to squeeze between a few crates and sundries. He keeps going. As he gets further back, he has to climb on top of things. The space gets smaller, gets darker\n\nHe's still moving back\u2014now he's squeezing through a space the size of an air vent.\n\nFinally the space widens, and he finds himself tumbling out and landing on the floor, the floor of:\n\nINT. XANDER'S BASEMENT\u2014NIGHT\n\nHe looks around him. A little pissed. No girls. He checks around the room . . .\n\nPUSH IN ON: THE UPSTAIRS DOOR\n\nAs something big SLAMS against it.\n\nCamera dutches on Xander as he looks up, truly frightened.\n\nTrying for bravado, he cries:\n\nXANDER\n\nI know what's up there!\n\nMore pounding. Xander heads for the other door again, slowly, looking back.\n\nANGLE: THE STAIRCASE\n\nAs the door SLAMS open and a thick black shadow is thrown against the wall.\n\nNow Xander's terrified. He turns to go\u2014and bumps right into the CHEESE MAN.\n\nXander starts back. The Cheese Man holds up a plate of American cheese.\n\nCHEESE MAN\n\nThese will not protect you . . .\n\nWe hear footsteps on the stairs. The shadow moves.\n\nXander moves as well, past the Cheese Man and out the damn door.\n\n24 INT. SCHOOL HALL\u2014DAY\n\nOr possibly night. Or possibly\u2014why is everything so GREEN? Flat, green light fills the entire place, not that Xander notices. He is too busy moving through the crowd (it's fairly busy in here), looking ahead, looking behind him.\n\nANGLE: BEHIND HIM\n\nHidden by the crowd, but visible in glimpses, the PRIMITIVE is following him.\n\nXander pushes ahead until he sees Giles, moves to him.\n\nXANDER\n\nGiles!\n\nGILES\n\nXander! What are you doing here?\n\nXANDER\n\nWhat's after me?\n\nGILES\n\nIt's because of what we did. I know that.\n\nXANDER\n\nWhat we did?\n\nGILES\n\nThe others have all gone ahead. Now listen carefully. Your life may depend on what I am about to tell you. You need to get to\u2014\n\nAnd at this moment, as Giles continues to speak, he is suddenly DUBBED INTO FRENCH. We can see him talking, but we can't understand a word any more than Xander can, unless we speak French, in which case la-di-da aren't we intellectual, I'm not Joe DICTIONARY, all RIGHT?\n\nContinuity Note: Willow spoke French in Buffy's first dream in \"Surprise.\"\n\nGILES (cont'd)\n\n(French dubbing over:)\n\n\u2014the house where we're all sleeping. All your friends are there having a wonderful time and getting on with their lives. The creature can't hurt you there.\n\nXANDER\n\nWhat? Go where? I don't understand.\n\nGILES\n\n(still dubbed)\n\nOh for God's sake, this is no time for your idiotic games!\n\nAnya rushes to them, worried. And dubbed.\n\nANYA\n\n(with the dubbing)\n\nXander! You have to come with us now! Everybody's waiting for you!\n\nAlthough this line is intended to be about Xander's fear of being left behind, it's also interesting when viewed as referring to all the guests at his wedding waiting for him to arrive, particularly since Giles is one of the people not at the wedding, and therefore not waiting for him.\n\nGILES\n\n(dubly)\n\nThat's what I've been trying to tell him.\n\nXANDER\n\nHoney, I don't\u2014I can't hear you . . .\n\nAnya grabs his arm, starts dragging him.\n\nANYA\n\n(dubbage)\n\nIt's not important. I'll take you there.\n\nXANDER\n\nWell, wait. Where are we going?\n\nShe just pulls, and Giles grabs an arm and pulls as well. Then a student starts helping. Then an Initiative soldier, Xander looking around confused, resisting as more and more students and soldiers grab hold of him, they hold him and turn him upside down, the camera also spinning upside down, he is calling out:\n\nXANDER (cont'd)\n\nHey! Let go! Hey!\n\n\u2014as they hold his legs, his head and arms dragging on the ground, him calling for help that won't come.\n\n25 INT. KURTZ'S SLEEPING QUARTERS\u2014NIGHT\n\nIt's very dark. A fire burning in the background provides the only real illumination. A man lies on a cot in an alcove, almost entirely in blackness. Xander is led in by an Initiative soldier with a rifle. He makes Xander get on his knees before the alcove, then retires into the background.\n\nIf any of this seems familiar, it's because you've watched Apocalypse Now way too many times. If you haven't, you should\u2014as much as possible, this scene should resemble the first meeting between Willard and Kurtz.\n\nAnd though he will remain in darkness for a portion of the scene, and only be revealed in glimpses, it will be clear to some the moment he speaks that our \"Kurtz\" is PRINCIPAL SNYDER. He doesn't move, just lies there, his voice finally coming from the darkness:\n\nSNYDER\n\nWhere you from, Harris?\n\nXANDER\n\nWell, the basement, mostly.\n\nSNYDER\n\nWere you born there?\n\nXANDER\n\nPossibly.\n\nSnyder sits up, face still mostly in darkness.\n\nSNYDER\n\nI walked by your guidance counselor's office one time, a bunch of you were sitting there, waiting to be . . . shepherded, to be guided. You and the other problems, glassy-eyed, slack-jawed, I remember it smelled like dead flowers. Like decay, and it hit me, yes, that's what it is; the hope of our nation's future is a bunch of mulch.\n\nIn the seventh season Buffy will be hired as a counselor at the new Sunnydale High.\n\nXANDER\n\nYou know, I never got the chance to tell you how glad I was you were eaten by a snake.\n\nContinuity Note: This occurred in \"Graduation Day, Part Two.\"\n\nSnyder takes a shallow wooden bowl, dribbles water on the dome of his head as he continues.\n\nSNYDER\n\nWhere are you heading?\n\nXANDER\n\nWell, I'm supposed to meet Tara and Willow . . .\n\nand possibly Buffy's mom . . .\n\nSNYDER\n\nDo you know why they sent you here?\n\nXANDER\n\nNot \"sent\" so much as \"manhandled,\" but . . . no.\n\nSNYDER\n\nYour time is running out.\n\nXANDER\n\nNo, I'm in my prime. This is prime time.\n\nSnyder runs his hand over his head, slowly. Still looking down.\n\nSNYDER\n\nAre you a soldier?\n\nXANDER\n\nI'm a comfortador.\n\nFor the first time, Snyder really brings his face into the light, eyeing the boy with distant contempt.\n\nSNYDER\n\nYou're neither. You're a whipping boy, raised by mongrels, and set on a sacrificial stone.\n\nThough Xander will not be \"sacrificed,\" of the gang he will have the most personal sacrifice when he loses an eye to the cause in \"Dirty Girls.\"\n\nXANDER\n\nI'm getting a cramp . . .\n\nHe hears something. Looks around, then rises, slowly, backs away to find himself in\n\n26 EXT. GILES' COURTYARD\u2014NIGHT\n\nHe looks around, and we see:\n\nANGLE: THE ENTRANCE\n\nThe Primitive is just coming around the corner, walking on her knuckles like an ape.\n\nXander watches a moment more, then we hear a panther's ROAR, and Xander\u2014\n\n(NOTE: This is the beginning of a rather epic steadicam shot)\u2014bails.\n\nHe moves into:\n\n27 INT. GILES' APARTMENT\u2014CONTINUING\n\nWhere Giles, Buffy and Anya are all looking at a passed-out and slightly convulsing Willow.\n\nGILES\n\nIt's even more serious than I thought.\n\nBUFFY\n\nI can fight anything, right?\n\nThis is a question that will continue to be raised throughout seasons five, six, and seven as Buffy tries to learn more about her abilities. She will finally realize the extent of her powers when she knows she can beat The First in \"Chosen.\"\n\nANYA\n\nMaybe we should slap her.\n\nXander doesn't stop, keeps going, looking behind him, into Giles' hall, turns the corner into Buffy's hall, students ignoring him as he starts to walk even faster, very worried, he's almost at Buffy and Willow's room when the Primitive leaps into the hall from Giles' hall, Xander ducks into\n\nINT. BUFFY AND WILLOW'S DORM ROOM\u2014CONTINUING\n\nXANDER\n\nBuffy?\n\nBut no one is there, he's increasingly freaked, throws open Willow's closet door and bolts in, the CAMERA FOLLOWS HIM as he works further into the closet, it turns left, a narrow wooden corridor, Xander moves swiftly through it, still throwing looks back, the corridor winds a bit and finally opens out onto (you guessed it)\n\n28 INT. XANDER'S BASEMENT\u2014CONTINUING\n\nYou did guess it, didn't you?\n\n(The steadicam shot ends.) Xander looks around\u2014this is the worst. And the POUNDING on the door upstairs has gotten louder. Xander is compelled to move toward it, to the bottom of the stairs, to look up.\n\nXANDER\n\n(whispers)\n\nThat's not the way out . . .\n\nANGLE: THE DOOR: BURSTS open, a silhouetted figure of a burly man standing at the entrance.\n\nMAN\n\nWhat the Hell is wrong with you? You won't come upstairs?\n\nXANDER\n\nI'm sorry . . .\n\nMAN\n\nWhat are you, ashamed of us? Your mother's crying her guts out!\n\nXANDER\n\nYou don't understand . . .\n\nThe figure stomps down the stairs toward him.\n\nMAN\n\nNo, YOU don't understand! Line ends here, with us! You're not gonna change that. You haven't got the HEART.\n\nXander's dream father is more physically imposing than his real father turns out to be, as evidenced in \"Hell's Bells.\" However, it's interesting to see how Xander imagines his father to be in his mind.\n\nThe comment that the \"line ends here, with us\" is another possible reference to Xander's abandonment of Anya at the altar. In doing so, Xander also loses the opportunity to continue the Harris line by raising a family. The false future he will see in \"Hell's Bells\" indicates that the idea of raising children who might grow to be like the rest of the family is, in fact, one of his greatest fears.\n\nANGLE: XANDER\n\nHas backed against the wall, is not even looking at the approaching figure. On the last word a hand suddenly PLUNGES into XANDER's chest. Xander looks up into the eyes of the Primitive.\n\nANGLE: XANDER'S CHEST\n\nAs his heart is ripped out of it.\n\n29 INT. BUFFY'S LIVING ROOM\u2014NIGHT\n\nXander convulses like he's been shocked, but does not wake up. The camera holds on him a moment, then tilts up and moves deliberately toward Giles.\n\nBLACK OUT.\n\nEND OF ACT TWO\n\nACT THREE\n\n30 INT. GILES' APARTMENT\u2014NIGHT\n\nANGLE: A POCKET WATCH\n\nSwings before us, catching the light. We hear voices, far off and echoey:\n\nGiles's dream exemplifies the conflict between his playing the father figure to Buffy and his wanting to go off to have a life of his own. This conflict will first be mentioned to Willow in \"Buffy vs. Dracula\" when he tells her that he is moving to England. Of course, he does not actually move until the sixth season.\n\nGILES\n\nYou have to stop thinking. Let it wash over you.\n\nBUFFY\n\n(amused)\n\nYou don't think it's a little old-fashioned?\n\nGILES\n\nThis is the way women and men have behaved since the beginning, before time.\n\nThis scene is indicative of the renewed training that Buffy will ask to undergo with Giles at the end of \"Buffy vs. Dracula.\" It is her request that will keep him in Sunnydale, and postpone his trip to England until the sixth season. Later, in \"Get It Done,\" Buffy will go against the way the Shadow Men, who created the First Slayer, behaved back in \"the beginning.\"\n\nANGLE: GILES AND BUFFY\n\nWe are as far from them as we can be, they are a tableau within the apartment, all the furniture gone save the chair Buffy sits in, primly, erect, Giles standing before her with the watch held before her, swinging. She wears a little sundress, he his woolly suit.\n\nGILES (V.O.)\n\nNow look into the light.\n\nThe concept of going \"into the light\" is a familiar one from recollections of near-death experiences. This line could possibly foreshadow Buffy's death, which finally does allow Giles to go home. However, her resurrection brings him back, at least temporarily.\n\nCLOSE ON: BUFFY\n\nAs the light gambols about her eyes, and she laughs, playfully\u2014\n\nANGLE: GILES' ARM\n\nAs Buffy grabs it, pulls him along . . .\n\n31 EXT. GRAVEYARD\/FAIR\u2014NIGHT\n\nBuffy pulls him along, trying to get him to hurry. In her sundress, with her insistent attitude, she resembles nothing so much as a child. Giles' dress is casual, hip but not undadlike. The familial image is reinforced by the presence of OLIVIA, who is both pregnant and pushing an empty stroller.\n\nBUFFY\n\nCome on! Come on!\n\nThey are walking through a graveyard, to be sure, but there is a bit of the state fair to it as well. Many standing crypts and caskets line the lane. Families occasionally pass them by, certain crypts have been set up as ring toss games and the like. It's not obtrusive (i.e. Not A Generic Scary Carnival Nightmare With Wide Angle Shots Of Carousel Horses Type Thing), there's just a comfortable level of incongruity.\n\nBuffy continues to pull, Giles good-naturedly to resist.\n\nBUFFY (cont'd)\n\nWe're gonna miss all the good stuff!\n\nOLIVIA\n\nDoes she always want to train this badly?\n\nContinuity Note: Olivia was introduced as Giles's \"lady friend\" in \"Hush.\"\n\nHere we have an example of Buffy using her desire to train to pull Giles away from Olivia and his future life of leisure.\n\nGILES\n\nIt appears she never heard the fable about patience.\n\nOLIVIA\n\nWhich one is that?\n\nGILES\n\n(tries to think)\n\nYou know, with the fox, and the . . . less patient fox.\n\nBuffy's impatience will become an issue in the final episodes of season seven, when she wants to rush headlong into the lair of The First against the protests of her friends and the Potential Slayers. Of course, she winds up going there on her own and is rewarded by finding the Scythe that is ultimately the key to their survival.\n\nBUFFY\n\nOoh! Here! Can I! Can I!\n\nGILES\n\nYes, go ahead.\n\nShe lets go his hand, moves to a stand (of crypt-like stone) that has balls set up, three to a pile, and a dummy mock-up of a vampire that pops up and moves around at the back.\n\nBuffy takes a ball, waits.\n\nThe dummy pops up and a tinny, recorded voice cries:\n\nVOICE\n\nI'm a vampire!\n\nBuffy throws a ball, it goes wide.\n\nGILES\n\nBuffy, you have a sacred birthright to protect mankind. Don't stick out your elbow.\n\nShe tries again, nails it. Looks to Giles for approval. He looks peevish.\n\nGILES (cont'd)\n\nI haven't got any treats . . .\n\nBuffy turns to the vendor, who hands her a cotton candy. She digs into it.\n\nOLIVIA\n\nFor God's sake, Rupert, go easy on the girl.\n\nGILES\n\nThis is my business. Blood of the lamb and all that.\n\n(to Buffy)\n\nNow, you're gonna get that all over your face.\n\nBuffy turns\u2014and her face is caked with mud. She looks wild and primeval, breathing hard through her nose. (NOTE: This close-up will be filmed separately, when Buffy is all muddy in act four.)\n\nGILES (cont'd)\n\n(shocked, whispers)\n\nI know you . . .\n\nANGLE: THE CRYPT at the end of the lane. Spike is leaning out of it, waving frantically at them.\n\nSPIKE\n\n(stage whisper)\n\nCome on! You're gonna miss everything!\n\n32 INT. SPIKE'S CRYPT\u2014NIGHT\n\nGiles enters, Olivia (who is already there) trying to fold the stroller without much success. (Buffy is no longer present.)\n\nGILES\n\nDon't push me about, you know, I have a great deal to do.\n\nHe is speaking to Spike, who stands before a group of tourists taking pictures, posing and making faces.\n\nSPIKE\n\nI've hired myself out as an attraction.\n\nGILES\n\nSideshow freak?\n\nWhile there is technically nothing \"freakish\" about Spike being a vampire in Sunnydale, he will become more sideshow-worthy when he becomes one of only two known vampires to have a soul. . . .\n\nSPIKE\n\nAt least it's showbiz . . .\n\n. . . and moves to LA\n\nOlivia has failed to fold the stroller. She is sitting on the floor, crying, the misbent thing in her lap.\n\nGiles looks at her, unsure how to help, torn\u2014he must go.\n\nAsks Spike for advice:\n\nGILES\n\nWhat am I supposed to do with all of this?\n\nSPIKE\n\nGotta make up your mind, Rupes. What are you wasting time for? Haven't you figured it all out yet with your enormous squishy frontal lobes?\n\nGILES\n\n(starting to walk)\n\nI still think Buffy should have killed you.\n\nThis too will become a bit of a recurring theme, leading to conflict between Giles and Buffy, especially when he takes part in Wood's plan to kill Spike in \"Lies My Parents Told Me.\"\n\nHe moves down through the crypt, not sure where he's heading. Passes the Cheese Man, who has slices of cheese on his head, including two with holes ripped out over his eyes.\n\nCHEESE MAN\n\nI wear the cheese. It does not wear me.\n\nGiles stares at him a moment, then continues.\n\nGILES\n\nHonestly, you meet the most appalling sort of people . . .\n\nHe continues walking and exits the crypt, camera leading him into:\n\n33 INT. THE BRONZE\u2014CONTINUING\n\nIt's busy, people bustling about in the usual fashion. Giles starts making his way through the crowd to the front.\n\nANGLE: XANDER AND WILLOW\n\nAre sitting on the couch in Giles' living room\u2014except of course it's in the middle of the club, near the stage. They look worried, going through the books on Giles' coffee table.\n\nCamera moves up to find Giles coming from behind them. He reaches the living room setup, sits in a chair.\n\nGILES\n\nI'm sorry I'm so late. There's a great deal going on, all at once.\n\nGiles will show up almost too late at the end of the sixth season when he returns to find that his young charges have gotten into dire trouble without him.\n\nWILLOW\n\n(peevish)\n\nDon't we know it. Only at death's door over here . . . Look at Xander!\n\nXander opens his jacket to reveal a big wet bloodstain in the middle of his (ripped) T-shirt.\n\nXANDER\n\nGot the sucking chest wound swinging . . . I promised Anya I'd be there for her big night. Now I'll probably be pushing up daisies in the sense of being in the ground underneath them and fertilizing the soil with my decomposition.\n\nXander fails to make it to Anya's \"big afternoon\" when he does not show up for their wedding. He also isn't there for her death in \"Chosen,\" nor does he even find her body before it is sucked down into the ground with the rest of Sunnydale.\n\nGiles looks up at the stage and sees:\n\nANGLE: ANYA\n\nHer big night appears to be a stand-up routine. She stands at the mic in the spotlight, reading a joke (from a sheet of loose-leaf) that she seems to have no real understanding of.\n\nANYA\n\nOkay. A man walks into the office of a doctor. He is wearing on his head, a . . . there's a duck. Is that right?\n\nUNSEEN PATRON (V.O.)\n\nYou suck!\n\nANYA\n\nQuiet. You'll miss the humorous conclusion.\n\nGiles turns back to the others.\n\nGILES\n\nShe seems to be doing quite well.\n\nWILLOW\n\nDo you even know this is your fault?\n\nGILES\n\nWe have to think about the facts, Willow. I'm very busy. Have a gig myself, you know.\n\nWILLOW\n\nSomething is trying to kill us. It's like some primal . . . some animal force.\n\nGILES\n\nThat used to be us.\n\nXANDER\n\nDon't get linear on me now, man . . .\n\nANGLE: ANYA\n\nANYA\n\nAnd the duck tells the doctor, \"there's a man that's attached to my ass.\"\n\nHuge laughter from the crowd. Anya beams.\n\nANYA (cont'd)\n\nSee, it was the duck and not the man that spoke.\n\nApplause. She heads offstage.\n\nWILLOW\n\nRupert, if we don't know what we're fighting, I don't think we have a chance.\n\nHe gets up as she is speaking and heads onto the stage. Straps on his acoustic guitar and, to great applause, sings:\n\nGiles's singing the exposition is another piece of foreshadowing for the musical episode, \"Once More, with Feeling.\" In that episode the important hidden truths are revealed through song, and the gang reaches the finale in the Bronze.\n\nGILES\n\n(sings)\n\nIt's strange. It's not like anything we've faced before, yet it seems familiar somehow. Of course! The spell we cast with Buffy must have released some primal evil, that's come back seeking . . . I'm not sure what. Willow, look through the Chronicles. Some reference to a warrior beast . . . Xander, help Willow and try not to bleed on my couch. We've got to warn Buffy. I tried her this morning but I only got her machine. Oh, wait . . .\n\nAnother form of machine\u2014namely the Buffybot\u2014will take over in \"Bargaining, Part One\" when the real Buffy is unreachable following her death.\n\nBut the mic goes dead. All the noise stops but for a feedback hit. Disappointed AWWs from the crowd. Willow and Xander barely look up from their books.\n\nGiles takes off his guitar, looks down at the mic cord. He tugs at it, then gets on his hands and knees, following it, pulling himself along behind a stack of speakers and equipment.\n\nThe cord becomes tangled in another, and more, soon Giles is following a maze of entwined cable, still on his hands and knees, no one visible, just all this equipment around him, and all this . . . cable . . .\n\nANGLE: THE CABLE\n\nAs Giles' POCKET WATCH falls out of his pocket onto it. Giles stops. Weary dread on his face.\n\nGILES (cont'd)\n\nWell, that was obvious.\n\nWIDER ANGLE: The Primitive is perched on a speaker right behind him. We see her silhouetted by an indoor LIGHTNING\n\nFLASH. Blade in hand.\n\nGiles doesn't move as she creeps down behind him.\n\nGILES (cont'd)\n\n(quietly terrified)\n\nI know who you are. And I can defeat you. With my intellect. Cripple you with my thoughts.\n\nANGLE: THE TOP OF HIS HEAD\n\nAs she prepares to cut it open.\n\nGILES (cont'd)\n\nOf course you underestimate me. You couldn't know . . .\n\nEXTREME CLOSE ON: GILES' FACE\n\nas blood begins to wash down it from out of frame.\n\nGILES (cont'd)\n\nYou never had a watcher . . .\n\nThis is the first specific clue that they are dealing with the First Slayer. Although the First Slayer will play a more important role in Buffy's dream, it is here we learn that she did not have a Watcher. We will come to find in \"Get It Done\" that she did have a sort of Watchers Council, in the form of Shadow Men who charged her with protecting the world against evil.\n\nFADE OUT:\n\n34 INT. BUFFY'S LIVING ROOM\u2014NIGHT\n\nGiles takes in a gasping breath. His eyes do not open.\n\nBLACK OUT.\n\nEND OF ACT THREE\n\nACT FOUR\n\n35 INT. BUFFY'S LIVING ROOM\u2014NIGHT\n\nHey, it's Buffy's turn! Therefore, close on her as we hear:\n\nBuffy's dream exemplifies her confusion over her destiny and her role as the Slayer. In this sequence we learn it is the essence of the First Slayer attacking the gang in their dreams because they went against the role of the Slayer as a lone entity. Buffy fights against this idea\u2014as she has done before\u2014knowing that she is more powerful with her friends. Even though she defies the First Slayer's words, Buffy will continue to wonder about her powers and her destiny through to the end of the series.\n\nANYA (O.S.)\n\n(fierce whisper)\n\nBuffy, wake up!\n\n36 INT. BUFFY AND WILLOW'S DORM ROOM\u2014MORNING\n\nBuffy wakes up in her dorm bed, looking over at:\n\nANGLE: ANYA across the room in Willow's. She clutches at the covers, pulling them up to her chin in her fright.\n\nANYA\n\nBuffy, you have to wake up! Right away!\n\nBUFFY\n\nI'm not really in charge of these things . . .\n\nBuffy claims that she is not in charge of waking herself up, which will prove true when she dies and has to rely on her friends to \"wake her up.\"\n\nANYA\n\nPlease wake up oh please!\n\nBUFFY\n\n(turning onto her back)\n\nI need my beauty sleep, okay, so stop\u2014\n\nANGLE: BUFFY'S POV\n\nRight above her, hanging from the ceiling, face right near hers, is the Primitive. It ROARS in her face\u2014\n\n37 INT. BUFFY'S BEDROOM\u2014MORNING\n\nBuffy WAKES suddenly\u2014it was only a bad dream . . . WIDEN to see she's in her bedroom at home. She has made a mess of the sheets in her nightmare.\n\nREVERSE ANGLE: BUFFY\n\nLooks at the mess of a bed from the doorway.\n\nWe find TARA standing next to her. Tara is completely poised, quiet\u2014clearly on top of whatever's going on here.\n\nBUFFY\n\nFaith and I just made that bed . . .\n\nTARA\n\nFor who?\n\nA dream sequence in \"This Year's Girl\" saw Buffy and Faith making the bed. During the dream Faith comments that \"little sis\" is coming, but Buffy has much to do before that happens.\n\nBUFFY\n\nI thought you were here to tell me. The guys aren't here, are they? We were gonna hang out, watch movies.\n\nIt is fitting that Tara serves as Buffy's dream guide, as she is the one person Buffy will turn to in the sixth season when she feels disconnected from the world and her friends.\n\nTARA\n\nYou lost them.\n\nBUFFY\n\nNo, I . . . I think they need me to find them.\n\nShe looks at the clock by the bed:\n\nANGLE: THE CLOCK reads 7:30\n\nBuffy looks worried about the time.\n\nBUFFY (cont'd)\n\nIt's so late . . .\n\nTARA\n\nOh, that clock's completely wrong.\n\nIn the dream sequence in \"Graduation Day, Part Two,\" Faith mentioned that Little Miss Muffet was \"counting down to seven three oh.\" Though there has been much speculation over the meaning of this phrase, it is generally accepted as the number of days from that original dream to Buffy's death in \"The Gift.\" Tara's comment regarding the clock being \"completely wrong\" could not only mean that the waiting time has been cut in half, but also that the death coming at the end of that time will not be Buffy's final rest.\n\nShe produces a deck of tarot cards, tries to hand it to Buffy.\n\nContinuity Note: Tara hands Buffy the Manus card from the tarot deck. It is the card Willow used in their joining spell to represent Buffy's essence.\n\nTARA (cont'd)\n\nHere.\n\nBUFFY\n\nI'm never gonna use those.\n\nTara moves closer, whispers in Buffy's ear:\n\nTARA\n\nYou think you know. What's to come, what you are . . . You really have no idea.\n\nThus we have the theme of Buffy's dream, as well as her journey from this point through the end of the series. Throughout season five she will try to discover the true nature of her Slayer power. In season six she will worry that her return from death has made her a demon. It is in season seven that Buffy will finally accept what she is and how the Slayer's powers truly came about. Dracula will start her on this journey when he states that their power is both rooted in darkness in \"Buffy vs. Dracula.\"\n\nANGLE: THE BEDROOM\n\nThe bed is made now. It's very still.\n\nBUFFY\n\nI gotta find the others.\n\nTARA\n\nBe back before dawn . . .\n\nThough the early-morning imagery has been hinting at this, here would be the first mention of Buffy's sister-to-be by name.\n\nBuffy leaves.\n\nA38 INT. UNIVERSITY HALL\u2014DAY\n\nBuffy walks through the hall, searching for her friends. She stops a passing student.\n\nBUFFY\n\nHave you seen my friends anywhere?\n\n(looking around)\n\nThey wouldn't just disappear; they're my very good friends.\n\nThe language in this section of dialogue does not fit Buffy's normal speech pattern. However, it does match the way the Buffybot will speak.\n\nThe student just walks away. Buffy continues on, a bit peeved at the no response. A few feet on she stops, looking over at the wall. She moves to it and we see that a small hole has been broken through, showing a glimpse of the dark, cramped space behind.\n\nInside that space is Joyce.\n\nBUFFY (cont'd)\n\nMom?\n\nJOYCE\n\nOh, hi, honey.\n\nBUFFY\n\nMom, why are you living in the walls?\n\nJOYCE\n\nOh, sweetie, no, I'm fine here. Don't worry about me.\n\nBUFFY\n\nIt looks dirty.\n\nJOYCE\n\nWell, it seems that way to you . . . I made some lemonade, and I'm learning to play mah-jong. You go find your friends.\n\nBUFFY\n\nI think they're in trouble-danger . . .\n\nJoyce laughs.\n\nJOYCE\n\nSorry dear. Sorry. A mouse is playing with my knees.\n\nBUFFY\n\nI really don't think you should live in there.\n\nJOYCE\n\nWell, you could probably break through the wall . . .\n\nIn Joss Whedon's commentary he admits that he hadn't intended to foreshadow Joyce's death in this exchange, but in hindsight it seems very much like she is entombed. Joyce mentions that Buffy could probably \"break through the wall,\" but in real life Buffy will discover that she is powerless to get her mom out of her tomb. Looking at the scene as Buffy joining her mother in death would also foreshadow the Slayer's own passing. Like she does in this scene, Buffy will leave her mother behind in \"Heaven\" when she \"breaks through the wall\" herself to find the friends that bring her back from the dead.\n\nBut Buffy has caught a glimpse of:\n\nANGLE: XANDER\u2014Rounding a corner.\n\nBuffy moves after him.\n\n38 INT. INITIATIVE\u2014DAY\n\nWe are quite wide in the bright white space. Riley and another man sit at opposite ends of the glass conference table. The other man some will recognize as ADAM, but he is entirely human. Riley wears his Sunday suit, Adam something similar.\n\nBuffy approaches slowly, from a distance.\n\nRILEY\n\nHey there, killer.\n\nBuffy will have a difficult time in the coming seasons distinguishing her Slayer self from that of a \"killer.\" In the first episode of season five, \"Buffy vs. Dracula,\" Dracula will echo Riley by calling her that same name. Later, in \"Intervention,\" the First Slayer would seem to support the idea when she appears in the form of a guide telling Buffy that death is her gift. This is something she will come to accept in \"The Gift,\" although Giles tries to convince her otherwise. Of course, the interpretation of death being her gift will change by the end of that episode.\n\nBUFFY\n\nRiley! You're back!\n\nRILEY\n\nI never left.\n\nBut he will leave, and then come back.\n\nBUFFY\n\nHow did the debriefing go?\n\nRILEY\n\nI told you not to worry about that! It went great. They made me Surgeon General.\n\nBUFFY\n\nWhy didn't you come and tell me? We could have celebrated.\n\nRILEY\n\nOh, we're drawing up a plan for world domination. The key element? Coffeemakers that think.\n\nThis could be a reference to The Key and how it is a necessary element for Glory's domination . . . or just a coincidence.\n\nBUFFY\n\nWorld domination. Is that a good?\n\nRILEY\n\nBaby, we're the government. It's what we do.\n\nADAM\n\nShe's uncomfortable with certain concepts. It's understandable.\n\n(to Buffy)\n\nAggression is a natural human tendency. Though you and me come by it another way.\n\nBUFFY\n\nWe're not demons.\n\nLike her struggle with being a \"killer,\" Buffy will also worry about being a \"demon\" throughout season six when she comes back \"wrong.\" The fact that Spike can hurt her even though he has the chip in his head furthers this concern.\n\nADAM\n\nIs that a fact?\n\nRILEY\n\nBuffy, we've got important work here. A lot of filing, and giving things names.\n\nBUFFY\n\n(to Adam)\n\nWhat was yours?\n\nADAM\n\nBefore Adam? Not a man among us can remember.\n\nA voice sounds on the intercom:\n\nVOICE\n\nThe demons have escaped. Please run for your lives.\n\nDemons will escape at the end of seasons five (when the dimensions blend together) and seven (when the Hellmouth opens), though Buffy will be there to stop them both times.\n\nThe lights go dimmer as Buffy looks at Riley, panicked. The men are all business.\n\nADAM\n\nThis could be trouble.\n\nRILEY\n\nWe'd better make a fort.\n\nADAM\n\nI'll get some pillows.\n\nHe exits as Buffy stands there, too frightened to speak up.\n\nWe see a passel of demons approaching from behind, out of focus.\n\nBUFFY\n\nNo wait . . . I have weapons . . .\n\nShe reaches into her bag.\n\nINSERT: HER BAG\n\nis filled with mud. She sinks her hand into it, pulls it back. Drops to her knees in a panic, reaching into the bag and finding nothing but mud.\n\nShe looks at it on her hands. Brings them to her face. Slowly, she starts covering her face in it, putting on more and more.\n\nThe demons are long gone. She looks up at Riley, face now looking just a little like it was when Giles saw it. Animal. Riley backs away, a scolding look on his face.\n\nRILEY\n\nIf that's the way you want it baby, I guess you're on your own.\n\nAs the dream indicates, Buffy and Riley will continue to have trouble connecting because they are too different. He will eventually leave her for real in \"Into the Woods.\"\n\nBuffy watches him go. The light on her changes again, daylight streaming in from the side.\n\nOnce again there is a reference to Buffy \"going into the light.\"\n\nShe stands, heads toward it.\n\nANGLE: BUFFY'S FEET\n\nAs she walks, we see sand on the ground. Finally she's walking only on sand.\n\nANGLE: HER FACE\n\nIs no longer muddy. The wall behind her gives way to rock, and finally we are\n\n42 EXT. DESERT\u2014DAY\n\nBuffy walks past the Initiative wall and into the bright white desert, the flat, sandy vista spreading out forever. Camera arms up to find that Buffy stands atop a lone large sand dune.\n\nBuffy will visit the desert again when she goes on a spiritual journey in \"Intervention\" and in search of the Shadow Men in \"Get It Done.\"\n\nShe looks around, worried.\n\nBUFFY\n\n(whispers)\n\nI'm never gonna find them here . . .\n\nANGLE: TARA\n\nAppears opposite Buffy on the dune, walking toward her. She is dressed in Indian garb, midriff and skirt. Again, preternaturally calm.\n\nTARA\n\nOf course not. That's the reason you came.\n\nShe stands a ways apart, the two of them regarding each other.\n\nBUFFY\n\nYou're not in my dream.\n\nTARA\n\n(agreeing)\n\nI was borrowed. Someone has to speak for her.\n\nThough this foreshadowing certainly wasn't intentional, when The First tries to convince Willow that Tara wants to talk in \"Conversations with Dead People,\" it \"borrows\" the image of another to speak for it.\n\nBUFFY\n\nLet her speak for herself. That's what's done in polite circles.\n\nAs she says this, the Primitive appears right behind her.\n\nBuffy is aware of her, but does nothing.\n\nThe Primitive circles her, slowly, sniffing her, assessing her. Buffy is rigid, the Primitive all angles and motion, finally ending up in front of Buffy.\n\nThis is not the last time Buffy will interact with an image of the First Slayer. The so-called Primitive will appear in future episodes, including \"Intervention\" and \"Get It Done.\"\n\nAs this is happening, we cut between the two slayers as though they are conversing, though it is Tara who speaks for the Primitive.\n\nBUFFY (cont'd)\n\n(to the Primitive)\n\nWhy do you follow me?\n\nTARA\n\nI don't.\n\nBUFFY\n\nWhere are my friends?\n\nTARA\n\nYou're asking the wrong questions.\n\nBUFFY\n\n(calm anger)\n\nMake her speak.\n\nTARA\n\nI have no speech. No name. I live in the action of death. The blood-cry, the penetrating wound. I am destruction. Absolute. Alone.\n\nBUFFY (realizing)\n\nThe Slayer.\n\nTARA\n\nThe first.\n\nThe Primitive stands erect at that, facing Buffy with defiant pride.\n\nBuffy looks down, at her hand. Sees:\n\nINSERT: The deck of tarot cards that Tara had tried to hand her. The top card is actually a bird's-eye view of the four friends asleep in Buffy's living room (CGI insert).\n\nBUFFY\n\nI'm not alone.\n\nThe Primitive growls, snaps her teeth at Buffy.\n\nTARA\n\nThe Slayer doesn't walk in the world.\n\nBUFFY\n\nI walk. I talk. I shop, I sneeze, I'm gonna be a fireman when the floods roll back. There's trees in the desert since you moved out, and I don't sleep on a bed of bones. Now give me back my friends.\n\nThe Primitive struggles to contain her rage, finally spitting forth:\n\nPRIMITIVE\n\nNo . . . friends . . . just the kill . . . we are . . . alone.\n\nAs she says this last, the Cheese Man leans into frame, dangling a couple of slices invitingly.\n\nBUFFY\n\nThat's it. I'm waking up.\n\nAs with so many times before, Buffy does not play by other people's rules. She will make this same type of decision when she refuses the Shadow Men's \"gift\" in \"Get It Done.\" This concept of breaking the rules will be most prophetic when she uses Willow's powers in combination with the Scythe to divide the power of the Slayer among all the Potential Slayers in the world so that she is truly no longer alone.\n\nThe Primitive LEAPS into frame, knocking Buffy back out of it. And they fight, briefly, the Primitive strong with primal rage, Buffy more sophisticated, the martial artist.\n\nAfter a quick exchange Buffy comes up at the edge of the dune, saying:\n\nBUFFY (cont'd)\n\nIt's over.\n\nThe Primitive dives at her, tackling her and they both roll down the dune and we hard cut to:\n\n43 INT. BUFFY'S LIVING ROOM\u2014NIGHT\n\nBuffy wakes up. Everything is the same as it was, except Buffy is lying in the middle of the floor. She raises herself, looks over at the gang\u2014they are still sleeping.\n\nBuffy is about to speak when the Primitive drops into frame right in her face and stabs her, bringing the knife down again and again . . .\n\nShe stops. Buffy looks pretty bored. There is no blood on her.\n\nBUFFY\n\nAre you quite finished?\n\nShe gets up, moves back to where she was sleeping. The Primitive stands, bewildered.\n\nBUFFY (cont'd)\n\nYou just have to get over the whole primal power thing. You're not the source of me.\n\nShe sits, makes herself comfy.\n\nBUFFY (cont'd)\n\nAlso, in terms of hair care, you really want to say \"what kind of impression am I making in the workplace?\" 'Cause that particular look\u2014\n\nAnd in midsentence:\n\nSMASH CUT TO:\n\nA44 INT. BUFFY'S LIVING ROOM\u2014NIGHT\n\nShe wakes, for real\u2014gasping with the intensity of it.\n\nLooks about as the other four go through the same thing.\n\nThey look at each other, overwhelmed.\n\n44 INT. BUFFY'S FOYER\/DINING ROOM\u2014NIGHT\n\nBuffy and the others sit around the table, Buffy nearest the foyer, Xander with his back to the kitchen. They all look a little tired . . . and wired.\n\nWILLOW\n\nThe First Slayer . . . wow.\n\nXANDER\n\nNot big with the socialization.\n\nWILLOW\n\nOr the floss . . .\n\nGILES\n\nSomehow, our joining with Buffy and invoking the essence of the Slayer's power was an affront to the source of that power.\n\nBUFFY\n\nYou know, you coulda brought that up before we did it.\n\nGILES\n\nI did! I said there could be dire consequences.\n\nBUFFY\n\nYeah, but you say that about everything.\n\nJoyce enters from upstairs.\n\nJOYCE\n\nI'm guessing I missed some fun.\n\nWILLOW\n\nThe spirit of the First Slayer tried to kill us in our dreams.\n\nJOYCE\n\nOh. You want some hot chocolate?\n\nA chorus of:\n\nALL\n\nYes please\u2014that sounds nice\u2014thanks, yeah . . .\n\nJOYCE\n\nXander?\n\nXander turns to her and, suddenly remembering his dream, becomes quite uncomfortable.\n\nXANDER\n\nYes? What, Joyce\u2014dyeh, Buffy's mom?\n\nJOYCE\n\nWill you be my kitchen buddy again? Help me carry?\n\nXANDER\n\nYes. Sure. Buffy's mom.\n\nShe exits. Giles looks at Buffy, who seems pensive.\n\nGILES\n\nYou all right?\n\nBUFFY\n\nYeah, I just . . . I think I might jump in the shower.\n\nGILES\n\nYou do seem a bit . . .\n\nBUFFY\n\nYeah. I guess . . . The First Slayer. I never really thought about . . . it was just intense. I guess you guys got a taste of that, huh?\n\nXANDER\n\nYeah, from now on, you keep your slayer friends out of my dreams, is that clear?\n\nWILLOW\n\nShe's not good for the sleeping.\n\nBuffy rises, saying as she heads upstairs:\n\nBUFFY\n\nYeah, well at least you all didn't dream about that guy with the cheese . . .\n\nShe exits, leaving the others looking slowly up, at each other, very perturbed.\n\nBUFFY (O.C.)\n\nDon't know where the Hell that came from . . .\n\n45 INT. BUFFY'S UPSTAIRS HALL\u2014CONTINUING\n\nBuffy reaches the top of the stairs, heads for the bathroom. Stops, goes toward her room.\n\n46 INT. BUFFY'S BEDROOM\u2014CONTINUING\n\nBuffy enters, stands in the doorway. The lights are off, but she can see okay.\n\nANGLE: THE BED\n\nQuiet and neat.\n\nBuffy regards it, regards the room. We hear:\n\nTARA (V.O.)\n\nYou think you know. What's to come, what you are . . . You haven't even begun.\n\nBuffy stands a moment longer, looking into the dark.\n\nShe leaves. For a beat, we hold on the empty room.\n\nBLACK OUT.\n\nEND OF SHOW\n\n## ABOUT THE AUTHOR\n\n* * *\n\nPhoto by Shivohn Kacy Fleming\n\nChristopher Golden is the New York Times bestselling author of Snowblind, Tin Men, Ararat, and many other novels. He co-created (with Mike Mignola) two cult favorite comic-book series, Baltimore and Joe Golem: Occult Detective. As editor, his anthologies include The New Dead, Seize the Night, and Dark Cities. Once upon a time, he wrote a great many novels, comics, video games, and nonfiction books in the worlds of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel and loved every minute of it. Please visit him at christophergolden.com.\n\nVisit us at simonandschuster.com\/teen\n\nAuthors.SimonandSchuster.com\/Christopher-Golden\n\nSIMON PULSE\n\nSimon & Schuster, New York\nThe Official Companions to the Show\n\nThe Watcher's Guide, Volume 1\n\nThe Watcher's Guide, Volume 2\n\nThe Watcher's Guide, Volume 3\n\nThe Monster Book\n\nSunnydale High Yearbook\nWe hope you enjoyed reading this Simon & Schuster ebook.\n\n* * *\n\nGet a FREE ebook when you join our mailing list. Plus, get updates on new releases, deals, recommended reads, and more from Simon & Schuster. Click below to sign up and see terms and conditions.\n\nCLICK HERE TO SIGN UP\n\nAlready a subscriber? Provide your email again so we can register this ebook and send you more of what you like to read. You will continue to receive exclusive offers in your inbox.\n\nSIMON PULSE\n\nAn imprint of Simon & Schuster Children's Publishing Division\n\n1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, New York 10020\n\nwww.SimonandSchuster.com\n\nFirst Simon Pulse hardcover edition October 2017\n\nInterior: TM & \u00a9 1998, 2000, 2004, 2017 by Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation. All rights reserved.\n\nPortions of this material were previously published in The Watcher's Guide Volumes 1-3\n\nCover: Buffy the Vampire Slayer TM & \u00a9 2017 by Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation. All rights reserved.\n\nCover illustrations by Neal Williams\n\nAll rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.\n\nSIMON PULSE and colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.\n\nFor information about special discounts for bulk purchases, please contact Simon & Schuster Special Sales at 1-866-506-1949 or business@simonandschuster.com.\n\nThe Simon & Schuster Speakers Bureau can bring authors to your live event. For more information or to book an event contact the Simon & Schuster Speakers Bureau at 1-866-248-3049 or visit our website at www.simonspeakers.com.\n\nCover designed by Regina Flath\n\nInterior designed by John Candell\n\nThe text of this book was set in Avenir, MrsEaves, and Rockwell.\n\nLibrary of Congress Control Number 2017942493\n\nISBN 978-1-5344-0415-1 (hc)\n\nISBN 978-1-5344-0416-8 (eBook)\n\nThe opinions in the essays and interviews included in Buffy the Vampire Slayer 20 Years of Slaying are those of their respective authors, and not those of Twentieth Century Fox or of Simon & Schuster, Inc.\n","meta":{"redpajama_set_name":"RedPajamaBook"}}
+{"text":"'If you want to read a beautiful, uplifting book about the survival of the human spirit, and good lives being forged from the most unfortunate origins, then But We All Shine On is absolutely essential. The subject matter and intensely personal nature of the material makes it perfect for Paolo Hewitt's positive, soulful prose. He and his friends don't spare us the pain and sorrow, but they make us feel the relief and redemption that love, hope, humour and togetherness bring to that suffering.'\n\n\u2013 Irvine Welsh\n\n'Powerful, moving, touching and funny. Paolo Hewitt has given a voice to those who are often unheard. The characters stay with you long after you have turned the final page.'\n\n\u2013 John Crace, The Guardian\n\n'Read But We All Shine On and you might act just a little differently next time you're out amid the crowds of humankind. These are stories of people all around us, but stories which their subjects wouldn't normally volunteer. They have told them to Paolo Hewitt because he spent his own childhood with them, in care. Hewitt relays their accounts with a warmth and wit familiar to those who enjoyed his wonderful memoir The Looked After Kid. These \"orphans\" were boys who overcame awful circumstances to become fine adults \u2013 and they remind us of the vast unlocked potential of every child who through cruel luck is denied the childhood they deserve.'\n\n\u2013 Ian Burrell, Assistant Editor, The Independent\n\n'Stories of hope and resilience that will break your heart.'\n\n\u2013 John Niven, author of Kill Your Friends\n\n'It could be said that family is a collection of disputed memories between one group of people over a lifetime. But for the child in care this \"one group\" of people is continually dispersed to the point of being impossible to recognise themselves. A non-family of shadows. With his pen Paolo projects light on the darkest path as he seeks the family that never was and unravels a tragic, comical, magical and moving story. All we are is our story. Without it we are pages of spurious ellipses. We need Paolo Hewitt with his torch. Shine on, Paolo Hewitt. Shine on.'\n\n\u2013 Lemn Sissay MBE, writer\n\n'Reading these remarkably personal and inspirational self-discovery journeys bought a mixture of emotions that were both a joy and painful to feel. It never ceases to amaze me, the strength and humanity which stays secure within hurt children and lives with them forever. A beautifully written memoir which has to be read and recognised for the achievement it is and the dignity it deserves.'\n\n\u2013 Hope Daniels, care leaver and author of Hackney Child\n\n'This book will put tears in your eyes and leave you with a smile on your face. It is a testament to the spirit of five boys who are forced to confront fear, loneliness and varying degrees of mental and physical cruelty, yet emerge as strong, decent men. Paolo Hewitt draws the stories of his four orphanage friends together with great integrity, splashing poetry and light over their shared trauma. Reading But We All Shine On is a humbling, uplifting experience. It is a worthy companion to the author's brilliant memoir The Looked After Kid.'\n\n\u2013 John King, author of The Football Factory and Human Punk\n\n'Paolo writes with such deftness of touch and fondness for the real-life characters that populate this engaging memoir that the reader is taken into their lives and hearts; he opens a door and invites us into the world of the \"care\" system in the 1970s. Rightly, he makes us feel sad for the many, many children who suffered cruelty or indifference at the hands of people who were meant to care for them, but this is no misery memoir. Paolo doesn't dwell in the darkness or want us to \u2013 he shows us how so often the human spirit survives and triumphs over ill-treatment, rejection and abandonment, against all odds. He has no interest in pandering to the voyeuristic schadenfreude of readers who hungrily devour graphic accounts of child abuse; instead, he gives us hope, humour and warmth. Traumatic and poignant events are recounted factually and simply without the trappings of melodrama, but are all the more affecting for that. His tone is honest and humane; he seeks to understand and forgive the wrongs done to him and others and tries to avoid judgement. In passing, he contrasts the experience of young people in care then and now, and even for those of us who know only too well that the system is still deeply flawed, the book serves as a reminder of how far we have come as a society in terms of how we treat our most vulnerable children.'\n\n\u2013 Natasha Finlayson, Chief Executive, The Who Cares? Trust\n\n'Reflecting on care in the not-too-distant past through the eyes of children, But We All Shine On gives insight into where we've come from, and challenges where we are and where we still need to go. It can help get us to the better future we all desire for children in care. In the created family of the children's home, relationships matter \u2013 they can change and sustain a person for a lifetime, and bring the opportunities of life to be lived.'\n\n\u2013 Jonathan Stanley, National Centre for Excellence in Residential Child Care\n\n'Hewitt has shed a light on the murky world of late '60s and early '70s children's homes. An empathetic listener and master story teller his is the authentic voice...from the inside...first hand. The characters are his friends. They trust him. The stories herein are touching, funny and most of all redemptive. It's quite possibly his masterpiece.'\n\n\u2013 Dr. Robert, The Blow Monkeys\nBut We All Shine On\nby the same author\n\nThe Looked After Kid\n\nMy Life in a Children's Home\n\nPaolo Hewitt\n\nISBN 978 1 84905 588 8\n\neISBN 978 1 78450 042 9\n\nof related interest\n\nNo Matter What\n\nAn Adoptive Family's Story of Hope, Love and Healing\n\nSally Donovan\n\nISBN 978 1 84905 431 7\n\neISBN 978 0 85700 781 0\n\nShattered Lives\n\nChildren Who Live with Courage and Dignity\n\nCamila Batmanghelidjh\n\nISBN 978 1 84310 603 6\n\neISBN 978 1 84642 254 6\nBut We All Shine On\n\nThe Remarkable Orphans of Burbank Children's Home\n\nPaolo Hewitt\n\nJessica Kingsley Publishers  \nLondon and Philadelphia\nFirst published in 2015\n\nby Jessica Kingsley Publishers\n\n73 Collier Street\n\nLondon N1 9BE, UK\n\nand\n\n400 Market Street, Suite 400\n\nPhiladelphia, PA 19106, USA\n\nwww.jkp.com\n\nCopyright \u00a9 Paolo Hewitt 2015\n\nFront cover image copyright \u00a9 Des Hurrion 2015\n\nAll rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any material form (including photocopying or storing it in any medium by electronic means and whether or not transiently or incidentally to some other use of this publication) without the written permission of the copyright owner except in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 or under the terms of a licence issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency Ltd, Saffron House, 6\u201310 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Applications for the copyright owner's written permission to reproduce any part of this publication should be addressed to the publisher.\n\nWarning: The doing of an unauthorised act in relation to a copyright work may result in both a civil claim for damages and criminal prosecution.\n\nLibrary of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data\n\nA CIP catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress\n\nBritish Library Cataloguing in Publication Data\n\nA CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library\n\nISBN 978 1 84905 583 3\n\neISBN 978 1 78450 033 7\nI dedicate this book to Des, Norman, David and Terry and to all the children who lived at Burbank Children's Home. I hope you all find the light I did, given to me by Dio and shaped by Sahika.\nContents\n\nACKNOWLEDGEMENTS\n\n Prologue\n\n[1.Author in Search of a Character:   \nThe Story of Des Hurrion](010-Chap01.xhtml)\n\n[2.The Runaway Boy:   \nThe Story of Norman Bass](011-Chap02.xhtml)\n\n[3.The Boy Who Couldn't Be Hear:   \nThe Story of David Westbrook](012-Chap03.xhtml)\n\n[4.Those the Gods Make Crazy:   \nThe Story of Terry Hodgson](013-Chap04.xhtml)\n\n Interlude: Things Seen at Dawn\n\n5.Home\nAcknowledgements\n\nThank you to Iain Munn who first took on this work and then graciously passed it onto Stephen Jones and the fine people at Jessica Kingsley Publishers, without a fuss. Here's to Dundee F.C.\n\nThank you George Georgiou for being such a great Academy graduate and for your help in designing the cover. Here's to your wife Jenny as well. Thank you Simon Wells, thank you Kathy and Tim Pring, thank you Johnny, Inki, Stirling and Asa Chandler, thank you Peter, Kin Lin and Talia, thank you Dennis Dervish, and all those I meet under the Tree of Spurs, thank you to all the Park Lane End boys and girls, thank you Il Nipperoni, thank you Katherine and Keith, thank you Guy, thank you Eugene and Nicky, thank you Dylan, Gareth and Penny, thank you David Luxton and Rebecca Winfield, thank you Gavin Martin, thank you Imran, Arfan, Munnie, Sweetie, Reshi, Wayde, Anaia, Kaizen and Jaienna, thank you Irvine and Elizabeth, thank you Father Sean Carroll, thank you Sister Patricia, thank you all at St Peter-in-Chains Church, thank you Sheas, Jonesy and the Stone Foundation boys, thank you Rob, Michelle, Joe and Cleo, thank you Mark Powell, thank you John King, thank you Pete G and all the Woking boys and girls, thank you Mark and Anita, thank you Ant, Anna and Lucky, thank you Paisan Kevin, thank you George Russo, thank you deeply, Nina and Francesca, plus all the Yeovil contingent, especially the four angels, Izzy, Millie, Evie and Abi, thank you so much Stephen Jones and all at Jessica Kingsley Publishers, thank you Tony Marchant, thank you Johnny Harris, thank you Russell and Joanne, thank you Christopher Makris, and thank you Phil and Richard for the state we are in.\nPrologue\n\nI climbed aboard the silver bird to India and awoke on a beach in Goa. Before me, the sea glimmered in seven different shades of blue. Sunlight created row upon row of small, sparkling jewels which then danced upon the sea's white flecked tiny waves.\n\nI ran and immersed myself in this gift from above.\n\nI was exhausted. I had spent the last year writing a book called The Looked After Kid, a memoir about my unhappy childhood and subsequent teenage life spent in a children's home called Burbank, and writing that book had taken everything out of me.\n\nMoreover, it was a book I had waited to write. The idea of writing the book had occurred to me whilst I was in my twenties. The excitement that thought first engendered was quickly tempered by another voice, a more insistent voice, which insisted that I put the book on hold until I was mature enough to write it.\n\nThat voice was correct. Although there was a part of me that wanted to rush in print, it was incumbent upon me to wait until the deep smoke of confusion had cleared from my soul. Then, only then, could I write with a deeper and better perspective.\n\nIt was too simple for me to show you how my foster mother had pushed me into a cupboard and locked the door. I needed to show you why she did that.\n\nTo do so I would have to grow as a person and at the same time immerse myself in my craft. I downed tools and waited.\n\nWhen I did come to write The Looked After Kid, it happened naturally. I had finished my two biographies of the band Oasis and wanted to get away from the music world.\n\nI got up one morning, followed my regular routine and, suddenly, I was writing about my past. Moreover, I was doing so with true freedom, with no fear or compunction about what I was doing or where the book was heading. Those two elements sustained me throughout the whole work.\n\nThe story began with my birth and removal from my mother's arms after just two days on this earth. My mother had lived in England for eleven years and for many years I wondered why my mother would leave Sorrento, a town filled with brilliant colour, and unusual warmth and smiles, for the grey of England.\n\nThen I read Norman Lewis's wonderful book, Naples 44, read of the diseases and the famine and the vice that the war had created, and knew then why my mother had fled.\n\nMy mother arrived in this country in 1947. Soon, she was living through one of the coldest winters of the century. Furthermore, the British still despised the Italians for their part in the Second World War and so extended no friendship towards her. She was isolated.\n\nMy mother had two children, Nina and Francesca, and then, in 1952, suffered a major breakdown. Despite his efforts, Mr Hewitt, their father, could not save her and she was admitted to a hospital in Couldson Surrey. Sometime in 1957 she lay with someone and that someone was my father. To this day I have not met him. I do not know his name or his nationality. For I had been born in a thunderstorm and knew not the source of my lightning.\n\nThe hospital covered up the incident and my mother could not help.\n\nHer memory by now had been obliterated by drugs and what was left of it she did not want to waste on unhappy dreams. So she pulled on her ever present cigarettes, the only moments of pleasure in her wasted days and dressed in a pink cardigan with a blur striped t-shirt and light blue skirt, and she looked at me and said of my father, 'His name was Mr Cruise. I can't tell you any more. Sorry, Paolo, sorry,' and those words broke my heart.\n\nOne day, a woman came and took me away from the nursery. Her name was Mrs K. Mrs K. was a vindictive, unhappy woman who broke my childhood in a million different ways. And then broke it some more. She beat me so deeply, both emotionally and physically, that it would take me at least twenty years to recover from the relentless assault she made upon my character, my soul.\n\nHer cruelty, her anger, her indifference, her lack of any love or compassion towards me or the world, disabled me emotionally. I became extremely fearful and deeply scared of the world. I became shy, a compulsive worrier, a boy with no address, no identity.\n\nWhen I was ten Mrs K. decided that she had had enough of me. She put me back into care.\n\nMy first children's home was called Woodrough, situated in Bramley near Guildford. I got there in April of 1968 and within a month, I knew happiness for the very first time. Woodrough was run by a couple, John and Molly Brown, and they created a home which should be the model for all children's homes. Of the many things they did for me (and so many others), they made me feel special, made me feel wanted, made me feel that I had importance.\n\nOf course, happiness was not to be, so in August of that same year I was transferred to Burbank Children's Home in Woking, Surrey. Although in later life I spent many years running from Burbank, I now began to see the positive effect it had had on me.\n\nAs I delved deep into my mind, for the first time, I saw, I felt, the strength us kids drew from each other in those days of ours, as we navigated our way through life as orphans, trying so very hard to understand the rich but perplexing strangeness of our lives.\n\nI looked back and where once I saw darkness, now I saw light and hope and strength, and it was that which I tried to convey to the reader, that the Children's Home, my children's home, was tinged with blackness but it also had light, colour, and adventure.\n\nI finished the book on a positive note. The day after I awoke and knew I needed rest, I needed healing.\n\nHence, my arrival in Goa.\n\nBy the time I had settled in that wonderful part of the world, I had come to a major decision. I had decided that the book I had just written would never see the light of day. I would not allow it to be published. Of that I became certain.\n\nThe work was too raw, too open. People would not understand it. For years, I had kept my past a closely guarded secret and I was not yet ready to blow my cover.\n\nWith that decided, I settled into Goa. I rose early with the sun, went swimming with the jewels. I sat in a hammock and read about Tolstoy. At night, I ate well, made friends, watched football, slept beautifully.\n\nWithin two weeks, I had recovered from my labours.\n\nSo had my mind.\n\nFive months later, The Looked After Kid was published to great acclaim. The reviews were uniformly positive; people seemed genuinely moved by what I had written. E-mails started coming in extolling the book's virtues.\n\nOne arrived from a girl in Liverpool. It read, 'I hate you. It is four in the morning and I have to go to work at seven but I can't put your bloody book down.'\n\nI was thrilled by the response. It felt like I had entered a new era as a new person. People who once harboured serious reservations about me, now extended the hand of friendship.\n\nI took it gladly.\n\nOthers said to me, 'It must have been so cathartic, writing that book,' and I smiled and I said yes, it was. But I was lying. It was the act of publishing the book that liberated me, not the writing of it.\n\nThe day that book came into being I told the whole world something I had found impossible to do previously \u2013 that I was an orphan.\n\nIn The Looked After Kid, I revealed everything I had kept hidden all those years. I had only told a handful of people \u2013 if that \u2013 about my past. I feared sympathy. I suspected I had a touch of talent for writing and I did not want to be judged through the prism of compassion.\n\nThe book then was my way of coming out \u2013 and the relief was tremendous. No more hiding my past from others, no more deception, no more changing the conversations at friends' when the subject of parents or childhood came up.\n\nInstead, freedom, the freedom of definition, a move towards a real identity, one which had strength and endurance, one which gave me roots. This was my past, and this is who I am because of it.\n\nThen, excitement. The BBC wanted to create a series about care that would go right across their network. There would be films, documentaries, radio shows on the subject.\n\nI travelled in for a meeting. I met high-powered executives. A documentary about life after care with myself and others was put into motion.\n\nMany good things happened around this documentary but perhaps the best thing of all was that they tracked down the phone numbers of many of the people I once shared Burbank Children's Home with.\n\nTop of the list was the number for Des Hurrion. I was thrilled to be given his information.\n\nDes was my closest friend at the Home. For much of our time at Burbank, we were inseparable, two boys drawn together by humour and music and football and a shared attitude towards life.\n\nI called Des. He came on the line and we spoke as if no time had passed between us. A week later, I met him at a pub in Hammersmith.\n\nAlcohol was consumed, a great friendship renewed. At eleven that night we parted, both of us swaying dangerously into the night.\n\nI realised on the way home that half of my high came just from being re-united with this man.\n\nThe next day I awoke with a smile \u2013 and a hangover. I turned on the computer.\n\nMore e-mails about The Looked After Kid had arrived.\n\nOne guy had written to inform me that he had sent my book to a friend of his who, like me, had grown up in a children's home.\n\nHe wrote, 'I sent him your book four days ago. He has just called to say, \"This book is me, this book is me!\" You should be proud of yourself.'\n\nThen another e-mail arrived and it was from a Norman Bass. I opened this with great interest.\n\nI had spent many years with Norman at Burbank. Although we had not been close, he had been a permanent fixture in my life at an important time. Now, after a million years, he was back in touch.\n\nThis always happened around the writing or publication of a book: people you needed to see suddenly appeared as if summoned by mysterious forces. First Des, now Norman. The process never failed and I never questioned it.\n\nNorman wrote that he had thoroughly enjoyed my book. He added that he would be in London soon and did I want to meet up?\n\nOf course, I did. Of course.\n\nOn the morning of our appointment, as I sat on the train, I tried to recall Norman's face. It was a fruitless task. His features somehow eluded me. When I met him later that day, I found out why.\n\nEven though he had been at Burbank for five years, Norman had spent most of his time running away. That is why I could not remember his features. He was always on the run.\n\nAs he greeted me with a warm handshake, I noted that he was tall, suited, wore glasses, had receding hair, was well built, authoritative in nature, and quite controlled. Not what I had expected at all. Which begged the question \u2013 what had I expected?\n\nAnd I could not answer that question either.\n\n'Come on,' said Norman, 'I know a place we can eat.'\n\nHe had chosen a pub for lunch, a place where suited men and women from nearby offices took their lunch break and talked earnestly to each other over beer and steak pies.\n\nNorman, with his suit and tie and briefcase, blended right in. I, with my bright Gabicci top and white Levi jeans, did not.\n\nWe settled in our chairs, began talking. Chit chat at first, pleasantries. And then a rush of words, the pouring out and sharing of memories, a recall of our time at Burbank, the kids, the staff members, the characters around Woking town.\n\nThe conversation was seamless. Two hours seemed to pass in an hour.\n\nReluctantly, Norman looked at his watch. 'Got a train to catch,' he said, apologetically.\n\n'That's a shame,' I said in earnest. We left the pub and headed back to London Bridge station.\n\nAt the bottom of the escalators I shook hands with Norman.\n\n'I'll be in touch,' I said and I meant it.\n\nAfter he had gone, I jumped a train. As I rattled and rolled through the underground, dark foreboding walls either side of me, one question kept presenting itself to me. Why had it been so easy between us? Why had there been no awkward moments as I had expected?\n\nAfter all, the odds had been seriously against us getting on.\n\nNorman and I had not been close during our days at Burbank. He was younger than me and, at that time, all I was interested in were the big boys of the Home, the ones who carried themselves confidently, smoked ciggies, kissed girls, played football.\n\nMoreover, Norman did not share my passion for books, music and football. We were miles apart.\n\nYet none of that mattered today. Why?\n\nThe Children's Home is why.\n\nBurbank had twinned us for life. Norman and I had survived care. We had crossed the same stormy sea and finished intact on the other side.\n\nThat feat alone had bound us together and, yes, bound us like brothers.\n\nThe writer Arthur Miller once wrote of his wife, Marilyn Monroe, an alumna of care, that she could walk into a room and spot a fellow orphan straight away.\n\nIt was the longing in their eyes that she instinctively recognised.\n\nI did not have that power but what Miller said of Monroe resonated with me.\n\nThere is a level of strong, psychic understanding between all care kids \u2013 and that is what I had felt with Norman that day. Both of us had spotted the longing in each other's eyes.\n\nWhen I got home and settled, I took the thought further. If Norman and I were brothers of a kind, then it stood to reason that I had an entire other family. They were not blood related; they were not close to me. Instead, they were the children of Burbank, the children I grew up with during the most crucial period in my life.\n\nTheir names and faces now appeared before me.\n\nJimmy B. for example. When I first arrived at the Home, he protected me. He saw I was confused, a frightened boy. He understood I needed to be toughened up.\n\nJimmy taught me to fight. He made me punch walls so that my knuckles would harden. Because of Jimmy, I defended myself well against those who sought to physically harm me.\n\nThis was good.\n\nHe also nicknamed me Bert (after my middle name Alberto) because he couldn't pronounce Paolo properly.\n\nThis was bad. Especially when it came to girls.\n\n'What's your name?'\n\n'Paolo.'\n\nA little shiver.\n\n'Ooh, that's a nice name. Is it...'\n\n'Oi Bert, you coming or what?'\n\nEnd of romance.\n\nColin N. introduced me to the music of Jimi Hendrix and taught me how to laugh at authority instead of shaking all over every time I encountered it.\n\nGrahame B. first instilled in me the value of dressing well, of looking good despite a life you lived to the contrary.\n\nFrank and Jimmy welcomed me into their gang, made me feel wanted, something the adult world had conspicuously failed to do up until that point in my life.\n\nAs their faces appeared before me, I began wondering about their lives. What had happened to them? Did they make it through the hoop okay? Had the Gods smiled upon them or banished them to the gutter?\n\nMy first thought was to fear for them. After care, many children snapped in two. It is said that every year, forty per cent of care kids go through prison; sixty per cent end up homeless. Just thirteen per cent a year pass GSCE exams.\n\nA tiny percentage have become rich or famous \u2013 the actress Marilyn Monroe, the designer Bruce Oldfield, the footballer John Fashnau, the actress Samantha Morton, and the prophet Muhammad sprang to mind \u2013 but many fell by the wayside.\n\nCertainly, my generation had huge mountains placed in front of them.\n\nAt that time kids as young as sixteen, were thrown into the wider world without any support of any kind. They had not been programmed to navigate the difficult road ahead. No one had taught them the basics of living. No one saw to it that they found accommodation or work. No one thought of their emotional well-being.\n\nThey had been sent out to face the lions alone, without any protection whatsoever.\n\nScandalous.\n\nHow then had the kids from my Home fared?\n\nThe only way to answer that question was to track my people down. But how? The answer came instinctively. Trust the process. Start the book and they will come to you. Des and Norman already had.\n\nWithin a month of Norman e-mailing me, two men, who I had grown up with at Burbank, had been in touch.\n\nTheir names were Terry Hodgson and David Westbrook.\n\nTerry I had known for about a year at Burbank. He frightened the life out of me with his size and latent aggression.\n\nDavid was a cheeky little kid who was much younger than me but who, never the less, I befriended towards the end of my stay.\n\nSo I made arrangements to see all of them. I would now go on a journey to see where life had taken my brothers. Who would I first approach?\n\nEasy.\n\nDes Hurrion, of course, once my bestest friend in the whole wide world.\nOne\n\nAuthor in Search of a Character\n\nThe Story of Des Hurrion\n\nOn the silver snake to meet Des, I thought about how children in care rarely talked to each other about their fractured past, their torn up history.\n\nCertainly that was the case at Burbank.\n\nI knew Des Hurrion closely for five years and I never knew why I shared a home with him. He never told me his circumstances. I never told him mine.\n\nPerhaps, we were not emotionally mature enough to do so. Or \u2013 and this I think is closer to the mark \u2013 we just accepted that life had badly twisted our fortunes, and that words were not necessary. We were in Burbank, we were in care, we had been floored.\n\nWhat else could we do but try to get up?\n\nNow, thirty years later, I was about to find out why Des lived with me at Burbank.\n\nDes met me off the train. He wore a black coat, black trousers and shoes. His colours in no way mitigated the excitement that was palpable between us.\n\nWe now knew that come what may, we would be in each other's lives until forever.\n\nIt was a good feeling.\n\nStill, I was slightly uneasy. I wanted to ask Des a question, a question I could not ask him when we had first met in Hammersmith. That night, it would not have been appropriate, it would have been out of context.\n\nNow, I wanted to see if Des could deliver the answer I sought.\n\nI needed to ask Des about his affair with Julie, the married woman who ran our Home. Julie had taken Des away from me. He had been mine and then he became hers. I needed to know why and how that had happened.\n\nDes and I walked to the nearby Chinese restaurant. When we entered, it was a quarter full, perfect for my needs.\n\nNot too far away from where we sat was Des's rented house where he spent his time writing sitcom scripts.\n\nThis had been his work for years but soon it would stop. His production company had just dropped him. None of his projects had got off the ground and the money he had been using to fund his writing was now dwindling.\n\n'I'll finish the script I am working on at the moment,' he said nonchalantly, 'and then I will find another job. Probably get a quiet office job and do writing in my spare time.'\n\nDes betrayed no bitterness at having to give up this work. Since leaving Burbank, he had lived in many places, worked at many jobs. These included barman, postman and IT manager.\n\nIn that sense, he had been much braver than me.\n\nI've always been filled with an ambition directed towards a writing life. To be employed as anything else would, in my eyes, mark me as a burning failure.\n\nDes was different. He marched to his own drum beat, cared not for the gossip of others. He would work as anything \u2013 and he did.\n\nI told him that script-writing was the job I thought him perfect for.\n\nHe smiled, a little embarrassed. But it was true.\n\nDes was not only the funniest boy at Burbank during my time there but he was easily the brightest, the most imaginative.\n\nIf you would have put money on anyone from the Burbank class of 1970 succeeding in life, Des Hurrion was the one you would have bet on.\n\nHe had an enviable intelligence. He once told me that at the age of ten he decided to teach himself French and Latin, which he duly did.\n\nI wasn't surprised at this achievement. Nothing seemed beyond his ken.\n\nDuring the first three years of his stay at Burbank, Des attended a private school in Nottingham.\n\nI have met and worked with many privately educated men but Des was not like any of them; he never used his intelligence as a sword, to wound or cut down others. He was not vindictive.\n\nHis was a graceful, generous intelligence, shot through with a warm wit that appealed to everyone in the Home, and I mean everyone.\n\nFrom staff member to the youngest child, no one was exempted from Des Hurrion's many charms.\n\nDes contained a self-assurance that for a shy fearful boy like me was thoroughly addictive. It still is. I have always envied people who appeared self-possessed, confident, looked like they knew exactly what they were doing in life, their faces seemingly untroubled by the world.\n\nI keenly noted them on London tubes and buses, on the street, in work places, in shops, in clubs, in caf\u00e9s and restaurants, and I yearned for just a smidgen of their self-possession. I thought, if I could just have a little of their magic and then my world will be a beautiful place to live in. And on such notions do fools build their castles.\n\nAt Burbank, Des made me feel that anything was possible, that despite living in care, the future was mine to mould into whatever shape I so desired. He shrugged off limitations. He did not even acknowledge them.\n\nHow I loved him for that. How I envied him for that.\n\nThen Julie seduced him and he was no longer mine. Once I had a hundred per cent of Des. Now, I only had fifty.\n\nI have handled many difficult things in life but rejection burns me like nothing else.\n\nYet, I couldn't blame Des.\n\nThat song Bobby Goldsborough used to sing on the radio to Des and me about loving an older woman in summer, said it all. He was seventeen and she was thirty-five. Who could resist? I would have done exactly the same.\n\nThe affair lasted months and only I knew about it.\n\nCertainly, Barry, Julie's husband didn't, or he would have torn the Home down, brick by brick.\n\nDes even shacked up with Julie for a while. This was after she and Barry had split up for good and he had moved far away. But it didn't last. How could it? The thrill had gone.\n\nSuddenly, they no longer worried about being caught in compromising positions. Now they worried about mortgages and jobs, the nine to five life.\n\nDes was never cut out for that existence. He still isn't.\n\nThinking about this now, perhaps there was another reason for hunting Des down, a selfish reason. Perhaps by simply being with him I thought I would once again feel my future turning gold, see the world opening up in front of my eyes, just as it did back in my youth when Des and I sat together in the sitting room and played records, or talked in the garden, sitting there with a ball at our feet, the sun placed high above us in a careless blue sky.\n\n'I'm still not sure,' he said carefully, 'if I should tell you everything about my life and what happened, but because it is you,' he ruefully smiled, 'I probably will.'\n\nForty-nine years old now, Des retained a face that time had rendered quite keen. His dark hair was pushing back a bit but that just served to emphasise his large brown eyes. The skin around those eyes remained relatively unwrinkled and his constant expression was one of being slightly amazed by what was going on around him. When you discovered what he had been through as child and man, that was no big surprise.\n\nI pushed the tape recorder across towards him.\n\n'What better time than now to start the talk?' I said.\n\n'What better time indeed?' he replied.\n\n'And don't forget to do Julie.'\n\nDes laughed out loud at my unintended double entendre.\n\n'To do Julie,' he repeated, mimicking my London accent.\n\nHe swigged again at his beer and finished it off.\n\n'But first,' he said, as he signalled for more alcohol, 'a little background material.'\n\n* * *\n\nDes Hurrion was born on 23rd July 1956, in Paddington, London.\n\nHis mother, Mary, was a Catholic Irish girl who crossed the Irish Sea in the early fifties and found work in London as a chambermaid.\n\nShe met a young engineer who persuaded her to do that which she shouldn't, and Mary fell pregnant. The father disappeared, last heard of living in Shepherd's Bush.\n\nThe mother was broken by anguish. Her religion was strict and unforgiving on such matters. Having babies out of wedlock was a mortal sin. Now, hell itself beckoned.\n\n'The plan was to have me adopted the minute I arrived,' Des said. 'So she went to a mother and baby home in Highgate and I was born.'\n\nAs is always the way in these matters, Highgate is less than a mile away from where I now live.\n\nWhen Des appeared, the inevitable occurred; the mother's maternal instincts reared up, completely consumed her. Suddenly, she could not abandon her baby son.\n\nA new plan was required to keep her in Des's life.\n\n'She had me fostered to a family in Addlestone, Surrey,' Des said.\n\n'Meanwhile, she tried to find a job as a housekeeper \u2013 she was a very good cook \u2013 and once she had done that she thought she would then take me back and bring me up in the house she was working in. I was taken to this foster family just before my first Christmas.'\n\nHe paused, reached for his beer.\n\n'You know, I have never spent Christmas with my real mum.'\n\nI asked Des if he at least knew the nationality of his father?\n\n'I first heard about my father when I was fifteen,' he explained. 'If you remember I had a talent for playing the piano and my social worker wondered where that talent had come from, so on her own initiative she found out about my father.\n\n'She visited me at Burbank one day with a document and reading it she said she had found out that my father was an engineer.\n\n'She said the document had more information about him and some information about my birth mother; I told her I didn't want to know.\n\n'Subsequently,' he continued, 'I traced my birth mother. During that process I learned four things about my father: he was Irish, he was twenty-eight when I was conceived, he lived in Shepherd's Bush, his name was Ben Kavanagh and he did a runner as soon as he found out my mother was pregnant.'\n\nI had never met my father either, I told Des, and I believed I never would.\n\n'How come?' he asked.\n\nWhen my mother fell pregnant with me, she was a long-term patient in a Surrey hospital. Naturally, her condition created a huge scandal.\n\nUrgent questions had to be raised. How had this happened? Who was the father? A doctor, heaven forbid? A nurse, heaven forbid? A patient? A groundsman? An outsider?\n\nWhoever it was, a cover up was required, a cover up that existed to this day.\n\nMoreover, my mother never gave up his name, either to the authorities or, later to me.\n\nTwo days after my birth I was placed in care and then fostered.\n\nDes too was fostered but his experience had been different to mine. His foster parents adored him. Mine made my childhood a living hell. Des's people sought to give him a kind of loving. Mine cruelly berated me all day long.\n\nSuch is the turning of the cards.\n\nDes's foster dad was a glazier by trade and the mum stayed at home.\n\nThey had two daughters of their own but they were giving, loving people who were moved to foster abandoned children. Des was later to become their fourth adoption.\n\n'I think my saving grace \u2013 my sanity \u2013 is that I was really loved in those early years by my adopted parents and by my real mother who came and visited at least once a fortnight,' Des said.\n\nIronically, a battle between Des's two mothers, his real mum and his foster mum, started to take shape. The battle for Des's heart lasted for two years. Then Mary, Des's birth mother, found work as a steward on a boat sailing round the world.\n\nIt was there that Mary met a young man whose entices she could not resist. She fell pregnant again.\n\nThe father now gave Mary a cold choice. Either come to America with me, or raise Des and the new baby on your own.\n\nOne or the other.\n\nMary acquiesced to her lover. She chose him over her son. On a day he would never forget, Mary visited Des and told him that she would not see him anymore.\n\nShe was starting up a new life and he would not be in it.\n\nThis day, this very day, was the last time they would ever see each other.\n\nDes was just three-and-a-half years old.\n\n'I remember it so well,' Des said. 'She told me she was going to America, which is a very stupid thing to say to a three-and-a-half-year-old because America might as well be Isleworth. And then she just walked.'\n\nAs she walked away, Des instinctively turned to his foster parents, his safety net. He believed they would catch him and hug him and tell him everything was going to be alright. That the world still existed and he still had a place in it, an important place. But he was wrong.\n\nThey did not reach out to him. They did not cuddle him, or embrace him. They too, like Des, stood frosted in confusion.\n\nThe effect of their inaction would haunt Des in the most terrible way.\n\n'My foster parents were good people,' Des said, 'but they had been born in the 1900s and they didn't know how to show emotion or affection. I wasn't allowed to show any anger or frustration. What was worse is that when my real mum took me out as a kid, she would say, we'll be together one day and it will all be wonderful. She built up this fairy story which I subliminally took in.\n\n'When she walked out on me that day the fairy story was gone and suddenly I was in harsh reality. She created a fantasy world we were going to be in. Then she left me and that world was gone.'\n\nTo deal with the loss, the pain, the confusion, Des reached for every child's first line of defence \u2013 fantasy. Every day, he imagined his mum returning to rescue him and taking him off to a lovely house and there he would find laughter and smiles and sunshine days and happy ever afters.\n\nHe kept this picture alive his whole childhood.\n\nHe had to, otherwise he was dead.\n\nYou and I both, I told him.\n\nThe years passed. Financially, they were difficult. The sharp edges of poverty started closing in on the family. In all aspects of his life, from food to clothing, there was want.\n\n'I used to have to wear my sister's blouse to school,' he said, 'and of course they button up the wrong way to the boys. I used to get so paranoid that someone would notice. I had to wear her shoes. My feet are knackered now because the shoes were too tight for me.'\n\nAt school, Des did not shine. His grades were continually low. He also failed his eleven plus. Not hard to see why. Motherless children rarely prosper academically. Other things on their mind, you see.\n\nYet Des was lucky. Unlike me, he had a great aptitude for learning music. At home, he played piano, played it extremely well.\n\nOften, when he practised, though, his dad ordered him to play quieter. A streak of anger would then rise in Des and he found himself silently wishing his father would die.\n\n'Unfortunately,' Des said, 'I got my wish.'\n\nIn May 1969, his adoptive father contracted emphysema and took to his bed. Des was scheduled to go on a week's holiday at a scout camp. The day before Des's departure, his dad called for him.\n\n'My dad was a fun loving man,' Des said, 'but when he got the illness he became a real curmudgeon. So I walked into the downstairs room and I thought, oh God, here we go again. But when I walked in he was all smiles. He gave me a ten bob note or a pound \u2013 I can't remember \u2013 but he did it because I was off to scout camp. I couldn't believe it. So I went off to scout camp.\n\n'When I got back my adopted brother ran out of the house and said, \"Dad's dead.\" I remember my foster mother hugging me, which was something she never did, and it being really quite uncomfortable. I didn't like that at all. We were poor then but now we were even poorer.'\n\nHis father's death was merely the prelude to the darkened storm heading his way.\n\nNot long after burying the father, the foster mother's granddaughter was diagnosed with flu. Doctors heavily counselled the foster mother against any contact due to her anaemic illness.\n\nThe foster mother ignored their warnings. Blood will protect me, she reasoned. She reasoned wrong.\n\nIn February 1970, the foster mother was rushed into hospital with major flu symptoms, complicated by her weak immune system.\n\nIn her absence, Des, not yet fourteen, was now forced to take on responsibility, become the head of the house.\n\nHe cooked, he washed, he cleaned. He made sure his siblings got to and from school, made sure they got to bed on time. He also organised weekly hospital visits where the mother would issue instructions.\n\nTwo months into this new life, a policeman knocked on their front door.\n\n'Are you Des Hurrion?' he asked.\n\n'Yes.'\n\nThe policeman shifted his feet, looked awkwardly at Des. Then, he spoke.\n\n'I am very sorry to tell you this but your mother has died. Can I come in?'\n\nBut Des said, 'No, you can't come in,' and then he remembered himself and added, 'Don't worry. I'll be fine.'\n\nDes closed the door. The first thought that struck him was about their three dogs: now mother had passed, would they be able to survive? That question really bothered him.\n\n'My younger brother broke into tears when he was told,' Des said. 'But I didn't feel anything. I was numb. I had just lost four parents in ten years.'\n\nSocial workers were called. Whilst they began assessing the situation, Des stayed at the family house, still cooking, still cleaning, still protecting his siblings.\n\nThen, he was asked to attend an appointment at a solicitor's office. At that meeting, his mum's will was read out.\n\nIn it, a major surprise.\n\nHis foster mother had ordered that a part of money from the sale of the house would pay for a private education for Des. He would be schooled in an exclusive boarding school. His adoptive mother had reached out from beyond the grave and set him on a new path.\n\nDes was shown a list of prospective boarding schools. He picked a school in Nottingham. He did so because it was the furthest away from the nightmare he now knew as home. He started in September.\n\nMeanwhile, there was summer to negotiate. At first the authorities tried to place Des with his foster family's relations. But those relatives cared not for the golden child.\n\n'I was sent to relatives who didn't really want me,' Des said. 'There was one auntie and uncle in Selsey Bill. The uncle used to smoke all the time, ash falling on his chest. They didn't want me around so I was put into care where I was specifically told I could at least spend holidays with my foster brothers and sisters.'\n\n* * *\n\nNot for him the stability of living in one Home. Instead, Des was moved from one children's home to another without rhyme or reason. He was not allowed to settle but made to move round the country seeking shelter.\n\n'I'd be put in a home and then a bit later I would get a letter from the authorities,' he said. 'It would contain a rail ticket and say, be at this station at this time where so and so is going to meet you. Off I'd go. Then once in that home I'd get another letter.\n\n'Be at this station at this time and so and so will pick you up. I'm thirteen years old with a little blue suitcase going from station to station. I went to Sussex, I went to Norfolk, all over the country. Can you imagine that today?'\n\nFunny word, care, when applied to Des.\n\nThe first children's home Des entered was in Hindhead, Surrey.\n\nHe arrived on a Friday, the weather absolutely glorious.\n\nIt was morning and the Home was deserted. All the kids were on holiday. Des was taken in, sat at a table and given some breakfast. After he finished eating, the woman in charge told him to take a stroll around the grounds so he could become familiar with his new surroundings.\n\nDes walked into the gardens, began exploring. Next thing he knew he had stumbled upon a beauty spot, known locally as the Golden Valley. There he stopped and gazed into its tranquil, breath-taking scenery.\n\nAnd then it happened, the Orphan's Epiphany arrived and made itself real to him. He was not alone in experiencing its terrible gifts.\n\nAll of us who have been abandoned have experienced the moment when we suddenly realise with a deep horror that we are completely and utterly alone in this world: that there is no one to guide us and protect us or help us. There is no mother, no father, no love. The only people on our side are ourselves and we will never be the same again.\n\nAll this revealed to Des on the most glorious of summer days.\n\n'I stood on this spot looking down the valley on this beautiful day and I am thirteen years old,' Des said, 'and I said to myself, You are on your own. There is no one there. You are alone but you know what? Part of me was okay about it. Part of me was absolutely terrified and sad. Yet I also felt kind of a thrill because now I was in charge of my own destiny.'\n\nI told Des that my Orphan's Epiphany occurred when I was seven years old. My foster mother had just beaten me with a cane and sent me to bed. The rain was heavy that night, the wind so strong it made the tree outside tap irregularly on my window, creating a sound so menacing, as if the Devil himself was trying to get into my room.\n\nThat was the moment which told me I had no one to turn to in life, no one at all.\n\nMost people were given this message \u2013 all humans are alone \u2013 when death approached. We orphans were given it at a very young age.\n\nI don't know which of us was better off knowing such things. I have always suspected it is us.\n\nDes realised that he had a huge problem. He was a sensitive kid who loved books and played the piano. He suspected that many kids in care did not share such enthusiasms.\n\nIn the rough and tumble of a children's home environment, Des knew he would be swallowed up unless he made drastic changes.\n\nIn a flash, the answer appeared. He would kill himself, and then create a new Des, develop a new character who was charming and funny and could talk himself out of any situation.\n\nCharm and humour would be his protection from the fists of the unhappy. To achieve this aim, Des had to rid himself of his melancholia, the sadness which shone unmistakeably from his eyes, the sadness which made him an immediate target.\n\nTo do so, he took his deep painful emotions and memories and buried them as deep as he could. If they came to mind, he shushed them away, like you did a troublesome pet. It was hard at first but soon he became competent.\n\nAnd the effect was astonishing.\n\nWithin a month, Des Hurrion had become a bright and breezy boy, forever quick with a joke and a smile. Suddenly, everywhere he went, people marvelled at him, wanted to know him. He was irresistible. He told them jokes and they laughed. He was cheeky, irreverent and they patted him on the back.\n\n'I had re-invented myself,' he said. 'For the first time in my life I felt special. It was great, a really good time. Discovering you have ability when everybody has written you off was great. I kind of felt there wasn't much I couldn't do. I had come out of this oppressive environment and suddenly I could express myself, do the things I wanted to do. It was a great time.'\n\nThe magic had worked. Beautifully.\n\nPeople wanted to know Des Hurrion and be with him and I was no exception.\n\nDes arrived at Burbank in the summer of 1970. Another impersonal letter had arrived, containing a rail ticket and orders to be at Woking train station at six in the evening on a certain Sunday.\n\nA Barry Isleworth will pick you up, the letter said.\n\nDes packed his little blue suitcase and trundled off to see where life was now going to take him.\n\nHe waited an hour for Barry at Woking train station.\n\nWhen he finally turned up in his purple Morris Minor, they both realised that they had been waiting for each other at the wrong entrances.\n\nOn the way back to Burbank, Des blithely said to Barry, 'I won't be here long. I'm back at school in Nottingham soon and then I'll probably spend the holidays with my little brothers and sisters.'\n\nBarry turned to Des, a little confused.\n\n'Hasn't anyone told you?' he asked.\n\n'Told me what?'\n\n'Your family do not want you to spend time with them. They don't want you. I am sorry. You'll be here at the Home full time now. This is where you now live.'\n\nIce snagged his stomach, turned his body numb. Bewilderment suffused him. After all he had done for them, his foster family had turned against him, cruelly rejected him.\n\nHe arrived at Burbank in a state of shock but as he got out of the car, he suddenly remembered what to do. He reached for his new character. The new Des cracked a smile, buried the hurt and walked into Burbank.\n\nAt this point, I had been at Burbank for two years. Even so, I can't recall how Des and I met, what was said, how we bonded; all I know is that very soon after his arrival, Des and I were firm buddies.\n\nLike everyone else, I was mesmerised by him. I wanted his magic. I wanted to be as confident as him, that self-assured. I wanted to play guitar beautifully, write lengthy interesting essays, crack witty remarks, time and time again. Just like Des did.\n\nThe only problem I had with Des was that he went away to his boarding school and there was no one else at the Home to fill his shoes. Actually, there was Colin Nollie who I bonded with over music, but his dad took him away after a few months and I never saw him again.\n\nThe other kids at the Home I got on with fine. But none were as magical as my Boy Wonder.\n\nDuring his holidays we hung together as one. He played me Steely Dan records; I played him Bowie and The Faces. We read similar books, swapped authors, gave each other knowledge. We played football in the garden for hours and hours, and then smoked ciggies and tried to kiss the girls. We laughed at staff members, broke rules, and took as much advantage as we could. We grew up together.\n\nAnd then suddenly I was fifteen, he was seventeen and life was about to change.\n\n* * *\n\nJulie, the head of the house, became a hippie. It seemed the right thing to do. Although a child of the sixties, she had missed out on that decade's massive cultural changes. I did not know why. I suspected she had been too busy obeying everyone \u2013 parents, husband, her career \u2013 to take part.\n\nNow it was time to time to change all that.\n\nThe catalyst for this dramatic change was Julie's husband, Barry Isleworth. Together, they were charged with the running of the Home. I suppose you could say they were the closest any of us would get to a proper mother and a father figure.\n\nAt first, their work reflected their marriage: Julie was in charge of staff rotas, the washing of clothes, the feeding of the children. Barry was the boss. He chaired meetings, roared off into town when he felt like it, drank a lot, maintained his own little office, acted the boisterous father figure.\n\nMan first, woman last. It was the early seventies and feminism was a new concept, ripe for mocking. You want to burn your bra, darling? You can guess the rest of the 'joke.'\n\nWhilst she loved him, Julie ignored the unfair balance of their relationship. Love will do that to humans. But when the cracks appeared in the marriage, exacerbated by Barry's drinking and his roving eye, Julie determined to take action.\n\nAs her home was bound up in her job, she had nowhere to hide, nowhere to run. She would have to stay, see out the marriage.\n\nThat's when she decided to become a hippie. What a great act of revenge, to turn yourself into something your boozy, narrow minded husband would never understand in a million years.\n\nObviously, Julie would need a crash course in her new chosen subject.\n\nShe needed to know her Dylans from her Lightfoots, her Woodstocks from her Isle of Wights, her Hesse from her Kerouac, her kaftans from her afghans.\n\nThere was only one man suitable for the job \u2013 my fellow orphan and very best friend, Des Hurrion.\n\nDes's obsession with music was as fierce as mine. It began the day a social worker gave him the album, Fire and Water by the band Free, and it never abated.\n\nAll it took was two plays of that album and down came the posters of his favourite footballers, Manchester City's Franny Lee and Colin Bell, and up went posters of the two main Free men, Paul Rodgers and Paul Kossoff, to take their place.\n\nDes now dressed accordingly. I see him now, sitting in the Home's front room, wearing his blue cheese-cloth shirt, his dark luxurious hair dropping onto his shoulders, playing Free songs on his acoustic guitar, a rock star in aspic.\n\nJulie started gravitating towards Des, started spending a lot of time in his company. I would often find her with Des in the sitting room, her sitting in a chair, sewing, Des playing his guitar or playing records.\n\nSometimes, he would point out a particular part in a record or tell some story about the band they were listening to, and Julie would instantly stop what she was doing, and lean forward and listen so attentively.\n\nOr maybe he would drop a joke and she would laugh and shake her head in quiet amusement. Oh Desmond.\n\nAt first I found this scenario kind of funny. It amused me to hear this woman I thought of as so square, suddenly start talking about Alan Hull's new solo album, Pipedream, or what she thought of Hendrix at Woodstock.\n\nDes saw her differently, though.\n\nJulie was not a mother figure to him. She was a bright, attractive woman who paid him loads of attention. He liked that. He liked the new Julie, the one who was opening up day by day, turning into something totally unexpected.\n\n'I remember coming home from working in a part-time job I had,' Des said, 'and everybody had already eaten and Julie saying to me, what would you like to eat? I said, I really fancy fish chips and beans and she went out and cooked it for me. She presented it to me in the dining room and then sat and asked me all about my day. It was kind of weird.'\n\nOne night, the inevitable happened in the small corridor that leads from the hall to the kitchen. I can see it now, Des coming one way, Julie towards him.\n\n'She was smiling benignly all over her face,' Des recalled, 'and as we squeezed past she kissed me on the lips. It wasn't a passionate kiss but it was a kiss and it totally freaked me out. I had no idea what was going on. I really don't know what happened but soon she was coming to see me and we were being really naughty. It really is as simple as that.\n\n'There were no women around who fancied me and I was flattered. I was seventeen years old, and wanted a woman to find me attractive. The fact that she was twice my age didn't seem to matter, she was a woman who found me attractive.\n\n'Any woman who made an advance at me at this time was in. I just went with the flow, as I have done all my life. I just did it. I didn't know what was going on, I just knew I enjoyed the attention of this woman and I knew that I liked this woman.\n\n'I always know quickly the people I am going to like and when she changed and became a bit more open, I realised I liked her.'\n\nThe affair lasted seven months and was conducted in complete secrecy. That meant deceiving me, four live-in staff, six ancillary workers, twenty children and a husband of seven years standing. A salut, you two.\n\nThat was some going.\n\nAt first, I suspected nothing. In fact, the idea never crossed my mind and if it had done I would have dismissed it as absolutely preposterous. A member of staff did not sleep with a child. That thought had not even been formed in our collective consciousness. At Burbank, the unacknowledged demarcations were clear. It was kids here, staff over there and never the two shall be at one.\n\nMoreover, Barry, Julie's husband, was not a man you would want to mess around with. This was a beefy man, a capricious man, capable of great and deep anger at the most unpredictable of times.\n\nThen I started growing suspicious.\n\nDes would make the odd remark or disappear and then not be able to satisfactorily tell me where he had been. I noticed that we rarely spent time alone; Julie always seemed to be around.\n\nFinally, on holiday in the Isle of Wight, the truth was revealed. I was on the beach and went to get an ice cream from the kiosk. Next to it was a postcard stand. I wandered over to look at them.\n\nThe next thing I knew, I heard Des and Julie talking on the other side of the stand. They thought they were alone.\n\nShe was telling him they had to be careful, she thought Barry was getting dangerously suspicious, Des was telling her not to worry. Then they moved off. I gazed at a postcard for two minutes.\n\nLater that day, in a quiet place and moment, I told Des I knew.\n\n'Really,' he said.\n\n'Really,' I replied.\n\n'Ah,' he said.\n\nAnd then he brought me into his confidence. He told me how he had been seeing Julie for a few months now, how she was desperately unhappy, how her marriage was dead and that they both brought each other happiness.\n\nWhat I didn't know was that the fires were already cooling. About a month after my discovery, Des and Julie finished.\n\nWhy, I asked him thirty-four years after the event?\n\n'Because I had just enrolled at Guildford Technical College and had begun hanging out with girls and boys of my own age. I found it embarrassing to be the lover of a thirty-five-year-old woman,' he coolly said. 'So I ended it.'\n\nIn the Home, of course, the relationship was wonderful. It was illicit, exciting. Sneaking down midnight corridors, opening doors slowly, hoping they wouldn't creak, entering a bed for sex with a woman so much older than yourself.\n\nFantastic. What could be better for a rampant seventeen-year-old?\n\nBut at college, amongst his own age, his own kind, the attraction waned.\n\nThere was another reason for Des breaking away from Julie.\n\nRock 'n' roll. May sound silly but you have to understand that for Des music was the most important thing in the world to him. Why? Because music was the creator of his dreams, the father of his visions. Music shaped a world inside his mind's eye and Des went to live there.\n\n'One of things that my 1970s rock and roll did was to romanticise the itinerant,' Des said.\n\n'Listen to the song, I'm A Mover by Free. There is a line about being born by a river and like that river, the guy has been moving since. Can I associate myself with that? Damn right, I can. You're talking about someone who had been shunted around for five years. And check out the lyrics to a John Miles song called Remember Yesterday.\n\n'There is a line that says something about how he has been everywhere but still has no place to go. What better way to deal with a peripatetic life than to realise it was actually quite cool? Rock 'n' roll music really did change my life. Suddenly there is this wonderful world you can go into with these sounds and lyrics.'\n\nI knew this escape route well. In fact, I knew it back to front. Music gave me hours of welcome escape, took me off to faraway worlds, fantastic places. Yet Des took things much further than me.\n\nSome months into his course, he quit further education for good. He hopped on a boat to France where he busked and made his living.\n\nDes and his guitar, and the open road. Told you he was braver than me. I'd never have made such a move. Fear would have stopped me. The world still scared me at this point.\n\n'I left college because I wanted to be free of institutions,' he said. 'The boarding school, the Home, college... Also my work was suffering because of this liberated rock 'n' roll lifestyle I was living and there were no adults to tell me what a stupid decision I was making, although my course tutor tried.'\n\nDes returned to Britain, got a job, got a flat.\n\n'I did what most people do at that age,' he said, 'which is listen to rock 'n' roll music, drink too much and just have the time of my life.'\n\nIn 1977, he went with friends to the Guildford Civic Hall to see a band called Thin Lizzy. Who should be standing in the bar when he arrived? Julie. They got talking.\n\nTelephone numbers were swapped.\n\nJulie had now left Barry, had her own place where she lived with her daughter, Susan.\n\nSoon, the inevitable. The pair were re-united. Des went to live with Julie. But it would never work. Des had left college to pursue the magic that can free your soul. Instead, he found himself with a job, a wife, a child.\n\n'It wasn't where I wanted to be,' Des stated. 'I wanted to live in London and I didn't care where it was.'\n\nI too needed London to save me but Des took a different route to Our Blessed City of Salvation, the city that allows you to re-invent yourself, re-make yourself, to do as Des had done, and forget all. London breathes its past on all its citizens but its future is what excites, what allows us to hide our pasts.\n\nOne morning, Des opened up a map of London, shut his eyes and placed his finger on the page.\n\nHe opened his eyes. His finger was placed in the middle of the Thames River. No good. He repeated the action. His finger hit Watford. Elton John territory. Not good.\n\n'The third place I hit was a place called Gunnersbury which is West London, Chiswick,' he said.\n\n'I took the day off sick and I went to Gunnersbury to have a look around. There is nothing at Gunnersbury. There is the Brentford flyover and a roller disco which tells you how long ago it was. I went back and looked at the map and saw that Ealing was near Gunnersbury and Ealing resonated. I suppose because I had heard of Ealing Broadway, Ealing Common, Ealing Studios. I thought okay, I'll live in Ealing.'\n\nOne day, the inevitable happened. Des and Julie got into a massive row. Shortly afterwards, he packed his bags.\n\nHe travelled to Ealing Broadway station, and then asked a cab driver to take him to the cheapest hotel. Two weeks later he applied for a job as a barman at a local pub.\n\n'I had to start all over again. No friends, didn't know anybody. Got a job in a local pub after two weeks. Went into the pub on Thursday and the landlord told me you are working tomorrow night with a guy called Chris.\n\n'That night, this bloke walked in at eight o'clock and said, \"Hi, I'm Chris.\" We worked the shift and had a good laugh, and at the end I said, \"Do you fancy a pint one night?\" He said, \"Yeah all right,\" and like all the key relationships in my life I knew straight away that I was going to know him forever.'\n\nThe very next night he met a woman called Margie and a man called Wig. To this day, all three have been his closest friends. Like me, like so many other orphans I suspect, his friends became his family.\n\nSoon after, Des left the pub, moved on. He took on casual jobs, worked as a postman, a fork-lift driver before deciding to get serious and take a computer course.\n\nNaturally, he passed. He began working in IT, working his way up to manager status. But something was not quite right.\n\n* * *\n\nEvery now and then, especially after a weekend of heavy drinking, he would suffer panic attacks.\n\nHe put these attacks down to his large alcohol intake. But one day at work, a Monday, he went to the pub at lunchtime for the boss's birthday drink.\n\nAt one point, feeling a little giddy, he went to the toilet.\n\nAnd it was there that Des Hurrion fell to pieces.\n\nHe recalled, to me, strange, frightening sensations that rushed through his body. He remembered how fear filled up his stomach quicker than booze ever did. He recalled how he rushed out of that toilet shaking, and afraid to his very soul, as if death had just brushed by his shouder.\n\n'I walked over Putney Bridge. I thought I was having a heart attack,' Des said. 'It was a nightmare. The next day this depression moved in, this dreadful depression. It was like carrying a cow on my shoulders. I remember walking round the park and I could feel this thing on me, on my shoulders, on my head.\n\n'I really needed a break but I had to work, I had to pay the rent so every day I dragged myself into work. A lot of people at that time described me as looking shell shocked. And they were right, I was finally diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder. I must have looked awful every morning coming into work. I stuck it out for a couple of years and then I went into counselling.'\n\nLuckily, Des happened upon a sympathetic psychiatrist. As their sessions lengthened, enlightenment slowly dawned. Answers appeared.\n\nHe was shown that the character he had created to protect himself with had fallen apart. All the hurt that he had pushed downwards had now surfaced. That was why the pain was so unrelenting. That was why the black despair gripped so tightly.\n\nThey went back further and further and further until they came upon that dreadful day, the day when Des's mother walked away from him, and so, in their unwitting way, did his foster parents.\n\n'I had locked it away but it wouldn't stay locked,' Des quietly said.\n\n'The simple fact is that at the age of three-and-a-half I had my heart broken and wasn't allowed to express the pain and the anger and the fear that I felt.\n\n'My social worker once brought up the subject of my mother and I remember very clearly being very practical and saying, \"Oh it's fine, she's got her thing to do.\" But I couldn't deal with it and my brain imploded. So I had a dreadful time for a very long time. From my late twenties to my early forties, in fact.'\n\nAs children, we had no understanding of adults. If they hit us, we became convinced it was our fault. We knew not their motives. How could we? We could hardly stand on our own two feet.\n\nWhen I discovered in later life that my foster mother had experienced a bad childhood, a heavy load was instantly lifted off me. I now knew I was not bad or stupid, or any of those other terrible names she had spat out at me. The pain she was in had caused her to lash out. I just happened to be in the way. Unfortunate. Unlucky. Terrible. But you know what?\n\nKnowing that I was not to blame gave me a tremendous kick-start.\n\nAt thirty-nine years of age, Des decided to track down his real mother. He needed to confront her. He needed understanding. He needed her to heal him.\n\nAt first, he thought she was in America but he was wrong. After a year of hunting he was astonished to find that one of her recent addresses was just two miles away from where he lived. They had probably passed each other by in the street and never realised it.\n\nHe discovered that she had married the father of her second child and had had two more children with him. The man had then run (as they do) and she had raised the family on her own. Then she went back to Ireland. Des found her address and sent her a letter.\n\n'I said in the letter that I didn't want to upset her life but just wondered how she was and who she was,' Des said, his voice now slowing. This is such hard territory for him to enter.\n\n'She phoned me. She is thirty years older than me and she sounded like an old woman. It was such a shock because I remember when she was young. We had a brief talk and at the end of it she said, \"I love you Desmond,\" and I said, \"I love you very much, Mum.\"'\n\nThis was the first time mother and son had told each other that. Des was in his late thirties at the time.\n\nThe phone calls continued but when Des suggested a meeting, she shocked Des. She said no.\n\nThe stigma of illegitimacy still frightened her. 'She thought, if someone found out that she had a son, she would lose her friends, lose her kids, and that she would be vilified all these years later for having a child out of wedlock,' Des explained.\n\n'She couldn't cope with it at all. So we had a phone call relationship. We did plan to meet but she let me down a couple of times. It was a very painful eight or nine months. She sent me a jumper for my fortieth birthday and a card with a car on the front like a kid's card, which was weird. She also sent me a couple of photographs of her. I had never seen anyone who looked like me before. We were two peas in a pod. I could have been her brother.'\n\nDes Hurrion retained just one happy instant from this time. Speaking to her on Hallowe'en, his mum said, 'You know I don't believe in witches.'\n\nTo which her son replied, 'You haven't seen some of the women I've been out with.'\n\nBoth mother and son laughed out loud together. They had never done that before. It felt good.\n\n'But it wasn't going anywhere,' Des continued. 'I phoned her in February of 1996 and she was in a foul mood on the phone. She accused me of having people spy on her in Ireland. She was really paranoid.\n\n'I phoned her back and said, look this is not healthy; don't call me back and I won't call you. Then I put the phone down.'\n\nYet she still haunted him, still exerted a massive pull on his soul. How could she not? She was his mother.\n\nA year later, Des wrote again to her. In the letter, he told her not to respond, that there was no point staying in touch, but he wanted to tell her one thing, and that was this \u2013 I will always love you, O mother of mine.\n\nAs he told me this, tears started up in his eyes. Such tragedy. Mother and son, torn apart by religion, by circumstance, unable to help each other, to grow, to live as intended, in happiness, in love. I felt helpless.\n\nDes wiped his eyes, moved his head left and right, attempted to shake himself clear of the sadness gripping him.\n\nAnother swig of beer, then he started up again, his tone more measured, more matter of fact.\n\n'I was very pissed off over Easter and I couldn't understand why,' he said.\n\n'Then I realised it was the ninth anniversary of me getting in touch with her. I wrote myself a note which said, I am free. That was three months ago and that's when it ended.\n\n'I do understand and I forgive. Because when she left me she had my sister Alex inside her and she made the right decision. She had an unborn baby and she was with a guy that she thought would be okay. I don't have a problem with that, I just have a problem with all the pain it has caused me.'\n\nHe paused. 'I always feel that all my life I have been tidying up someone else's mess. But the thing is I have come to terms with it all. I understand about my mother, I have recovered from the breakdown and to be honest, I like my life now.'\n\nThe clock struck ten.\n\nI looked down and saw that the ashes of the words we had spoken were piled up around our feet. Empty beer bottles stood close to white plates which were smeared with dark sauce and coloured foods.\n\nFor a brief second or so, the walls of the Chinese restaurant faded in and out, in and out, out and in. Alcohol was once more threatening to take me on a long holiday from myself.\n\nThe bill arrived, money was exchanged.\n\nDes walked me to the station in the black cold country night and we hugged goodbye.\n\nOn the train home, I thought of Des living alone at forty-nine years of age, not married, childless. For most people this would be the tragedy. Life is about children, about togetherness.\n\nYet there are other routes to take in life and just as meaningful. Who is to argue differently?\n\nAs Bill S. once wrote, to thine ownself be true.\n\nAll in all, I thought Des happy. After all, he had his freedom, the precious freedom that music showed him as a kid and still means so much to him today.\n\nMusic made him unfettered, unafraid. God bless music. Today, Des Hurrion has the ability to go with the flow of his life, to go wherever his soul dictates, see where it takes him, whether that be as an IT manager in charge of an office, in charge of people, or as a barman in an Ealing pub full of drama.\n\nIt is the same freedom he exuded at the Home. My man still believed in the magic that can change your soul. It made me so happy.\n\nA week later, I wrote an e-mail to Des.\n\nFrom: paolo@gmail.com\n\nTo: desh@hotmail.com\n\nSubject: The New Book\n\nDes \u2013 Hope all well, amico. Finished writing your chapter last night and have attached it above. I was hoping you could take a look at it, correct any mistakes, dates, etc. The first thing that struck me was how similar our starts in life had been. Both our mothers were Catholic immigrants who escaped to England from highly religious and restrictive societies. Both of them carried such high hopes for their future and both tragically floundered.\n\nUnintentionally, they brought two boys into this world whose lives would be heavily touched by pain, misery, extreme difficulty.\n\nThe only difference was this: The bulk of my pain occurred in childhood.\n\nYours, unfortunately, would not let go and savage you again in later life.\n\nI have to say I was really moved by a lot of what you had to say. That image of you as a small child with your little blue suitcase being shunted from home to home is one that will stay with me a very long time. I really think it a damning indictment of how badly valued children (especially motherless ones) were in this country. I use the past tense. I can only write what I see but I think there has been a positive sea shift in child rearing. I just look at my friends who are fathers and they are fantastically involved with their children, probably in ways that their fathers had not been.\n\nThey really have placed themselves at the centre of their kid's lives, have fully accepted commitment and responsibility. I really do admire them for those qualities. And in the world of care I see positive changes. Since The Looked After Kid was published I have been invited to many care functions and conferences to give readings. I normally do a reading of ten mins, take questions and then afterwards speak to social workers, foster parents, etc.\n\nEveryone I meet seems genuinely anxious to do their very best for kids in care.\n\nI did a reading at a home in Birmingham once. Never forget it. I read the opening chapter where I talk about the bedroom that the eight of us shared, the crappy clothes we had to wear, the lack of money, the lack of everything really. When I finished there was a silence and then this girl exclaims, 'Man, you're old school!'\n\nTurns out they all had their own rooms, forty pounds a week pocket money, and could basically come and go as they pleased.\n\nI used to think I was like the great Spurs footballer Jimmy Greaves and could perfectly time my runs into the penalty area of life and score with ease. Going by what those kids told me, I am wrong. I think we both landed in care about twenty years too early. Being facetious. Of course, all those kids, forty quid a week or not, will suffer the same problems and experiences we did. Money and riches won't change that. You have to go inwards, stage a revolution of your mind and heart, to beat that which would bring you to your knees.\n\nBetter go. The Sopranos are on TV in a minute. You should watch it. Best show ever. Get in touch after you have read the chapter. Also am going to see Norman Bass next week. He lives down near Brighton. Best ones, Paolo\nTwo\n\nThe Runaway Boy\n\nThe Story of Norman Bass\n\nLet us pray.\n\nAt five years of age, I loved going to mass. My vindictive foster mother was not Catholic so, on blessed Sunday mornings, I was given an hour and a half out of her company. I could not have been happier.\n\nMass was my safe haven from her, a place of ritual and forgiveness, of incense and kindly priests, and songs with fine melodies, stirring choruses. God held out the promise of love and heaven. Every day, I ached for His blessed deliverance from my dark world.\n\nNothing bad happened to me in that church and that's why I loved it so. Not long after my first mass I became an altar boy. At first I stood at the altar holding a giant candle. It made me feel grown up.\n\nThen I graduated to passing Father Tucker the communion cup. I liked Father Tucker a lot. He was a good man, the kind of man you want a priest to be, so warm, so approachable, so kindly.\n\nOne Sunday, Father Tucker gathered us altar boys together, told us that a special mass would be held that week to celebrate the moment when Jesus washed the feet of his disciples.\n\nTwelve men from the congregation had already volunteered to take part in the ceremony. However, Father Tucker cautioned, in case someone failed to show, he would call upon one of us altar boys to make up the number whose feet he would wash. Be ready was his message.\n\nHe then asked us to come to church on the Wednesday morning for a rehearsal.\n\nI duly attended the run through and then went home. I spent the afternoon alone, kicking a ball in a light rain that sprinkled diamonds on the garden. That evening I went to church expecting a huge attendance. When I walked in I saw that most of the pews were empty. Most of the volunteers had stayed at home. Mass went ahead.\n\nWhen the part of the mass that required the washing of the feet arrived, Father Tucker had no choice. He gestured for every altar boy present to come forward.\n\nI sat on the bench and took off my shoes. In a line of gleaming white feet, mine stood out unforgivably. They were caked in about an inch of mud. Playing football on a rainy afternoon will do that for you.\n\nWhen Father Tucker reached me I saw a look of great holy disdain cross his face. He hastily dabbed my feet with his towel and then moved off. Worse was to follow.\n\nIn the rehearsal that morning I had not really paid much attention to Father Tucker's instructions. As usual, my mind was in the clouds and my feet walked in other worlds.\n\nMy negligence would now come back to haunt me.\n\nAt one point in the service we had to leave the altar, kneel in front of a statue of the Virgin Mary, and pray.\n\nI was at the back of the group so when we stood and turned, I was the leader. For some reason (those clouds fogging up my brain again), I believed the mass had finished.\n\nSo I led everyone back into the vestry.\n\nAfter a minute or so, one of the boys asked, 'Where's Father Tucker?'\n\nAnother boy looked through the curtain. 'Blimey,' he said. 'He is out there on his own. I don't think mass has finished.'\n\nWhen Father Tucker finally came into the vestry, he made straight for me.\n\n'What were you doing?' he demanded. 'You led everyone away. Didn't you hear my instructions this morning?'\n\nMy cheeks flushed violent red; I bowed my head in shame. I had never seen him this angry.\n\n'I don't know,' he said, exasperated. He moved away and addressed all of us.\n\n'For taking part in mass tonight \u2013 such as it was,' he said, glancing back at me, 'everyone is to receive a Winston Churchill Crown. These are special coins that will grow in value over the years and therefore are very much worth putting away and saving.'\n\nAlthough I felt I should refuse the present given my conduct that night, treats in my life were rare. I slipped it into my pocket.\n\nTo assuage my guilt, I made a deal with myself. I would keep the coin until I was an adult. And then I would cash it in for huge amounts of money, give some to Father Tucker, and then be rich and safe for ever more. Amen.\n\nWhen I returned home I made sure to carefully hide the coin from my foster mother. If she discovered it, I would never see it again.\n\nOn the day I moved into Burbank, I still possessed that coin. I handed it to Barry Isleworth, the head of the Home, with great care and watched as he placed it in the petty cash tin which was kept in his little office by the front door.\n\nWhen I turned eighteen and left Burbank, I asked for my coin. A staff member went to retrieve it but could not find it anywhere. After much thought and deliberation, we realised what had happened.\n\nMany years back the petty cash tin had been stolen. My Churchill coin was in the tin. I was stupefied. A potential fortune had been stolen from me.\n\n'What child stole it?' I asked.\n\nNo one could remember.\n\nThirty years later I discovered the thief's identity. His name is Norman Bass.\n\nAnd this is his story.\n\n* * *\n\nHe sat in the police station, alone. It was two in the morning and he wondered how it was that every time he ran away, the police kept managing to track him down.\n\nI am like a human boomerang, he thought to himself, with a rueful smile. I fling myself as far as I can but somehow or other I always come flying back.\n\nI should join the circus.\n\nA policeman bustled past him and then there was silence again. He was glad no one was talking to him. When you have a stammer as bad as Norman's, you are always glad when people ignore you.\n\nThat way you are not forced to watch people trying to hide their smiles or uneasiness at your malady as you try to engage in conversation.\n\nHe looked up and saw a series of small posters pinned to a noticeboard.\n\n'If you see a crime, tell us,' one said. Fat chance of that, he thought to himself.\n\nThen he saw another poster, a poster that would inadvertently set in motion dark and terrible things.\n\nThe poster in question told Norman Bass, the serial runaway boy, that British citizens could buy a one day passport and travel to France.\n\nHe read it and then read it again. A sense of excitement ran through him. Of course, why not? Next time he plans to, he will acquire one of those passports. And go to France.\n\nFrance. No bugger would catch me there. And better still no one could talk to me. I am English, they are French. I can disappear. Forever.\n\nIn France.\n\nSuddenly, Norman Bass's life seemed a lot brighter.\n\nThe policeman came back and placed himself in front of him.\n\n'Mr Isleworth has just arrived to take you home, sonny.'\n\nNorman stood up and picked up his small bag. He had already anticipated how Barry would act towards him.\n\nEither he will be loudly shouted at, either in public or in private, or he will be submitted to the silent treatment for a number of weeks.\n\nActually, Norman thought to himself, I don't care what he does. I have got a plan, now. And no one is going to stop me.\n\n* * *\n\nHis wife Tania had thoughtfully made us sandwiches for lunch. They sat in the fridge. She sat at her work.\n\nNorman and Tania lived in a quiet village about thirty minutes out of Brighton. Theirs was a deep relationship. Norman told me that Tania was nothing less than his saviour, an amazing woman whose love and care had healed so many of his wounds.\n\nLove, he revealed, had been the most decisive force in his life.\n\nNorman's house was unprepossessing, not out of the ordinary. Good sized rooms, family photos on the wall, lamps, a certain cosiness. He surprised me when he told me it was rented. I assumed he maintained a mortgage, such was the sense of responsibility he exuded.\n\nIt was a good time for us to talk. Yesterday, Norman had organised his stepson's thirteenth birthday. Kristian, Tania's thirteen-year-old son, went paintballing, then had his mates to the house for a barbeque.\n\nNorman had cooked.\n\nAt five in the afternoon, Kristian turned to Norman and said, 'Dad, this is the best birthday ever,' and Norman quickly felt tears gather at the back of his eyes.\n\nHis emotion was not a surprise to him. As a child, there was not one of his birthdays that he could remember with any fondness. Now he had made another's memorable. It was a rare achievement.\n\nHe brought coffee out of the kitchen and we sat at a table.\n\n'Ready when you are,' he said.\n\nI switched on the recorder and pushed it towards him. 'Start at the beginning,' I said.\n\nNorman Bass was born on 17th January 1960 in Thornton Heath in Surrey, not far from Croydon.\n\nHis mum worked for the Quaker Oats Porridge people and his dad was a factory worker.\n\nNot long after he was born the family moved to a new council house in Camberley. Everything was going well.\n\nThen it happened \u2013 Norman awoke one day with a terrible stammer. No one knew where it came from.\n\n'At first, it was very embarrassing,' he said. 'Then, at primary school, it absolutely consumed me. It terrified me to the point where when the teacher shouted out my name for register, I couldn't even say, \"Yes miss.\"'\n\nEight o'clock in the morning and already the day had been made bitter and sour, made cruel beyond any repair.\n\n'I started to play truant,' he said, 'simply because that way I wouldn't have to answer the register. I used to forge notes from my mum saying I was ill. Then my brother came along. Soon after that I started to run away from home. The first time I went was at Christmas time.\n\n'I pinched a tin of ham out of the Christmas hamper and my dad's bicycle and I cycled fifty miles to my auntie's house in Oxfordshire. I was ten years old. It took me a day. I literally turned up on her doorstep, stayed overnight, and then Dad came and got me on the train and took me home.'\n\nThis overwhelming urge to run was not hard to figure out. On the road, you rarely have to talk to anyone. That's a very big attraction for a kid with a terrible stammer, especially one whose stammer had now started attracting the vindictive attention of the school bullies.\n\n'There was one incident I'll always remember,' Norman said. 'There was this huge kid at school and one day he punched me so hard in the face that he split my nose wide open. I went home crying and the next day my mother took me into school to see the headmistress. Because of my stammer, all I could say to this woman was that this kid had punched me. Her reaction was to poke me in the chest really hard and say I don't have kids in my school, kids are baby goats.'\n\nNorman's parents were accepting people, not ones to complain or assert themselves. They were very English in that way. Norman's parents meekly accepted the headmistress's dismissive behaviour towards their son. And walked away.\n\n'The inability of adults to understand what is being said by the young is both the joy and tragedy of childhood,' I announced.\n\nNorman looked at me quizzically. I had been reading a lot of Oscar Wilde lately, I explained, and his influence hung heavy on me.\n\nNorman raised his eyebrows, continued his story.\n\n'One day,' Norman told me, 'I was so badly beaten by a gang of kids, that to this day I can still remember the savagery of their punches. But when I got home again my parents refused to do anything about it. They said they didn't want to make a fuss and report it to anyone. I remember thinking then, why won't you do this for me?'\n\nWorse, Norman's uncle came to stay at the house. He acted pleasantly. Until Sunday, when Norman's parents would go to church. As soon as they had departed, the uncle turned, began threatening Norman with violence, with severe beatings.\n\nIn response, Norman began wetting his bed on a nightly basis. Instead of asking why this had happened, his parents became enraged with their son. They too threatened him with violence.\n\nSo he started running away from them on a regular basis.\n\n'My parents' way of dealing with my running away was to bring in these heavyweights from the church to come over and threaten me,' he said, smiling. 'They would threaten me with purgatory and all these things. It didn't stop me. I just ran away again.'\n\n'When I ran away,' he said, 'I never had any idea where I was going. It was always the going rather than the arriving. Anyway, I found myself sitting on Teignmouth seafront one night.\n\n'Then this lad, who couldn't be any older than me, came along and asked me, was I okay? I said I had nowhere to sleep so he took me home to his mum and dad who, of course, phoned the police. Dad came down on the train the next day to get me.\n\n'When I came home I was told a social worker was coming to see me. I had never heard of these people before. The social worker came and she told me, we are going to take you away from home because we think you are beyond parental control. She came back a couple of days later.\n\n'She drove a blue Austin car. I had no idea where I was going or what was going on. All I knew was that I was going into care, whatever the hell that meant.'\n\nI told Norman I knew that sense of confusion well. When they told me I was being put into care, it was as if they were talking a different language.\n\nI knew nothing about children's homes or social workers. The closest I had gotten to the subject at that point was the Charles Dickens novel, Oliver Twist.\n\n'I didn't know either,' Norman cheerfully replied. 'The social worker said she was going to take me to this place and I would spend some time there with some very nice people until they worked out what was best for me.\n\n'So they drove me to Guildford. In the car was my mum and this social worker. I remember we turned into this long driveway with this big posh house at the end of it and as we drove up there were children running around in the garden. This was Woodrough.'\n\n'Woodrough? You and I and both,' I said, excitedly.\n\n'So you knew the wonderful John and Molly Brown?'\n\n'Lovely people Molly and John Brown, or Auntie Molly and Uncle John as it was back then,' Norman said. 'John was this little man with curly hair and glasses and a pipe and Molly had on this housecoat. They took me in and they got one of the boys to show me round.\n\n'Then I was taken into this little playroom and I remember standing on this wooden floor and I watched my mum drive down the road. I had been left again. There were tears. I was crying but then Auntie Molly came in and she was great.\n\n'She introduced me to a couple of the kids of my own age and I was shown upstairs to this big bedroom with six or eight beds. It was all very new and a bit scary but they did try to shelter me from the strangeness of it all.'\n\nI too knew the strangeness of it all. Entering care robbed you of your gravity. You went into free fall. Suddenly, everything you knew had gone. Vanished. Nothing was solid, nothing seemed real. No more certainties. You don't know where you are, worse, who you are.\n\nPeople you had never met before looked after you. Strangers fed you, told you to do jobs, told you when to get dressed, when to sleep, when to eat, when to work, when to play.\n\nYou were completely adrift from the life you once knew.\n\nThere was the vastness of your new home to comprehend, the big garden, the many bedrooms, the playrooms. You have never seen the like before. You lived in a house built for the rich but now populated by you and your peers, and you were known as the abandoned.\n\nAs Norman said, the strangeness of it all.\n\nWorse, the kids there had the edge on you. They knew the rhythm of the Home's life, the rules, the customs. They trumped you and in doing so they created a tangible and dangerous vulnerability in and around you.\n\nYou walked uncertainly, you talked carefully, you tried to hold your nerve. You lived, unprotected.\n\nAnd then suddenly, there was a click, a loud click, and you woke up and found you had landed, found your feet, adapted, worked it out.\n\nSomehow, against your will, you had become a part of this once strange world, become a part of its tapestry. That was the day you officially became an orphan.\n\n'At Woodrough, there was a school with two classrooms in the grounds,' Norman said.\n\n'Yes,' I replied, 'I remember them, but why didn't they send us to a proper school?'\n\n'Don't you know?' Norman asked, somewhat surprised at my question.\n\n'Because they didn't know how long we would be at Woodrough for?' I asked.\n\n'No,' Norman said, 'they had to build them because the headmaster of the local school wouldn't take orphans.'\n\n'What?'\n\n'It is true. The local headmaster wouldn't take us. Didn't want us in his school.'\n\n'But why? Why would this man reject us in such a callous manner?'\n\nBecause England was a country built on class, its people judged by blood. Blood fixed your position in English society. Top of the line, the royal family, bottom of the pile, orphans.\n\nThat is why many refer to us as having 'bad blood.' We are born bad, we die bad. There is no redemption. We will always be unwanted within their circles.\n\nThe headmaster's decision to ban orphans from his school was no doubt based on that calculation. He must have worried that we would not be able to help ourselves from being wild, uncontrollable, disrupting forces, driven in fury by our bad blood.\n\nYet, stupid as these assumptions of his were (after all, applied to a race of people they would be automatically deemed racist) a kind of understanding for this man grew inside of me.\n\nThe headmaster knew nothing of the orphan and how could he? And in fact how could anyone? Our presence in the world was low, minimal.\n\nWe had no one to explain us. We lived in mysterious buildings, far away from the view of the community, our homes placed behind fences or large hedges.\n\nThe children's home rarely featured in people's lives or communities in the way the school, the church, the sports club, the pub, the bingo hall, the football ground, did. All of these are a part of people's lives.\n\nChildren's homes are not. They are invisible, hidden away like a bad secret.\n\nEasy then for myths to be built around them and easy for those myths to have assumed the force of truth. I would venture that most people's idea of the Home is that depicted in Oliver Twist, the book and film and I would not blame anyone for thinking in such a manner.\n\nIt is precisely how I thought of them until I was placed in one.\n\n'I started running away again,' Norman said. 'I wasn't very adventurous. It was just going up the road or going into Guildford where they would catch me and bring me back. I obviously didn't know where the staff lived so a couple of times I was actually picked up by the staff coming into work.\n\n'In fact I later found out that I had one of the longest records for staying at Woodrough. They couldn't figure out where to send me because they couldn't figure out why I was running away. I was there for about seven months.\n\n'Molly and John were still very good to me. They never put pressure on me to explain my actions. And one of the things I do remember about my time there was the treat of being able to go and spend the evening in the Browns' sitting room. It was a wood panelled room at the end of the house. I remember variety shows on the telly and all of us sat around in our dressing gowns and pyjamas eating chocolate and having a whale of a time. It was great.'\n\nI too had been given the healing treatment from the Browns and it really moved me that nearly forty years after life in their care, two grown men had met and remembered, with full gratitude, the good they gave them. The value of their work resonated to this day and beyond. It was a fantastic achievement by the pair of them.\n\nNorman's parents visited him at Woodrough. He was also allowed home on certain weekends. Even then he couldn't help himself.\n\n'My stammer was still a problem,' he said. 'I had the piss taken out of me relentlessly by the other kids because whenever anyone asked me anything there were these huge pauses. I remember we had to do an IQ test at Woodrough and apparently I came out quite high. But it took me ages to answer their questions.\n\n'Then one day I was told I was moving to this new Home in Woking and it was called Burbank. I was really upset. I had built up this great relationship with the Browns and all the kids.\n\n'I thought, I know I've been naughty but I loved it there. It was so cosy and the Browns were so loving and so supportive. I disliked running away from there more than anywhere else because I was made to feel wanted at Woodrough.'\n\nI recalled my last day there as well, choking in incomprehension that a child so happy should be removed from the very heart of that joy by the people who professed to care for him. I would not believe that John and Molly Brown no longer cared for me.\n\nNorman had exactly the same thoughts.\n\n'So on this particular day,' Norman said, 'this old Morris Minor estate trundled up the drive and this big beer bellied man with a goatee, all happy and bouncy got out and that was Barry. I remember that John and Molly were stood on the doorstep when I arrived and they were stood on the doorstep when I left.\n\n'Molly was crying and I was crying and Barry bundled me into the car and I remember trying to look back up the drive as the car pulled away and thinking that somewhere on the drive a barrier would suddenly come down and John and Molly would run up and say he can stay! But of course that was never going to happen.'\n\nExactly my thoughts, I told Norman, excitedly. I really thought that just as we got to the end of the drive, Barry would stop and say, 'Fooled you kid,' and open the passenger door and let me out of the car and then I would run back up the drive and into the arms of the people I adored.\n\nBut the car never stopped. It just kept on going. Now I see, that car never stopped.\n\nFor any of us.\n\n* * *\n\nNorman thought about that first day at Burbank, the day he placed himself in my orbit.\n\n'We drove to Burbank,' Norman said, 'and again, it was the big drive with the big house and lots of kids in the garden and then into the hallway with those red tiles and I remember thinking, oh well not quite as big as Woodrough but it felt the same.\n\n'Barry took me through to the sitting room and there was Julie and she was very nice. Even so it was all very strange \u2013 new kids, new staff, new experience and of course because I was wound up from leaving Woodrough my stammer was really pronounced.\n\n'The first thing Barry did was to start taking the piss out of it. He would shout, in that pseudo Welsh accent of his, \"What's the matter with you boy?\" I remember thinking hasn't anyone told you?'\n\nI was surprised to hear this of Barry. He was many things Barry \u2013 domineering, loud, forceful \u2013 but he never struck me as cruel. Perhaps it was his self-defence mechanism, buying time while he figured out what to do with a kid who stammered his every word.\n\n'I was taken upstairs, shown my bedroom. It was just two beds. Then I was taken down to the local school and enrolled there and then I started getting used to this new routine. It must have been just a few weeks but pretty soon I started to run away again. It is hard to explain the motives behind it. I just got this urge. I had to go.\n\n'Sometimes things would trigger it. I remember specifically we were sat in the TV lounge and there was this travel programme on about Canada and it was showing waterfalls and the scenery and the next day I got dressed, pretended to go to school and just buggered off.\n\n'Other times, I would leg it because of my stammer. Barry didn't get the point of how terrified I was of being made a fool of and feeling a fool with this stammer. If I said goodnight to him he would always reply with a g-g-g-g-g-good \u2013 n-n-n-night. And then laugh.\n\n'I ran away so many times. One time I went off with one of the girls in the Home. I was having an occasional thing with her, the occasional snog that kind of thing. We ended up deciding to run away together. The only place I could think of to go to was my auntie's in Oxfordshire. I don't know how we got up there, we might have thumbed lifts. We were twelve, thirteen, and it was extremely risky, a boy and girl together like that on the road.'\n\n'The naivety of youth often protects its reckless nature,' I said.\n\nOscar once more, and Norman, again, nonplussed.\n\n'I remember I nicked a cardboard punnet of mushrooms from the front of a greengrocer,' Norman said. 'That was all we had to eat. Soon, she had had enough, so she went into a shop near where my aunt lived, she went in there and gave herself up.\n\n'I panicked and went into Oxford as fast as I could and got the first train out. You could buy platform tickets then so I just did that and got on the first train and hid in the toilets. By the time I got off the train it was dark and I was in Birmingham New Street. I got back on the train and hid in the toilets again and the train moved off. Turned out it was the Edinburgh sleeper.\n\n'Not sure how they managed it but I got discovered and by the time we got to Edinburgh the transport police were waiting for me. They took me off to this remand home in the middle of Edinburgh. I was absolutely terrified. All these tough kids and me the little Southerner with the stammer.'\n\nI told Norman I understood his fear.\n\nMy school once organised a day visit to the local borstal. One resident, tall, imposing, came and stood in front of me.\n\n'I like your shoes,' he said.\n\n'Thank you,' I replied.\n\n'Now fucking take them off and give them to me,' he demanded.\n\nLuckily, a teacher was passing nearby.\n\nBorstal boys were tough. To be locked up with them in Scotland with a stammer and an English accent was probably not the best asset to be defending yourself with.\n\n'I was seen by a few people and then I had to go to their little school where they left me to do drawing,' Norman said. 'I remember everything was in lock down. Go into a corridor it would be locked. Go into the showers and come out, it's locked. I thought it was an awful place.\n\n'Then they told me that a senior member of staff from Burbank was coming up to get me. It was Maggie, her being from Scotland. All the kids, myself included, hated Maggie but she was great to me that time probably because she had got a free weekend out of it. And we flew back. None of this going back on the train malarkey.\n\n'I remember getting off the plane at Heathrow, coming down this escalator and there was Barry standing at the bottom looking up at me with that stern face of his.\n\n'I was almost wetting myself with fear thinking what is he going to say to me? I got to the bottom of the escalators and he just turned around and he walked. We got in the car and he didn't say a word during the drive back home. It was the scare-the-shit-out-of-him-with-the-stony-silence routine. Got in, was sent to bed and told not to speak to anyone about what I had done or where I had been.'\n\nBarry's deepest concern soon became apparent. Had Norman and the girl coupled? Given Barry's obsession with sex I now wonder if his questions did not reflect some form of personal interest.\n\nHe was always wolf whistling women from his car as he rushed down Woking High Street, always making lewd remarks. He once told me off when I failed to comment on a bronzed beauty who had just walked by. Of course, it was inappropriate behaviour, the behaviour of a man with a twisted mind, living in a sexless marriage.\n\nWhat's funny about his questioning of Norman is that his subject had no idea what he was talking about. Sex at that time was a mystery to Norman. He knew kisses, but that was all.\n\n'Barry asked me, \"Did you kiss her?\" I said yes. Then he lent forward and he said, \"Did you do this as well?\" And he made a hole with one hand and stuck a finger through it with the other. I thought, I don't know what the fuck you are talking about? What is that? Then it dawned on me and I thought, ah so that's how you do it, that's what that is for. I had just been given the facts of life, thanks Barry.'\n\nNorman's truancy had so far been confined to Great Britain. Inevitably, that had to change. The will to show those charged with his keep how unhappy he was had to assert itself.\n\nHe now thought of the one day passport to France offer. At the same time, he made another crucial realisation. His stammer made people think he was stupid. That was fine by him. It gave him the freedom to make all kinds of moves. Of him, no one would suspect anything untoward.\n\nTo secure a one day passport to France, he needed money. So the first thing he did was to buy a larger satchel than the one he normally used for school. He carried that bigger satchel for about three weeks. He wanted everyone to get used to seeing him with it. He also obtained a large plastic bag which he hid in the satchel.\n\nThen, one morning, he made his move.\n\nAfter breakfast, Norman dawdled in the Home's cloakroom. Jimmy and David and Graham and Sarah and Anne, and all the others, were busily putting on their blazers and shoes and adjusting ties and shirt buttons, before leaving for school; a crowd of noise and colour setting sail once more for the local classrooms.\n\nNorman waited patiently for them to go. No one minded him. They rarely did. When the last child had departed, Norman came out of the cloakroom, and walked through the playroom into the hallway. The staff were in the kitchen.\n\nThey were clearing up from breakfast. Norman heard water taps running, and the deep murmur of adult voices, some high, some low.\n\nHe walked up to the front door as if to leave the house but suddenly stepped into Barry's small office, which was to his right. He quickly opened up a drawer and removed the petty cash tin. He placed the tin carefully into the plastic bag which he put inside his satchel. As expected, it was a perfect fit.\n\nHe then walked out of the office, opened the front door and slipped out into the dark morning air, closing the door softly behind him.\n\nHe walked down the drive and for the first time in ages felt a great purpose about him. It was a rare feeling for Norman, rare indeed for many living in care. Norman half expected an enormous shout from behind to drag him back to the Home \u2013 but no such shout came.\n\nThe adventure was on.\n\nHe turned right at the end of the drive and then made two more rights.\n\nAt the mini-roundabout, there at the bottom of the Goldsworth Road, he failed to turn left to school as usual. Instead, he carried on forwards to Woking train station.\n\nJust before he reached the station he darted behind a public toilet. He knelt down, removed the petty cash tin, and then he opened it.\n\nHe gulped. He had never seen quite so much money gathered in one place before. He stared at the pile for a bit. And then he picked out some coins and carefully put them into his trouser pocket.\n\nHe closed the tin, put it back in the plastic bag and satchel, and then emerged into the stream of the morning High Street.\n\nHe knew he was on the verge of something big yet it was funny to him how calm he was, as if God had placed him on automatic pilot.\n\nHe reached the ticket office, managed to get the word Guildford out to the bemused ticket man, handed over the coins in his pocket, took his ticket, walked onto the correct platform and waited for the silver machine.\n\nWhen the train arrived, huffing and puffing and all out of breath, he hopped on. In a few hours he would be in Paris.\n\nHe was not quite yet a teenager.\n\n* * *\n\nOn the train to Guildford he sat alone. Good. No one in sight. He opened up his satchel and pulled out the tin and the plastic bag. He opened the tin, took the money out, and put it all into the plastic bag.\n\nThe plastic bag then went back in the satchel. The empty petty cash tin he placed on the rack above him and hastily shoved out of sight.\n\nHe sat down and waited for Guildford to pull itself into view. Twenty minutes later, Guildford obliged. After leaving the train, he made his way to the nearby High Street, to Alders, the big department store.\n\nDownstairs, a small passport office. It was nine thirty in the morning and Norman Bass's big moment had arrived.\n\nHe walked up to the window and asked for a 'one-one-one-one d-d-d-daa-yy-dayy passport.'\n\nThe cost was seventeen and six. Norman's money was all coins. It took him minutes to count out the right amount. Three pence, four pence, sixpence, a shilling...\n\nYou would have thought that the man taking the money might think to himself, here is a kid in his school uniform with an inordinate amount of money buying a one day passport, I should ring somebody. But the man cared not.\n\nHe was far more interested in the money than the child.\n\nHaving secured his pass, Norman walked back to Guildford station and caught the train to Dover. The journey took a couple of hours or so. He spent the time looking out of the window, watching the world flash by in streaks of green.\n\nThe voice above him came on. It said, we are now at Dover, our final destination. Norman gathered his things. He left the train and went to the harbour. He bought a ticket and still no one bothered him. He boarded the boat.\n\nOn the journey to France he suddenly realised that nearly all his money had gone. He shrugged his shoulders. What could he do?\n\nThe boat arrived in Calais. Norman joined the queue for customs. A man checked his passport and by the way he looked at him, for twenty excruciating seconds Norman truly believed the game was up.\n\nBut no, the passport was stamped and Norman was in France. Inside, his nerves were haywire. He was sure that at some point he would feel a hand on his shoulder and the adventure would be stopped.\n\nBut no such hand appeared.\n\nHe reached the end of the road, turned right and felt his nerves fly away into the blue tinged sky.\n\nIn front of him, the road into Calais. He marched into town, looked around. Nothing much to see. He got bored. So he moved on out of town and into the surrounding countryside. He saw an orchard and realised he was hungry.\n\nHe sneaked in, stole apples, and munched on them ravenously.\n\nIn a fashion, it sounded kind of idyllic, this little kid in the European sunshine, innocently walking through lush countryside, eating apples.\n\nBut life was rarely so kind. Or so pure.\n\nDusk approached, so he started hitching. Lorry drivers stopped to pick him up. But there was a price for their generosity. Sex was required. So Norman sat in the front seat, staring into darkness, white lines disappeared underneath him as his right hand caressed the driver's member.\n\nEventually, Norman reached Paris.\n\nHe did not do much sightseeing. A fellow traveller had told him about a road heading south out of the French capital where many hitchhikers gathered. That was where he had to get to.\n\nWhen he found the meeting point, he found companionship. People said hello and did so warmly. They shared food and drink. He liked it here.\n\nWords were not needed. People recognised their mutual needs. Norman felt a tinge of happiness, was glad to be where he was, began to think, they will have started the search for him in England by now \u2013 the fools: They would never think to search for him in France.\n\nNorman got himself a lift. The man was going to the south of France. Again, with the lorry drivers, again with the hand jobs.\n\nSoon, he was at the Spanish border. Norman thought, No turning back now, only forward.\n\nBut he had no passport, no papers, and very little money. Good. That made it all the more interesting. He surveyed the border points and realised that if he climbed a hill to the left of the border control without being noticed, he would be able to drop down into Spain.\n\nHe walked out of view of the patrolling officers, turned off the road, clambered up the hill and ran down. He heard a noise, looked right and saw a lorry approaching. He stuck his thumb out. The lorry stopped.\n\nThey drove for a bit and then Norman said, 'Where are we?'\n\nAnd the driver replied, 'Spain.'\n\nBlimey, Norman thought to himself that was quick. And easy. The driver now nudged Norman, gestured down to the middle of his open trousers. Norman did not flinch.\n\nHe travelled with the man for a bit, and then picked up another lorry.\n\nNorman had by now decided to head for Alicante, halfway down the coastline he was travelling upon. He told the new driver his plan.\n\n'Yes, yes,' the driver said smiling, 'but first let us stop at my house.'\n\nNorman looked at him.\n\n'To eat and drink,' the driver said laughing. Norman was reassured. He shouldn't have been.\n\nThey drove into a small village called Motril and pulled up outside a small cottage. Norman saw a wooden door. The driver got out and unlocked the door. Norman got out of the lorry and jumped down onto the gravel road. Stones splintered everywhere.\n\nNorman entered the man's living quarters.\n\nThe apartment was small but presentable. 'Sit here,' the man said, and he pointed to a small sofa. He left the room and then a minute later came back in.\n\n'Maybe you want the shower?' the man asked, and then added, 'after all your travelling.'\n\n'Thank you,' said Norman. He felt tired and dirty. The chance to make himself clean was too good to miss.\n\n'It is in there,' the man said and pointed to a door. 'I go and make the food.'\n\nThe man left the room. Norman stood, went through into the small bathroom.\n\nHe took off his clothes, carefully. He turned on the water and felt it with his hand until it was just right. He stepped in. The water poured onto his body and it made him feel great. He relaxed into the water, luxuriating in it. This was an unexpected luxury.\n\nHe lifted his head back and let the water drive into his face and then suddenly the man was standing beside him in the shower, naked with a look on his face that Norman really did not like.\n\nAt first, Norman was confused. He quickly stepped out of the shower and went into the bedroom. The man followed and pounced. He pushed Norman onto the bed so he was lying face down \u2013 and then he raped him.\n\nThe attack lasted just under three minutes, the worst three minutes in Norman Bass's life.\n\nThe man put on his clothes and then ordered Norman to get dressed. Norman did so in a silence that hung heavy with impurity, a silence moulded in fear.\n\nThen the man went to the front door and opened it. He gestured for Norman to leave. Norman walked through the door back onto the gravel road which seemed to shriek in pain under his step. The door slammed.\n\nNorman walked slowly down the dusty street, so frightened, so scared. He could not look at the men who passed him by on the street. He lowered his head as they passed, creating his own symbol of shame. What if it happened again, he thought to himself? Or what if worse occurred?\n\nWho could he turn to? Who could he run to?\n\nNorman now fully comprehended the consequence of his actions. And they were vast and startling. He saw himself as he really was, a small boy alone in a huge world without any protection from the lustful, the murderous, the wolves, who would consume him in a second.\n\nHe had never felt so terrified in his whole life.\n\nOn all levels \u2013 physically, mentally and spiritually \u2013 he was so close to shutting down.\n\nHe reached the small town square and, to his joy, he saw a policeman standing on the other side of the square. Please notice me, Norman thought to himself. Please, please notice me.\n\nHe continually sent this thought in the direction of the policeman, prayed that his distress signal would alert him.\n\nThe action worked. The policeman walked over to Norman and spoke to him. In Spanish.\n\n'English,' Norman said repeatedly, 'English.'\n\n'Pasaporte,' the policeman repeatedly said, 'pasaporte.'\n\nNorman shook his head. 'I don't have one,' he told the policeman.\n\nThe policeman looked at him in amazement.\n\nHalf an hour later, Norman Bass was in the local police cell.\n\nNorman lived in this cell for a week whilst the authorities tried to figure out how a little boy from England had crossed two borders without a passport. Incredible.\n\nThe cleaner in the police station took pity on him. Coffee and doughnuts magically appeared at Norman's cell window every morning.\n\nThen dysentery struck him, placed him in absolute agony. Every cloud has a silver lining. His virulent illness hurried his return to England. Two days after contracting this illness, Norman was bound for Burbank.\n\nOn arrival in the UK, he was taken to a hospital where it took him a week to recover from his illness.\n\nThe recovered Norman was then brought back to Burbank, back to where he once belonged.\n\nOf course, he was expecting the worse; a barrage of shouting and anger from Barry, it went without saying.\n\nBut his illness seemed to have dulled their angry annoyance with him. In fact, everyone was quite nice to him. He liked the feeling, liked the attention.\n\nHe suddenly started thinking, you know what, let me just belong. Let me become part of the whole. Somebody, please be my friend, and let life be normal. But then he opened his mouth and he stammered, and he could not let people know how he felt, and he knew then that he would always be the outsider.\n\nBarry made an unusual move. He asked Norman to write down all his experiences during his time on the run onto sheets of white paper. Put it down in ink, Barry said to him, because it will be good for you.\n\nNorman started writing. He recalled little about the trip except his route: Calais, Paris, Marseille, down the coast over the mountains, Spain, oh and the fact that he had been raped.\n\nHe took the paper to Barry, handed it over and walked away. He thought nothing more of the exercise until suddenly Barry appeared and waved the paper violently in the air, screamed and shouted, with specks of angry spit flecking his beard as he demanded to know what the hell had happened in Spain.\n\nNorman said nothing.\n\nA day later, Norman was taken to a sexual disease clinic in nearby Guildford and thoroughly examined. He was passed clean. Norman travelled back to Burbank and a week later did what he did best. He ran away again. Couldn't stand all the shouting, he said to me.\n\nOnly this time, he ran to one specific place, his home, to his parents, to where he began in life.\n\nTo the authorities that was deemed a very significant action. The boy was saying he wanted to go home.\n\nThe authorities told Norman he could go home at weekends and school holidays. They believed that contact with his family would heal the scars and maybe his runaway nature.\n\nThey never thought once to look at his stammer.\n\nHis parents had acquired a new house and Norman was given his own bedroom. Still, it was not enough. He could not help himself. The urge to run persisted. He could not help himself. Every week, he ran away from home. Every week, his parents came and collected him. Just like the old days.\n\nOn one occasion, he ended up in Brighton. He sat in the police station and waited for his parents to come. Only this time a policeman told Norman he was not going home. He was being sent back to Burbank. His parents could take no more.\n\nAs he digested the news, Barry arrived.\n\nOn the drive home, Norman remembered that he looked over at Barry and noted that Barry actually seemed upset that things had not worked out for Norman. Then he closed his eyes.\n\nWhen he woke up, it was back to life at Burbank again.\n\n* * *\n\nNorman revealed his story to me with a stoic equanimity. The rape, the abuse, the horror of it all, at no point did he break. At no point did the voice quiver or the eyes water.\n\nInstead, he told me how all his life he asked himself one question \u2013 why did no one address the problem of his stammer? Why had no one talked to him about it?\n\nIt was so obvious that this was the cause of all his ills yet no staff member, teacher, authority figure ever broached the subject.\n\nThat was until he met a child psychologist named Dr Barnes.\n\nDr Barnes worked at a child guidance clinic that Norman attended after school.\n\nUnlike others, Dr Barnes showed understanding, great sympathy.\n\n'I used to like collecting lizards when I lived in Camberley,' Norman said. 'I got quite good at it. I used to breed them as well. I expressed this interest to her and one day I went over there and instead of sitting doing tests in a classroom, she came out with a packed lunch and said, today we are going to go and collect lizards.\n\n'We spent the afternoon together. I showed her how you catch them and what you do and we had a fantastic day.'\n\nNorman's confidence picked up a bit. Quite a bit, in fact. He even got himself a girlfriend.\n\n'I can't remember her name now,' he said smiling, 'but for some reason she liked me and we started going out. I thought I should tell somebody at Burbank that I was seeing somebody because they always wanted to know where you are going. I finally got up the courage to speak to Julie and told her I had a girl. Suddenly, it was action stations.\n\n'At Burbank, a lot of us had to wear hand me down clothes but Barry took me to a menswear shop near the station and I have never had so much clothing bought for me in all my life. He got me a blue Budgie jacket, tank top jumpers, Oxford bag trousers. I looked the dog's bollocks. It was great. I remember I had to parade around the sitting room with my new clobber in front of all the older girls and they were all saying how good I looked.\n\n'I went on the date, all very civilised. I think we might have held hands but you can imagine what I was like. Totally nervous, stammering away, no experience around girls. I didn't tell her I lived in a home.'\n\nA couple of weeks later Julie suggested Norman invited his girlfriend to tea. Norman took to the idea and, on their next date together, he asked her. This took courage for it meant you had to tell someone you were in care.\n\nShe probably knew anyway, I told Norman. At school, you could not keep your home life a secret. Too many questions needed answering. Two in particular always floored me. 'Where do you live?' was one and, 'What do your mum and dad do?' was the other.\n\n'At school I didn't tell anyone I was in a home apart from a couple of really close mates,' he revealed. 'It wasn't shame but a lot of them wouldn't have understood. You know what it's like with kids, anything out of the ordinary and they take the piss out of you all day long.\n\n'Anyway she came up to Burbank and she was allowed to go through the front door, which was a great honour. We always had to go through the back door. I thought to myself, you don't know what has just happened here.\n\n'I sat at Barry's table with her and he started taking the piss out of me. Not in a horrible way but constantly. Then he began teasing her as well. Have you kissed him yet? All that kind of thing. Then we went for a walk and from the top window of the house you can see the whole of the garden, I can remember to this day Maggie watching me from that window, putting me under constant surveillance.'\n\nThe girl ended the relationship soon after this visit. You could not blame her. The strangeness of it all had no doubt unnerved her. Norman's response was simple. He started running abroad again.\n\n'One time I got as far as Monaco where the policeman just took me to the outskirts of the city and said, that way,' Norman said. 'I ended up in Marseille and gave myself up. Got no money, no passport.\n\n'I remember I had to go for an interview and it was the same guy who had come to Spain. He recognised me and he told me that a new rule had now been put in place by the local county council. Part of my punishment was that I now had to repay the fare to get me home.'\n\nAnd then Norman turned sixteen and left school. He was now obliged to leave Burbank.\n\nAt that time, the council were no longer legally obliged to house or feed any child after they left education. That person was now of work age and therefore responsible for himself.\n\nThe good old days.\n\n'I was sad to leave Burbank,' Norman said. 'I had been there for five years. In fact, I felt really desolate because I no longer had a safety net. I realised then that Barry, the social workers, all of them, had missed the point.\n\n'None of them had worked out why I was doing what I was doing and now I was going straight back to the environment where it all started with nothing resolved and no help given.\n\n'Burbank was good from a practical level. There was a roof over my head, regular meals, I got clothed, there was schooling but there was no intimate \"Let's see if we can work through this together.\" Apart from that one woman who was the only one who spent some time with me.'\n\nThe only choice Norman had was to head home to his parents, the original source of his unhappiness. Once there, of course, he started running away again. One time, he lived in a friend's house under the very nose of the unsuspecting mother.\n\n'I used to sleep under his bed,' Norman said. 'The mum was out at work all day so I would get up after she had gone and then just hang out.\n\n'Then I got busted for stealing milk off a doorstep. That was my first criminal offence. Anyway this guy came and picked me up from the station and instead of taking me home he took me to a hostel in Woking called Verrells.'\n\nVerrells was run by a man named Mr Gallagher. His job was to provide for kids still subject to a care order but in employment. Gallagher was tough, not afraid to take you into his office and give you a slap, as Norman discovered.\n\nNorman found work at a fencing manufacturer in nearby, Brookwood. He would come home stinking of creosote. All the kids complained so he was given his own room. That was about the only good thing that happened to him at Verrells.\n\nThen he turned eighteen and that was it, he was no longer the local council's responsibility or a ward of care. Norman Bass was out on his own.\n\n* * *\n\nLunch arrived. The sandwiches were eaten, the talk between us was genial. The tension created by his rape story had dissipated, gone. Again, care had bonded us. I recalled Norman talked proudly about his life now, showed me photos of dear loved ones.\n\nHe asked about my life but I gave short answers. I wanted to keep him focussed on his own adventures. But then something occurred to me.\n\n'Norman,' I said, 'If you stole the petty cash tin, then it stands to reason that it must have been you who purloined my Churchill coin. You are the thief. You are the man who took away my fortune.'\n\n'Sorry about that,' he said with a little smile.\n\n'As it is you, I'll let you off the thirty thousand pounds you owe me,' I replied. 'Let's carry on with the interview.'\n\nAfter Verrells, chaos. Norman got married three times, bore a daughter named Nicky, who he sees regularly.\n\nWith his ex-wives, there is no such contact. There was, however, drunkenness, infidelity, the normal broken tapestry relationships that most of us in care look for when we enter the world.\n\nHow could it not be so?\n\nMost of us leave care with our wiring made haywire. It takes years to repair the damage. In many cases, recovery is not even made.\n\nAn addiction to chaos was a major problem. We couldn't shake it off or make ourselves resistant to its demands. We had been raised in chaos and so without it we were lost. We yearned for chaos. After all, it had been the only constant in our journey.\n\n'I started going from one relationship to another,' Norman said. 'I craved one to one intimacy but in relationships I would use people up. It would get to a point where I would think, this has run out, what do I do next?'\n\nI knew fear of intimacy would be a common factor between the two of us. It always is for us motherless children. Norman's played out in exactly the same fashion as mine did. You chase the girl, you get the girl, you dump the girl. Why?\n\nBecause it was the chasing rather than the getting, that provided the biggest thrill.\n\nIn this arena, deep hatred of self ran the show.\n\nExample: Someone said, I love you. Your inner pattern read, Well, I am worthless. So you must be lower than I am to love someone as worthless as me. And because of that I am going to reject you.\n\nWe were emotional vampires. We sucked what we wanted out of people, got bored, then moved on. But if we were lucky, and if we went searching, we would be given a moment that changed our lives.\n\n'One day, I realised that I wanted to do a job where people were in a situation worse than I am,' he said. 'It was simple as that but it changed so much.'\n\nIn that moment of clarity and realisation, Norman determined he would dedicate himself to the helping of others. He would now become the saint not the sinner.\n\n'So I got a job in a home in Bracknell, Surrey, for adults with learning disabilities. I worked there for a year but it was very institutionalised. Because I wasn't qualified on paper to do this kind of work I now went from one care job to another. I actually worked in a children's home in Cheshire.'\n\nNorman loved the Home. It was brand new, designed as the first stop for kids coming into care.\n\nIt didn't escape Norman's attention how things had changed for the better within the care system. More staff, fewer kids was one significant development. And there was a completely different environment from the often chaotic one at Burbank.\n\nNorman then got lucky. Really lucky. He met Tania. They met when Norman was out canvassing for the church he attended. He rang on Tania's doorbell and not long after saw her at mass. They got talking, and as they did, love got to work.\n\n'She and my other partners were as different as chalk and cheese,' Norman said brightly. 'When Tania and my daughter Nicky met it was like they had known each other for years. Tania is very motherly. She has got a child of her own and they clicked.\n\n'They were going into Mothercare together, the whole bit. I thought this is exactly what Nicky needs, someone to be alongside her. That made me very happy. I think now that there was definitely an element about being in care that impacted on my marriages.\n\n'I was not a rooted person, I did not have family values and I was transient. Now I can say that all the ingredients I have been craving for so long are all together.'\n\n'What are those ingredients?' I asked. Late afternoon shadows were now dropping onto our faces.\n\nNorman considered my question.\n\nThen he said, 'I know now that I have the love and respect of my partner Tania, and her little boy, and I have got grandchildren now. My daughter is fantastic, my work life is amazing. I am a principal carer in a company. We are given care via the primary health trust of children that have long-term health issues. I feel wanted now and I feel appreciated.\n\n'I have come out of that children's home environment and I have achieved so much. I was thinking the other day that for a long time I really didn't know what I was looking for. But now being that much older I know I can't go for something new all the time. When I got together with Tania I told her I really don't care what job I do, just as long as I am with you. It sounds soppy but as it turns out I got my cake and I am eating it because I have a fantastic home life and a fantastic job. And I don't stammer anymore.'\n\nI was coming onto that.\n\n'Know what happened?'\n\n'Tell all,' I said.\n\n'I went to a church in Aldershot and I was invited to go to the front and receive healing for my stammer. Whether I received it or not I couldn't say but it was round about that time that I began to realise that I could speak for more than one sentence without breaking out into a cold sweat. It was pretty instantaneous.\n\n'One day I am a gibbering wreck who can't speak to anyone through the glass at a post office and the next I can ring up people and talk to them about all kinds of things and am able to walk into a room and talk to seven hundred people.'\n\nNorman looked at the clock. 'Tania will be home soon,' he said and suddenly, he looked a bit worried.\n\nI asked why.\n\n'Tania had a wonderful childhood,' he explained. 'Her parents were fantastic people, there were no upsets, she was really loved, so when I talk about my past she sometimes...'\n\n'Breaks into tears?' I asked. 'Don't worry, it will be fine,' I assured him. 'We are basically finished although one more question. Was living at Burbank, living in care, good or bad for you?'\n\n'Overall, I consider myself very fortunate,' he replied. 'I am where I am and who I am despite being in care, but also because of it. Does that make sense?' he asked.\n\n'Generally, yes,' I replied.\n\n'You know, even though my somewhat innocent and na\u00efve recollections about Burbank have been blown away, I still think it was a relatively good thing for me personally. If I think about the possibility of what may have happened to me without being in care, well, it makes me shudder.'\n\nI switched off the tape. I stood, gathered my things and extended my hand. Norman warmly shook it. A taxi was called. It arrived within the minute.\n\n'See you later, bruv,' Norman Bass said to me by his front door.\n\n'I'll be back before you know it,' I told him.\n\n'I'd like that very much,' he said.\n\nNorman Bass has many things now. He has love and trust and respect but more importantly, he has knowledge of self.\n\nSo much of the orphan life is spent in confusion. Why is this happening to me? Why did I get it in the neck? Why am I being treated like this and no one else?\n\nWhy do I make actions which only serve to hurt me?\n\nThose questions were gone now. They no longer haunted him. Norman Bass, after years of misery, had happiness \u2013 and he wore it well.\n\nIt made me so pleased for him.\n\nLike I said, remarkable.\n\n* * *\n\nNorman noted Paolo staring deeply into his eyes. He had just told him about the rape in Spain and he knew exactly what Paolo was thinking. He was trying to figure out if the incident still haunted him, whether it was still of great emotional disturbance within his soul.\n\nYou can look all you like, Norman thought, but you won't see anything and that is because I have dealt with it. The memory is burnt out, no longer able to attack me with ferocity.\n\nNorman had enjoyed the day, enjoyed going over his life. He liked Paolo, he liked how he allowed him to speak without interruption.\n\nHe even liked the pretentious little Oscar Wilde type quotes he kept throwing at him.\n\nOnly one thing perturbed Norman. It was that moment in their talk when Paolo realised that Norman had inadvertently stolen his Churchill Crown.\n\nAlthough the man had made light of the incident, Norman had detected a hurt in Paolo's eyes. Not a big hurt but a hurt all the same.\n\nAnd so an idea struck.\n\nAfter Paolo left, Norman turned on the internet and tapped the phrase Churchill Crown into Google.\n\nNumerous websites came up in front of him. He read about the coin's history and its current value. Today, the Churchill Crown's value is precisely twenty-five pence. Not \u00a330,000. He smiled and bought himself one.\n\nThe next day he bought a card. On it he wrote, 'Sorry I kept this for so long.'\n\nWhen the coin arrived, he put coin and card in the post, special delivery.\n\nTwo days later, there was a red note on Paolo's doormat, telling him to go and pick up a parcel.\n\nHe figured it must be the books he had recently ordered.\n\nHe walked to the post office. He stood in a line. He was given his package.\n\nThen he did something out of the usual for him. He opened up the package, there and then. No idea why. Normally, he waited until he got home. But something in his mind told him to look now.\n\nHe tore apart the paper. For a second he had no idea what he was holding. Then he read Norman's card.\n\nAs much as he wanted to hold the tears back, Paolo could not do so. A slight river slid down his cheek, and that river, slow and careful, would not stop until he had reached the safety of his home.\n\nNorman's act of kindness, the depth and meaning behind his action, was of immeasurable value.\n\nPaolo sat on his sofa, and he looked at that coin for ages before he picked up his mobile and texted Norman. He wrote: 'Norman, what I hold in my hand now is one of the best presents I have ever been given.'\n\nAnd he truly meant that.\n\nFor Father Tucker was right.\n\nThe coin had proved to be worth an absolute fortune.\n\nFrom: paolo@gmail.com\n\nTo: desh@hotmail.com\n\nSubject: RE: The New Book\n\nDes \u2013 Hope all well, amico. Just to say that in doing research for the book, two men have become heroes to me \u2013 they are Thomas Coram who created Britain's first ever children's home, <http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Thomas_Coram> \u2013 and John Barnardo \u2013 <http:\/\/www.infed.org\/thinkers\/barnardo.htm> \u2013 who of course created the Barnardo's Homes. Both of these men were pioneers and blessed with great courage and compassion. Their achievements are really worth exploring if you get the time. They were men who left the world in a much better shape and without them the likes of us would have been so much poorer. I know what you mean about putting the reader off with history lessons but I think this is a valuable and fascinating history and as one of the aims of this book is to open up the children's home to the wider world, perhaps it needs saying. I have just been to see Norman Bass. I am sure you remember him \u2013 had a stutter and always ran away. I had a great day with him. He had been through so much but seemed very much at peace with life. I was so anxious that at the start of this all the stories would be doom and gloom but half way through and everything remains very positive. Makes me happy and, yes, very proud. David Westbrook is next. He e-mailed me yesterday. (Would this book have existed without the internet, I wonder?) Up the Spurs. Paolo\nThree\n\nThe Boy Who Couldn't Be Heard\n\nThe Story of David Westbrook\n\nUnhappy children steal. I certainly did.\n\nFirst thing in the morning, when my foster mother was busy getting dressed, I would sneak downstairs, and take money from her brown leather purse. A halfpenny at first, then a penny, a sixpence, and then onwards, to my greatest prize, a half crown coin.\n\nI couldn't help myself.\n\nInevitably, I was caught. I think that was the first time she stripped me of my clothing, laid me over the dinner table, and caned me.\n\nNo lesson was learnt. My life still revolved around stealing. On the way to school I snatched newspapers from the mouths of front doors and milk from their feet.\n\nI dived into the local sweet shop and snaffled bars of chocolate. At school, I waited for class to begin and then pretended I needed the toilet. Toilet, schmoilet.\n\nSoon as I was out of the classroom door, I was in the cloakroom rifling through my fellow pupils' jacket pockets. In PE lessons, I was always the last one to get undressed. Why? Because it gave me a minute or so in an empty changing room full of tempting grey trousers and blue blazers.\n\nWhen I arrived at Burbank Children's Home, in the April of 1968, I was ten years old and a thief of admirable consistency.\n\nBut then my burgeoning career as a thief came to an abrupt end. One night, my pal Lazlo Molnar and I robbed Woking Football Club. As the players trained on the pitch, we rifled through their clothes.\n\nWe got a wallet containing fifty pounds. We were both twelve years old. Two weeks later the police arrested us. I faced the worst punishment I could imagine: expulsion from my school, St John the Baptist Secondary in Woking.\n\nI could not face life without my school friends. They were my family. I'd already lost one set. No way could I afford to lose another. So I stopped stealing. Except for the odd moment in my twenties and early thirties, when I would unexpectedly find myself walking out of a shop with an unpaid newspaper or a magazine under my jumper, sharp nerves soaring through me.\n\n'Why did you do that?' my partner asked when I showed her my bounty.\n\n'Do you know, I have no idea,' I said, secretly exhilarated.\n\nDavid Westbrook also stole. He stole like I did. Except there was a difference: his stealing got him into prison.\n\n* * *\n\nWe met at Guildford train station. The day was bright and hot. The trees and flowers were in blossom. David was waiting in his car by the station entrance. When I saw him he had the most lovely smile on his face.\n\nI climbed inside and we shook hands, firmly.\n\nHe set off. Talk was easy. One of the first questions he asked was, 'How do you remember me?'\n\n'As a really naughty boy,' I said. 'If I recall correctly, you always seemed to be getting caught for stealing.'\n\n'That's right, but a lot of the time I didn't do it. See, I just wanted...'\n\n'Not now,' I said, 'Just keep driving and save it for the interview.'\n\nHe had obviously been rehearsing his lines for our talk.\n\nDavid was a long-term resident at Burbank. During my time there I shared a bedroom with David and six other kids. Later on, the two of us shared a smaller bedroom.\n\nDavid was three years younger than me, so at first I didn't have that much to do with him. Perhaps this was why when I recalled him, my mind's eye had gone hazy.\n\nDavid's recollections of me were far more vivid.\n\nDriving to his house where he lived with his wife Margaret and adopted daughter, Dionne, he told me that I had taught him how to box.\n\nThis was shocking news to me. I am neither violent nor a skilled fighter. Yet David insisted I had taught him to jab with his left and then punch with his right. He told me that one day at school he had tried out this combination and floored some poor unfortunate kid with one punch.\n\nHe told me that in the bedroom we shared together, I continually played him Faces and David Bowie records \u2013 now that sounded right \u2013 and that the first time he ever got drunk was with me and my schoolmate Sean O'Flaherty.\n\nThe pair of us had apparently taken David to a nearby pub and got him goggle-eyed and crazy on beer. (Light and bitter, most probably.) He remembered after the second pint, Sean and I demanding that he buy a round, and that the price came to seventy-six pence.\n\nDavid would find no problem getting his round in now. He runs a successful air conditioning business and in a good year clears a six figure salary.\n\nMore importantly, David had found love. Margaret. He phoned her twice during the twenty minute journey to his house. Just to make sure she was okay.\n\nAt first, I was a little scornful of his devotion but throughout the day I became fascinated by it. Love seemed to have lightened his load. It had been the same with Norman Bass.\n\nA lesson was being delivered.\n\nWe pulled up at his four-bedroom house on the outskirts of Guildford. A concrete mixer stood in front of his house and some workman's tools lay haphazardly on his driveway.\n\n'The builders are in,' he said. He got out of the car. So did I. He spoke across the roof of the car. 'I'm having loads done to the house.'\n\nMargaret opened the door. David smiled.\n\n'This is Paolo,' he said, I think a little proudly. 'Known him a million years.'\n\n'Lovely to meet you,' she said. 'Come in.'\n\nMargaret had seen me on the TV the night before and was highly complimentary, insisting how well I had done in life. I smiled inwardly at the irony. At that point in my life, I was financially hurting and all ends up in a major relationship. I was living day to day, just hoping to get through the mess my chaos had created.\n\nYet I totally understood Margaret's view. If I saw anyone on television, my first thought is that their life must be wonderful, joyous, secure forever. They were on the box, they were on TV. Therefore, they must be more than all right. I accepted Margaret's compliments and said nothing.\n\nWe went through to the kitchen where tea was brewed, chit chat was exchanged.\n\nEventually, Margaret said, 'I'll leave you to it,' and exited stage right, leaving just David, myself and a tape recorder. The large kitchen was dominated by a wooden table. I sat at one end, David the other.\n\nHe was dressed in non-descript clothes. Shapeless shirt, blue jeans. His hair was mousy; his build was like mine except his stomach was slightly protruding. He wore glasses and still carried the freckles on his cheeks that I recalled from our time at Burbank.\n\nBehind me, I heard the builders in the garden doing that which David had paid them to do.\n\nI pressed the record button. 'Nervous?' I asked.\n\n'Not a bit.'\n\n'Good. So let's start at the beginning. How did you come to be in care?'\n\nHe came to be in care because his mum and dad were teenagers when they conceived him. Mother was fourteen, father was fifteen.\n\nIt was 1960. Shame and scandal. No way would they be given charge of their child.\n\n'I haven't got a clue who my mum and dad were,' he said. 'I don't even know their names; I am still in the dark because I couldn't get my social services report. I tried to get it recently but they say it's been lost so there you go.\n\n'I spent my first year at a place called Abeath, which was a nursery place in Woking, Surrey,' David said. 'From there I was adopted. My new parents were Westbrooks and we lived at number thirty, York Road, Woking.'\n\n'So Westbrook isn't really your surname?' I asked.\n\n'That's right,' he replied.\n\nFirst connection \u2013 Hewitt isn't my proper surname either, I told him. The name belonged to my mother's first husband, not my blood father.\n\n'Unfortunately,' David said, 'I was ill-treated by my adopted mother and that's why I was taken into care. She used to beat me so I was carted off to a place called Woodrough in Bramley, near Guildford when I was about three years old.\n\n'Woodrough was a holding place. I don't remember much about it except these huge black windows with a catch on them and that Batman was on the TV and we used to get raincoats and run around the garden pretending we were Batman. I don't know how long I was there for but from there I ended up at Burbank, which was a permanent place.'\n\nAgain, huge similarities. I too had been beaten by a foster parent. I too had been thrown out of the family home and into care. Like Norman Bass I had been placed at Woodrough whilst the county council decided my fate.\n\nDavid was different to Norman and me, though.\n\nHe didn't cry his eyes out when he was forced to move to Burbank.\n\nWoodrough had not impacted on him in the same way it did Norman and me. He did not open himself up to anybody at Woodrough. The barriers he had erected inside of himself, built from massive distrust and fear, were just too formidable to crack open in such a short time.\n\nAt Burbank, though, a different story.\n\nAt Burbank, he eased up, started to enjoy himself.\n\nUnlike Woodrough, there were numerous kids his own age to befriend and run around with.\n\n'We had loads of adventures,' he enthusiastically said. 'Do you remember those bamboos at the bottom of the garden? We demolished them. We were in the garden one day and Stephen B. said, \"Look, what I've just found.\" It was a box of matches. So we gathered up some leaves in the bamboos and we lit a fire.\n\n'Next thing we know the bamboos have gone bang and Maggie (staff member) came rushing down and then called the fire brigade. That night Barry came home and I was cacking myself. Do you remember how he used to come right up to your face and scream at you?'\n\nDid I ever. At first Barry's shouting badly frightened me. Then my friend Colin N. told me to take a step back and look at how funny his contorted face became, like a clown on LSD.\n\nFrom then on the fear was gone. In fact, it was all I could do to not burst out laughing every time Barry leant forward and bellowed at me. I have loved Colin all my life for giving me that valuable life-lesson.\n\n'He screamed at me and told me to get to bed,' David said. 'But the good thing about it is that the next day it was forgotten. It wasn't something they played on, which was great.\n\n'We used to mess around in the garden all the time,' David said. 'Then smoking came into the equation. I think I was about nine or ten. There were more packets of fags in that garden than there were in the shop down the road.\n\n'I remember Barry one day seeing them all and making me Fred and Stephen go round the garden and pick them all up. Then he said I want you to bring the rubbish up to the house. We put it outside the house. Then he got all the older boys, I think you were included as well, and he said, right you lot are going to eat all these packets of fags...'\n\nI'll give him one thing \u2013 Barry was certainly consistent in his punishments. He did exactly the same thing to me after seeing me in a phone box with a packet of Number Six cigarettes clearly visible in my top jacket pocket.\n\nDavid started his primary school education at St Dunstan's School in Woking. It was a thirty minute walk away from Burbank. I too went to St Dunstan's. I loved my time there.\n\nDavid didn't fare so well. He hit a fellow pupil over the head with a table tennis bat and was quickly shunted off to Barnsbury School down the road. Soon after his arrival they caught him smoking. He was nine years old.\n\n'The headmaster Mr Burbage called me into his office,' David recalls, 'and he said, \"Right Westbrook, you want to smoke, smoke these.\" And he gave me a cigar. Thing is I really enjoyed it! But I got ill-treated all the time at that school. I felt Mr Burbage would find any excuse to give me the slipper. I think because I was in a home. I felt victimised all the time.'\n\nThis is a regular theme for care kids. All of us, at some point, had to deal with the brutish assumptions of others, had to face down those who truly believed that we were deserving of our fate, who truly thought our broken childhoods were our fault. To this day I still come across them. And my heart goes out to them.\n\nImagine having to go through life carrying such a mean spirit.\n\n'I wasn't a goody-goody but I wasn't a baddy-baddy either,' David said, 'although Maggie who was a staff member certainly thought so.'\n\nI remembered Maggie, well. She was a thin Scottish woman, extremely pale skinned, red haired, with glasses. She reminded me a lot of my foster mum, always seemed so unhappy, so on edge, always looked for any chance she could get to shout and bawl one of us out.\n\nDavid felt her wrath, her bitter anger.\n\n'Do you remember those bins out by the kitchen?' David asked me. 'I had to clean them up every morning. That was my job. Then you had to get a member of staff to check it and once they said it was okay, you could get your breakfast?\n\n'As you know, breakfast was served at a certain time and if you didn't get there by a certain time, you would miss out on the cereals and I love cereal.\n\n'One day I had done my job and done it really well. The place was spotless. You could have eaten your dinner off those rubbish bins. I got into the queue for breakfast cereal and I was just about to get my bowl when Maggie said, \"Have you done your job?\" I said yes, she said, \"Let's go and check.\"\n\n'We go round there and all the bins had been turned upside down. There was rubbish everywhere. She went absolutely mental. I don't know how it happened, but to this day I reckon it was her. That's how evil she was. I was out there for half an hour picking all the rubbish up again.'\n\nThe day Maggie left the Home was a relief to all, including, I wouldn't mind betting, some of the other staff members, such was her tetchy and aggressive demeanour.\n\nI remembered too the jobs we were given every week \u2013 peeling potatoes, washing up, doing the boiler, sweeping up outside. Yet, compared to the long hours that my foster mother made me labour, those jobs were easy, over and done within half an hour at the most.\n\nBut if the purpose of this work was to install discipline, then in David's case it failed. Magnificently. He started to rebel, started to steal, as all unhappy children tend to do.\n\nThen he made another discovery and it would prove fatal.\n\n'Do you remember how if anything went wrong, Barry and Sandy would call everyone into the dining room and you weren't allowed to move until someone owned up?' David asked me.\n\nOf course, I replied. I can still remember the tension filling up that room as all of us waited to see who would admit to the crime in question and be publicly punished.\n\nI remembered your hand being raised a lot on such occasions, I told David.\n\nHe chuckled at my memory but then frowned.\n\n'Okay, sometimes it was me,' he confessed, 'but I didn't do half of the things I owned up to.'\n\nI was confused. Then why confess?\n\n'To get attention,' David said. 'I wanted attention. No one was giving me any attention so I owned up to things I did not do. And because of that I started being accused of stuff. It was just seeking the attention.'\n\nI had been lucky. At Burbank I was seen as a bright kid, one with a future. Attention came to me. David was not so fortunate. A lot of the time he was passed over. Twenty-five children lived at Burbank. Someone would have to go to the back of the queue.\n\nDavid's yearning for attention was to have terrible consequences for him. As he kept owning up to things he did not do, the perception of him as a child beyond help persuaded his carers that he needed a different environment to help change his ways.\n\nDavid was taken out of school and moved to Barnum's, a Borstal school for maladjusted kids. Barnum's was an absolute roughhouse. Violence provided the institution's crooked energy.\n\nIt occurred on a massive scale.\n\nI wasn't surprised to hear David now talk about staff members assaulting him.\n\nBorstal schools were fearsome institutions. Violence came at you from all sides. Could be from the staff, could be from each other. Did not matter.\n\n'I used to have a problem wetting the bed as a kid,' David said. 'At Burbank it was easy, it got dealt with. If I wet the bed at Barnum's I was stood at the end of the bed naked and a staff member would come in and punch me in the stomach for no reason.\n\n'I remember going back to Burbank once with a severely protruding lip where a staff member at the school had hit me and no one did anything about it. No one listened. In the end, I thought okay, I'll get in trouble with the police and then perhaps that way someone will listen. So I got in trouble with the police.'\n\nDuring one vacation, David and a fellow Burbankian, Peter, burgled a local house, stole fifty pounds. That was quite a sum back then. They managed a trip to the pictures before they were apprehended by the police. Silly boys, they had left their fingerprints everywhere.\n\nYet they were not silly. David had succeeded because again he had garnered some kind of attention. Sure, he was in trouble but at least someone was talking to him.\n\nUnfortunately for David, Burbank was not impressed with this turn of events. In the staff's eyes, he was simply too much of a handful and they washed their hands off him. No more holidays at Burbank.\n\n'Burbank booted me out and I ended up in a place called Kinton,' David said.\n\nAt Kinton, David Westbrook learnt more about crime in a year than you and I will do in a lifetime. He had just taken his first step towards prison.\n\n* * *\n\nIf life at Burbank was occasionally harsh, the regime at Kinton was unremitting in its cruelty. The school once made the national newspapers when the head forced a pupil to bend over and then allowed all staff and inmates to hit him with a slipper.\n\nThe boy received sixty blows.\n\n'You had these masters who basically kicked the shit out of you,' David explained. 'If you did something wrong, they attacked you. We are not talking a couple of slaps here and there, it would be fists and feet.'\n\nOne time, David said, he was smoking in the dining room with some other boys, when a staff member came up from behind and kneed him so badly in the back, he crumpled to the floor.\n\nWhen the pain subsided, David stood up, picked up a chair and attempted to smash it over the man's head.\n\nSurrounded and hemmed in by such violence, it was not surprising that David started running away. When he was caught, he gave social services a graphic account of the abuse and violence at Kinton.\n\nBut, again, no one attended to his desperate words.\n\nOf course, they did not. He was the boy no one listened to.\n\n'The only good thing about Kinton,' he said, 'was that there was a Mr Marshall, and he was a decent bloke. He used to take me out and one day he bought a local paper and there was a company advertising in it for a refrigeration air conditioner trainee. He said, phone them up. Basically, they were building a Fine Fare superstore right in the middle of Woking and needed people. I went for the interview and got the job, twelve pounds a week.\n\n'This guy I was working for then said to me, \"Do you want to go to college and learn the trade? I'll give you a wage increase of twenty-two pounds.\" I said, done. That is the only thing I got from Kinton, a trade, the one thing that has seen me through to my life today. Now, I am doing a hundred thousand pounds job so that is the only thing I can say Kinton has done for me. The rest was a nightmare.'\n\nThe catch was that Kinton insisted David handed his wages to them every week. In return, he would be given back maybe a tenth of what he had earned. The rest of the money simply disappeared.\n\nDavid calculated that if ten of the inmates were having their wage packets lightened in a similar manner, the staff at Kinton embezzled around about five hundred pounds a week, a huge sum in the early seventies.\n\nDavid continued playing truant.\n\n'I found pubs and clubs and I used to stay out, never go back,' he said.\n\n'I would stay at friends' houses or stay with women I knew. One week at work I worked sixty-six hours and I got paid nearly seventy-two pounds. No way was I going to give Kinton that amount so I doctored the wage slip.\n\n'I changed the amount from seventy-two to twenty-two and then gave it to the woman at Kinton. She didn't notice a thing. I thought great, so every week I started doing the same thing \u2013 doing overtime then changing the wage details on the brown packet they gave you. Kinton could not understand how I was pissed as a fart every night on about two pounds a week.'\n\nAlcohol did for David. Most nights he took a holiday from himself and his world, sought relief in the warmth and the promise of a better time that the drink gave him every night without fail.\n\nHe started turning up late for his job. His work suffered. His boss got angry. The sack was quick in coming.\n\nDavid had no money. He turned to crime.\n\n'It was things like breaking into shops, stealing and then flogging the gear on,' he confesses. 'I remember we broke into this sex shop one night. Now I had never seen a dildo before and the bloke I was with told me it was a tea-stirrer. We got away, went to the pub and I went up to the bar lady, showed her the dildo and said do you want to buy a tea stirrer? The woman looked at it and said, give me two!'\n\nOut of the blue a job offer in Liverpool came through, again refrigeration. David was seventeen-and-a-half. He ran away from Kinton and headed north to Liverpool, where he took the job. Six months later the police arrested him for a minor offence. But by then it was too late. David was eighteen and no longer a ward of the council. Kinton had no hold of him now. He'd escaped. He had a new town, and a new career as a criminal to consider.\n\n* * *\n\nFuck you. As a child, you deny me love, you deny me attention, you deny me security. Therefore, you must think me the lowest of the low. Fine. I'll show you how low I can go. I'll go to places you haven't even dreamt about, I'll prove to you just how unhappy I am. I'll act in ways that will shock you to your safe little heart and then when you try to stop me, I'll tell you again. Fuck you.\n\nNo one had listened to the child, so the man took over and he said, fuck you a million times to all forms of authority.\n\nDavid Westbrook became a full-time criminal, went into credit fraud with a friend of his.\n\n'How did that work?' I asked him. I was intrigued. Crime does that to me.\n\n'Easy, you open up accounts in thirty-two different banks under thirty-two different names. You put in a hundred pounds in the first account and keep moving the money around,' he explained.\n\n'Keep that up for a couple of months and then you say to the bank I need a cheque guarantee card. They then send you one. So now you've got thirty-two cheque books and thirty-two cards. Every day we would go to a bank and draw out money. That was our job. Going to the bank every day, opening up accounts and drawing out money.'\n\n'Nice work if you can get it,' I remarked.\n\n'It is until you get caught,' he drily replied.\n\n'I went into the bank one day and I was collared. At the police station, I had never seen so many cheques in all my life. But I only owned up to two. I just went that one is mine, that one is mine, the rest I don't know about. The police were so primitive in those days, they didn't have a clue. These days if you wrote something out, they would send it to an expert and have you. In those days, it was quick arrest, quick conviction. I got a three month suspended sentence. I never gave them the guy I was doing it with. I told them I didn't know his name.'\n\nDavid and his partner in crime celebrated with champagne and women. Yet there was something else going on at this time, something very specific to orphans.\n\nDavid trusted no one. As far as he was concerned, everyone \u2013 his partner, his lovers, his friends \u2013 was out to get him and, therefore, everyone was under suspicion.\n\nI too have felt the same way. So have a million other orphans. You cannot blame us. One can only take so many knife wounds to the back.\n\n'If I met someone and had known him for years, I still wouldn't trust the clothes on his back,' David said. 'That's the way I was. Even the guy I was doing cheques with, I didn't trust him one bit. I used to sit down with him and we would have a laugh saying, this time next year we will be millionaires. But I never trusted him, never trusted anyone.'\n\nIn other words, fuck you. Except now David had a much bigger problem than issues based around lack of trust and intimacy.\n\nThe police had his name and number and they were on his trail.\n\nDavid had come to their attention because with some of the proceeds of his cheque scam, he had bought a motor bike. Fine. Except, one day he went flying off the bike at top speed, broke bones and cracked open skin.\n\nWhen he woke up in hospital, he was told the police had been asking questions. He took in that information, recovered, and then hi-tailed it back to Woking to avoid having to explain himself to the authorities.\n\nThe Liverpool police charged him with reckless driving anyway. A court date was set. In Woking, David now realised he did not have the money to make the train back for his court appearance. So he did the most natural thing in the world \u2013 he stole a car. He forced its doors, and drove off with it to Liverpool. He then parked the stolen vehicle right outside the courts.\n\nAt the trial, a small miracle took place. Instead of imprisonment, the judge found David not guilty. He said the police had been harassing him and the case against him was unsound. David walked out of court a free man and in a state of absolute bliss. Fuck you, he thought to himself, fuck you.\n\nThen he walked to his stolen car and found two policemen waiting for him.\n\n'Is this vehicle yours?' one of the policemen asked. With a great big smile on his face.\n\nDavid was handcuffed and led away.\n\n'I suppose there's a moral in there somewhere,' he said.\n\n'Yes, there is a moral,' I told David, 'and it's this \u2013 don't go to court in a stolen motor car and then park it outside in full view of the law.'\n\nBoth of us laughed and it felt good to be here with this man. Truth be told I had worried about the interview. I had worried the talk would go flat or horribly wrong. Just the opposite had occurred.\n\nI was really enjoying my time with David Westbrook. Like Norman and me, we had twinned over care.\n\nFor the stolen car, David was remanded to Walton Prison, Liverpool. I couldn't imagine what that would be like. Prison scares me to my soul. In fact, I have nightmares about prison life.\n\n'It was degrading,' David said. 'You're nothing. It made me feel that if I ever got out of there, I would never get caught again. I also felt that because of my past and because no one had ever given a shit about me, what I was doing was my way of getting back at society.'\n\nDavid was released. With no job prospects in view and no one to guide him, he returned to crime and cheque fraud.\n\nYet the criminal's innate ability to know exactly when the net is closing in kicked into action. David sensed the law was getting closer so he bought a fake passport, hot footed it to St Tropez.\n\nThere he sold doughnuts on the beach and at night found himself in casual amorous adventures. He loved the day-to-day nature of this life, the freedom of waking up with just the day to think about.\n\nBut there was a shadow hanging over David and that shadow was the police. The constant worry of capture, he explained, was in itself a prison sentence. There was only one way to set himself free.\n\n'I decided to give myself up,' he said. 'I got back from France and I phoned my probation officer. He said, \"Come round and have a cup of tea.\" Ten minutes later two CID blokes who I knew arrived. One of them said to me, \"We wondered where you had got to.\" I told him I had been in France but that enough was enough. I got remanded in custody.'\n\nA change had taken place. Prison had initiated it, forced David to see, as that great poet Graham Parker once noted, that nobody hurts you harder than yourself.\n\nDavid's solicitor did not mince words. He told David he would be imprisoned for a very long time. David shrugged his shoulders. 'I said, I know that,' he recalled, 'but at least I will have learnt my lesson.'\n\nThe court case came. Before sentencing, the magistrate asked David if he had anything to say.\n\n'I stood up and I said, yes,' David said. 'I said, I have had a shit life. I have had people taking the piss out of me since I can remember, from the council to welfare to the police, but it is now time to go straight. I know you are going to send me away but I am telling you the truth, you won't see me again. I'm throwing the towel in.'\n\nThe magistrate retired to his room. When he returned he told David to stand. David stood. The magistrate gave David a chance, a last chance. He sentenced David to just twenty-eight days in prison. To David it was the most precious lifeline that had ever been given him.\n\n'As we were leaving court,' David recalled, 'this CID bloke said to me, \"You step in shit and you come out smelling of roses.\" Perhaps I said the right things, I told him. He said, \"You'll be back again.\" I said, I won't. You will never ever see me again.'\n\nAnd David was right. He spent twenty-eight days in Pentonville prison and was released. Immediately, he was re-arrested for other outstanding charges. But again his luck held. Another judge showed him beautiful mercy. Ellison was his name and David will never forget him.\n\n'He didn't like me but he gave me a probation order which meant I had to live in a hostel in Guildford,' explains David. 'He said, I am going to ask the hostel for a report in three months' time and if I ever see you in here again you know what is going to happen.'\n\nAll orphans consider themselves unlucky. But once in a while the cards fall our way and when they do the impact feels so much greater than it does to others. Suddenly there is great light where there had only been dark and it feels absolutely wonderful.\n\nDavid stayed in the hostel for a year, working for a national tyre service. He met a girl called Jackie, and they married. But there was dishonesty in the relationship. David was still closed off. How could he not be after a life that had left him full of shame, confusion and guilt \u2013 a man still unable to trust, carrying with him a huge fear of intimacy.\n\n'Thing is, I never told anyone about my past,' he states. 'I felt ashamed, degraded, it wasn't the children's home thing it was more the criminal side of things. I couldn't talk to anyone about it. Same with Jackie, I didn't tell her anything.\n\n'Of course she asked about my family, kept pestering me, so although I hadn't seen my foster dad for ages, in the end I went round there. I knocked on the door, he answered and I said, \"Hello Dad.\" He said, \"Blimey,\" and then the first thing he said to Jackie was, \"He never comes to visit me.\" I thought, do you blame me? You've put me through shit. I really did resent him. He was my father and he had put me into care.'\n\nAnd then it happened \u2013 David started crying. Not massively but tears appeared and flowed and his words stifled at the back of his throat. He asked me to turn off the tape recorder.\n\nAt first I was surprised. He had been so lively throughout the interview that I thought him in complete control of himself. But his dark recollections had taken him.\n\nHe had taken tremendous blows, been treated in the most terrible of ways, yet somehow he kept getting off the canvas and soldiering on. I know what it takes to do that. I know the price you have to pay.\n\nAnd that is why I wanted to go over and hug David but the truth was I didn't know him well enough to do so.\n\nAll orphans are touch sensitive. Any display of emotion that has just one false note in it, sets our alarm bells ringing. If I had hugged him it would have been the act of a close friend, and I was not that to David.\n\nIt was best to leave him alone. To be false in any way would have seriously damaged the bond that had grown up between us.\n\nI sat in my chair. But I could not help myself. I pushed out my hand across the table to him.\n\n'David,' I said, 'it's fine, it's fine, all finished now, mate.'\n\n'I'm sorry,' he said, using a tissue he had grabbed from the box on the shelf behind him. 'I didn't think I would crack.'\n\nI told him we would stop the interview.\n\n'No, no,' he insisted, 'nearly there now. I'm fine.'\n\nHe let out a sigh of ages, a sigh that said he that he was surprised at himself. He never suspected how deep the tears inside were.\n\nDavid's marriage lasted seven years. Then his wife told him about the affair she had been having. End of marriage although there is a son, Dean, who he regularly sees.\n\nHe met Margaret in 1995 and just the mention of her name suddenly brightens him up. His smile reappears. Margaret had no baggage. She was solid, someone of innate decency. Moreover, she offered him unconditional love. With Margaret, David would heal himself.\n\n'Being married to Jackie I hated going home,' David said, 'With Margaret I hate leaving her. I never told Jackie anything about my past, whereas with Margaret I have told her everything.'\n\nBut why Margaret, why open up to her?\n\nHe thought about the question for a while.\n\n'Because Margaret was open with me,' he said. 'I could talk to her about anything.'\n\nIn other words, the boy no one listened to had finally found someone who would listen.\n\n'A lot of us who go through this get this drive to succeed,' David noted, 'and that's what Margaret helped find in me. She's my best friend. She's done so much for me.'\n\nHe vaguely gestured at his new expensive home, as if Margaret had built it for him. I suppose in many ways, she had.\n\n'In 1996, I started my own air conditioning business. I worked really hard and I have made a big success of it. I've got so much today. I have got my freedom, I have got my sanity, I have a job, I earn really good money but best of all I have someone who cares for me, someone I trust implicitly. I can't ask for more.'\n\nHe smiled at me. I knew what that smile said. I reached over and turned off the tape recorder and then I smiled at him.\n\nDavid smiled back and then he said, 'Thank you for listening.'\n\nFrom: paolo@gmail.com\n\nTo: desh@hotmail.com\n\nSubject: RE: RE: The New Book\n\nDes \u2013 Hope all good. Went to see David Westbrook yesterday who I am sure you will remember. You will read about him in the book but suffice to say he is another one of us, someone who had to face problems and situations at far too early an age. At Burbank, just to get attention, he owned up to mis-demeanours he did not commit. The result was that he was sent to Borstal and eventually did time in prison. But he is okay now, very much loved up that is for sure. Love in his case did indeed conquer all. It was lovely to see.\n\nI wanted to tell you about this guy I hooked up with recently. His name is Sukhvinda. This mutual friend of ours works for this charity called the Bryn Meleyn group. I did a reading for them at the Houses of Parliament. Goldie the rapper and artist was there as well. He had time in care, as well. Basically, they try to help people who are having a tough time after leaving care. I mentioned to this girl, Janet, that I would be in Wolverhampton talking at a screening of the film Get Carter and she told me to meet up with a guy who had been in care. Really glad she did. This man had experienced the most horrendous times as a child. It is not right to reveal to you his background but Des I shiver when I think of what he went through. Yet you want to meet him. His energy and positive nature is uncontrollable and he was irresistible. I had to know, how had he got to a state so positive?\n\nAnd he said this.\n\n'Because Paolo, we orphans are the most important kids in the world.' The most important kids in the world, how good is that phrase, eh? I wanted to call this book that but had to concede it didn't quite fit. But that's what we are and always will be, mate. The Most Important Kids in the World. Thought you should know that. I am around in about two weeks' time. How are you fixed? And what about those Spurs? Paolo\nFour\n\nThose the Gods Make Crazy\n\nThe Story of Terry Hodgson\n\nHe tried to kill me. With his fists. Bang, bang, bang. He said we were playing football in the garden and I had dribbled the ball past him just one too many times. That was when the red mist descended. That was when he knocked me to the ground, straddled me and started punching.\n\nI would have been eleven years old, weighing eight stone. He would have been fourteen years old, weighing thirteen stone.\n\nI would have put my arms against my head and turned to the right so as to protect my face. He would have kept pummelling away, slamming his huge fists into my face and prostrate body, time and time and time again.\n\nBut here's the thing, here's the knockout blow \u2013 I did not remember this savage beating at all. As soon as he gave me the details, I tried to access the event in my mind, but every time I did, nothing appeared.\n\nIt was not in my memory.\n\n'But it's true,' Terry Hodgson insisted. 'I'll never forget it. I literally tried to kill you.'\n\n'No, not me,' I said. 'You're thinking of someone else.'\n\n'It was you.'\n\n'No, it must have been another kid at Burbank.'\n\nHe shook his head. He was insistent.\n\n'You. It was definitely you.'\n\n'Are you sure?'\n\n'Of course I am sure. God's honest. It is why I wanted to meet today.'\n\nHe looked at me, keenly.\n\n'I wanted to say, sorry.'\n\nHe paused. 'I've been waiting to say sorry for years.'\n\nTerry Hodgson looked up at me. We were sitting in a caf\u00e9 in Woking Town. Coffee cups stood before us. Cake was on order. This was our home town and therefore felt appropriate, comfortable. Both our ghosts still lived in nearby Burbank and the road we once lived upon.\n\n'Terry,' I said, 'if you did beat me like that, then \u2013 I forgive you, no problem.'\n\n'Thank you,' he said. 'But I am surprised you can't remember this. Are you sure you can't? I remember that once I was upon you all the other kids in the garden ran over, and tried to pull me off. But my bulk made it impossible for them to shift me. Then I remember one of the kids ran up to the house and shouted for help and a staff member came running into the garden.'\n\nThat staff member also jumped onto Terry. No good. He could not pull Terry off me, either. Other staff appeared in the garden. They piled on top of him. In the end, it took three of them to stop Terry beating the hell out of me.\n\n'And I am sure you went to hospital,' he insisted. 'That is how bad I had beaten you.'\n\n'No,' I said. 'I'd remember that.'\n\n'Are you sure?' Terry asked.\n\n'I remember all my hospital visits,' I said. 'At Burbank, I had just the one. Sprained my wrist, playing football.'\n\n'Well, it is true,' he said, 'true as I am sitting here.'\n\nAfter being pulled away from me, Terry was taken up to the house, put in an empty room. The door was shut on him. He paced the room. Clouds of red gripped his mind. Fury mixed with chaos. Madness, madness, madness.\n\n'I just hated myself,' he said. 'I didn't know what the fuck was going on. I just knew I was fucking mad,' he recalled.\n\nHe tried the door. The door opened. He came out into the corridor. No one was around. He turned left, went through the back door and was outside the house.\n\nHe walked quickly around Burbank and then went down the drive. A quick right, and then a quick left, and he was free and headed for town, Woking town.\n\nHe reached the outskirts of the train station, climbed a fence and then scrambled up onto the railway tracks. His breath was now deep and irregular. He walked alongside the tracks until he came to a bridge.\n\nHe stopped, looked down. Cars shot by beneath him. Whoosh \u2013 whoosh \u2013 whoosh. Good place to end it all, he thought to himself.\n\n'And I was just about to jump onto the road, just about to kill myself, because I knew I was mad,' Terry said matter of factly, 'when I heard someone shout behind me, and I turned round and all these fucking coppers are legging it across the tracks towards me and I thought \"Fuck this!\" and I jumped back over the side and I started legging it too.\n\n'They got me and they put me in a police car and took me straight up to Brookwood Hospital. When I got to Brookwood they put me in a padded cell, gave me an injection and put me to sleep for three days. I never came back to Burbank.'\n\n* * *\n\nTerry today: still big but not fat. Suited, tie a little askew, nervous, lights dancing occasionally across his eyes. Quick talker, laughs a lot, a little too much laughter. Maybe. Smokes. A lot. Tells me his memory is shot through constant abuse of drink and drugs.\n\nExample: Goes into a coffee shop for a sandwich, is asked what he would like? He freezes. Can't remember. Goes outside and it hits him. I want a sandwich. That is what I want. He goes back in and says to the man, 'A sandwich, please.' And the man says, 'What kind, sir?'\n\nFuck, now you're asking.\n\nIt is apposite that he mentioned drugs. After our meeting, I would liken the telling of his story to a surreal drug experience. Reader, best fasten your seat belt. You are about to take a massive trip.\n\nThe first day I met Terry Hodgson I was on an introductory visit to Burbank. I was ten years old, shot through with fear and apprehension. I was walking down the curved pathway to the left of the house when I came across Terry and another boy digging a ditch.\n\nTerry stopped what he was doing, looked at me, and then stabbed his pick-axe towards me.\n\n'Oi new boy, I am going to put this in your fucking head,' he said.\n\nI quickly walked off and vowed never to go near him again. His anger scared and then confused me.\n\nBut then, how could I know that three years previously he had been rejected in one of the most callous manners I had ever heard.\n\nThe rejection came in the form of a letter, a letter which would cause such anguish, turbulence, pain and violence, create so many tears and so much heartbreak, it was staggering.\n\nWords on paper.\n\nWords on paper.\n\nThat letter pushed Terry Hodgson into a life of such crazy turbulence that it took the intervention of God Himself to restore his sanity.\n\nThe early facts are clear enough. Terry Hodgson was born on 6th June 1955. His father was not his mother's husband. Naughty girl, Mrs Hodgson, you let your knickers down. Divorce and scandal followed.\n\nTerry and his mother went to live in a mother and baby home. These institutions keep popping up in this book. And the world spins round.\n\nThe mother despised life under disapproving inspection. One day, she walked, walked out of the Home, and never returned. Terry was two years old.\n\nGod only knows what damage it caused within. Never mind, much more to follow. Give us another hit, Tel.\n\nA local family came to visit, offered to foster him. Today, Terry believed their motives suspicious, thought that the mother needed something to take her mind off things at home.\n\nMany foster parents wanted children for the money or simply to take revenge for their own harsh childhood.\n\nLike my foster mother. She beat me because someone beat her. And so the world spins round.\n\n'My foster mother had two children of her own and she couldn't have any more,' Terry said. 'She wanted a plaything not a baby.'\n\nTerry told me his foster mother was 'a very kind, warm-hearted woman but she was totally dominated by her husband.'\n\nThe dad, well, what a bastard. Beat Terry as soon as he could lay his hands on him.\n\nExample: Family go shopping. Terry gets in the car, instantly he gets sick. Father's reaction? Beat the boy.\n\nTell me about it. Had the same with my foster mother. I used to clamber into her car with those dark brown leather seats and within five minutes I would be retching.\n\nAny love and sympathy from my guardian? Any hugs, any encouraging words to cure my sickness? Hell, no. Just a smack around the face, a smack around the head, and no pocket money for a week.\n\nThere was only one person Terry could run to, his foster grandfather. Listen to the excitement and the love in Terry's words as his saviour comes to mind.\n\n'We used to go fishing together, we used to walk in the woods, we used to do everything together,' Terry said.\n\n'He used to sneak me pocket money because my foster parents never gave me anything. He used to take me for rides on his motorbike over the woods; oh we had a fantastic time, me and him. He was a really nice old guy, he was how a grandad should be, the sort of grandad I try to be, he was a good man. It was a shame when he died. He was a painter and decorator all of his life and, when he was about sixty, he had to retire because his hips gave in. He lived to eighty-three, he smoked every day of his life.'\n\nTerry was safe with this man. Time spent with him was a time where no one screamed at him or punched him, or brought him to his knees in humiliation.\n\nHow then could the father be so different to the son, one so kind and caring, the other so cruel and unforgiving? How can two joined by blood differ so wildly?\n\nI ask because I faced exactly the same conundrum in my childhood. My foster mother was vicious and vindictive, rarely kind or giving. Her mother, a paragon of kindness and gentleness.\n\nIt is the anomaly that consistently puzzles.\n\n'I couldn't do anything right,' Terry said of his foster father. 'I don't recall him ever saying to me \"Well done.\" Grandad could say it, he could see the value in me. He used to say, well done. But my foster dad...I used to suffer from asthma and I remember once I had a bad attack late at night, and I opened the bedroom window.\n\n'The only way I could bloody survive was to lean out of the window getting my breath, he came in and he belted me for it. He didn't say \"What you doing? What's going on?\" He screamed \"Shut that fucking window!\" And then he hit me.'\n\nSuch hatred, such cruelty, and why?\n\nBecause father was no longer the centre of attention. Terry had taken his place. Therefore, Terry must be removed.\n\nHis plan was devious, crafty. It would cost him money but the way he saw it, it would be worth every penny.\n\nHe would send Terry to a boarding school in Dorset. A phone call was made. Terry's suitcase was packed. The uncomprehending boy was taken to the station and put on a train.\n\nDad went home exultant: he was again numero uno in the family.\n\nBut there was a flaw to the plan, a turn of events the father had overlooked. It was Terry. He could not settle at his new school. How could he? Damage had been done to his soul. He was too unhappy. Too scared. Too fearful.\n\nHe kept playing up. With teachers, with the police, with his class mates, anyone, in fact, that he came into contact with. All were fair game.\n\nBack home, family life was constantly interrupted by phone calls from authority figures telling of Terry's wayward behaviour.\n\n'I would go to boarding school and get into trouble with the police all the time,' Terry said,\n\n'The final thing was breaking into a quarry and driving a big bulldozer over the edge of a cliff, kid's stuff, vandalism, you know what I mean?'\n\nI didn't. Know what he meant, that is. A smashed bus stop was the closest I ever got to vandalism. And it wasn't even me who did it, guv. It was Den Harvey.\n\nIt kind of pales a bit in front of sending a bulldozer flying over a cliff.\n\nTerry was moved to another school, and then another, and then another.\n\nTheir names became a blur, so did the memories. Terry continually ran away, continually caused trouble. Eventually, he ended up at a school in Wishmore Cross, near Camberley, Surrey.\n\nMeanwhile, the father sat at home and listened to the daily calls of complaints against Terry and he thought to himself, will no one rid me of this turbulent child?\n\nFinally, his brooding turned to action. He reached for pen and paper.\n\nThe most significant day of Terry Hodgson's life had just dawned.\n\nWords on paper.\n\nWords on paper.\n\nIt was morning, a bright morning, sunny, bluish skies. Summer was fading, autumn approached. Yellow and brown leaves were readying themselves for the fall.\n\nTerry was in art class and his mind was elsewhere when his teacher came over and handed him a letter.\n\n'We weren't supposed to read letters there and then,' he said, 'but I opened my letter and I read it and I went into a state of shock. It was from my foster father and it said, we don't want you to come home anymore, you're not our child, you're not one of us.'\n\nSilence, there was silence between us. The only sound was that of Woking itself, of hurried cars and busy shoppers, trains that rumbled into platforms, the odd wave of breathless conversation passing us by, the sound of a twenty-first century British town seeking to pass another day without damage.\n\nAll around us, people completely oblivious to what had just been revealed.\n\nWhich is that Terry Hodgson had been completely and utterly discarded by his family. They had thrown him away. Like a sack of rubbish, like dirt-stained and unwanted leaves, stuffed into a bag and thrown into the world.\n\nThe father could not stomach his presence anymore so he had done what he had wanted to do for a long time. He had banished Terry from his world.\n\nNow, Terry had nothing, literally nothing. No family, no home, no parents, no anything.\n\nAnd he is ten years old.\n\n'And I read the letter and I read it and I read it, and I remember the art teacher coming to me... I think people realised something was wrong. I could sense everybody knew there was something wrong.'\n\nThe art teacher took Terry by the arm and led him into the kiln room.\n\n'He just left me there with the letter. And then I blew my stack. I smashed every bit of pottery in there. Then I walked out and went and sat in the middle of the playing fields.'\n\nIn that field, in that lonely expanse of grass, the ten-year-old Terry placed an imaginary fifty yard radius circle around him and determined to attack anyone who stepped over that invisible line.\n\nIf you really want to know what the orphan feels like, if you ever want to get close to the orphan soul, then I can think of no better image to give you than that of Terry, sat in a field, utterly alone, baffled and discombobulated, denied the very stuff of life \u2013 family, love, comfort, security, want, birth right.\n\nAnd not just Terry either \u2013 every orphan has had to sit in that field and make that circle at some point in their lives.\n\nTwo teachers approached him. Don't come any nearer, Terry warned them. But they persisted. So like a snarling dog he flew at them and they ran for their lives.\n\nThen some of his class mates approached him. Same result. They got close, Terry attacked, and they too, ran for their lives.\n\n'They banned all the kids,' Terry said. 'Kids weren't allowed out of school and they just left me to it. Then, after four days, the headmaster came to see me. Now, I can't tell you how fantastic our headmaster was...'\n\n'Four days?' I asked. 'Four days? You were sleeping there, as well?'\n\n'Yes.'\n\n'You stayed in that field for four days solid?'\n\n'Yes.'\n\n'You didn't eat, drink?'\n\n'I would get up to stretch my legs and just walk around the field. When I wanted a piss I used to just walk a bit away from where I was sitting, and piss on the field, then go and sit back down again. I stayed there night and day for four days.'\n\n'No blankets?'\n\n'No, nothing.'\n\n'Was this during the summer?'\n\n'It was September or the beginning of October.'\n\n'It was cold?'\n\n'Yeah, but I didn't notice any of that, I didn't notice nothing, I was just sitting there and a fifty yard radius was my space and anybody entered my space they died.'\n\n'But four days?'\n\nI shook my head in disbelief. By now, I should have been immune to such awful events unravelling themselves into my tape recorder but this was something else.\n\n'Anyway this headmaster came over, and he was such a wonderful guy. He walked towards me very slowly, very unthreateningly, and he sat down, I don't know five yards... ten yards away, and he just sat there cross-legged. He didn't try to speak, he didn't say a word to me, he just sat there.\n\n'I don't know if I realised it at the time or if it's just looking back, but now I know exactly what he was doing, he was getting on my wavelength. We've all got psychic levels and we can adjust to where each other are at and that's exactly what he did with me.\n\n'He sat there until he felt he was at my level, and then he said to me, \"What's going on, Terry?\" I said, \"I got a letter from home.\" He said, \"Do you want to show me?\" I said, \"Yeah, sure,\" I gave it to him.\n\n'If I remember rightly, it was just two sheets of ordinary letter paper this letter and it took him half an hour to read it, I think he went through exactly what I went through. He just said to me \"I'm so sorry, Terry,\" and I said something like \"Yeah, well,\" and he said, \"I had no idea about this, we never knew anything,\" and then he started crying. I can't remember exactly what he said but it was something like \"I'll leave you to it,\" he just got up and walked away.\n\n'The next morning, I think it was the next morning, I got up. I went back to the school, helped myself to some breakfast.'\n\nNot long after, Terry assaulted his science teacher, and was called into his headmaster's study. The head teacher said, 'Terry, we can't take any more of this; it's got to stop now.'\n\n'And he picked up his cane and he said, \"Bend over the desk,\" and these were the days of six of the best. But instead I took the cane off him and I beat him with it, I wasn't having any of that shit. And then I got expelled from there.'\n\nHe paused for comic effect. 'They've got no sense of humour these people.'\n\nThere was nowhere else for Terry Hodgson to go now, except into care, carrying a voice which incessantly told him: You are not wanted, you are not wanted, you are not wanted.\n\nWords on paper.\n\nWords on paper.\n\n* * *\n\nTerry entered care, a wounded, angry, rejected animal, the raging bull.\n\nCarrying a physique beyond his years, Terry roared at everyone. And everyone backed off. Blessed are the angry for they shall inherit the Children's Home.\n\n'I am going to put this pick-axe in your fucking head.'\n\nTerry was sent to the nearby Byfleet Secondary School but said he got expelled within a few days. For smashing windows.\n\n'I got done for thieving, shoplifting in Guildford and the Wych Hill Post Office.' (Burbank is on Wych Hill.) 'And I was always being brought back by the police, or Barry was having to rescue me, that was happening a hell of a lot.\n\n'When I first went to Burbank,' Terry remembered, 'there was someone who ran it and I'm sure his name was Board, Donald Board. Then he left and Barry and Julie came. Donald Board was like an administrative head of the Home whereas I always saw Barry and Julie as a mum and dad in a way. That was the difference between them, Barry and Julie really took an interest, that sort of thing, I liked them a lot, I really liked them.'\n\nStill, didn't stop him smoking, and stealing and trying to get others to follow his example. Me, for instance.\n\nAfter the pick-axe incident I had won Terry's grudging respect one memorable day by climbing on a bicycle and pulling off a dangerous stunt.\n\nNow, I went with Terry to the boiler room for a smoke.\n\nHe asked, I followed.\n\nAll of his orders I obeyed. Yet he was not a bully. Not like Mothy who beat me senseless for a year.\n\nCertainly, Terry was ready to explode, potentially dangerous, but I don't remember him as cruel.\n\nThreatening, yes. Scary, yes.\n\nBut not cruel. He told me his first feelings when he calmed down after the beating he administered upon me, were those of huge regret.\n\n'I liked you,' he told me plainly, 'I liked you a lot. The fact that I had attacked you really upset me. That is one of the reasons why I wanted to kill myself. I thought, how could I do that to him?'\n\nAnd that was why on the day I can't remember Terry Hodgson was admitted to Brookwood psychiatric hospital.\n\nBecause he wanted to kill himself. Over me.\n\n'Wasn't the late comedian Spike Milligan a patient there?' I asked Terry. I was trying to break the mood. I knew about Brookwood hospital. It was the building on the outskirts of Woking.\n\nLike Burbank, it was hidden from view.\n\n'Yes, and Russ Conway was there,' Terry said. 'I met him in there. It was like that film, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest that was how it was. There were people in there frothing at the mouth, stamping on the floor, banging their heads, all this kind of stuff. And I was sitting there thinking, \"I'm not one of these.\"\n\n'Eventually I managed to work my way out, I got cleaning jobs, I used to sweep the roads at the hospital. Within about three months I was running the social club.'\n\n'I started off setting up tables,' he explained. 'They used to have bingo and tea dances and I used to set that up. And then I used to use the social club as an excuse for going out on the town, and I joined a group of Hells Angels who were based up at Knaphill. What was the name of that caf\u00e9? The Copper Kettle, we used to meet at the Copper Kettle.'\n\nI had lived in Woking for eight years and had never heard of any Hells Angels in the area. So two days after my meet, I called my mate Pete G. His family home was a mile from Knaphill.\n\n'Pete, Hells Angels. Round your way. True or not?'\n\n'Nah,' Pete said, 'Never heard of them. Not round here.'\n\nI smiled. Bullshitter, Terry. That is what I will call you from now on. Bullshitter Terry.\n\nA day later, Pete was back on the phone. 'Mentioned your question to my mate at work. He is local as well and he said there definitely was a bunch of bikers round there in the seventies. Used to hang out at a caf\u00e9 called the Copper Kettle.'\n\nTerry was a biker, a Hells Angel. I stood corrected. And a little shameful.\n\nTerry stayed with the gang for a few months. But as time passed, his enthusiasm dimmed. Ironically, an act of violence did for him. One day, they forced him to beat an innocent kid up. The act made him feel sick to his soul.\n\n'I used to intimidate people but that was all,' Terry recalls. 'One day we were all driving along and there was this couple there and someone shouted something at them and the bloke responded, wrong thing to do. I was on the back of the leader's bike and he said to me, \"Right, this is it, do the business.\"\n\n'So I got off the bike and went up to the bloke and I gave him a pasting, and I hated it. I was into anger, I was into destroying the world. I hated the world, but I couldn't do it cold-bloodedly, I had to be mad, something had to upset me.'\n\nFunny that: the boy who screamed in anger at the world was the boy who shirked the fight.\n\nBrookwood hospital looked after the old as well as the young. The authorities decided to move Terry to a more youth orientated hospital, Farmstead Villa in Epsom, Surrey.\n\nTerry remembered his time at Farmstead well, always will do. It was here he first experienced marijuana and LSD. He greedily took to them. Who wouldn't? They altered your world, made it a different and better place. Sometimes. Other times, the drugs unleashed dark enormous powers, well beyond his control.\n\n'Once I nearly jumped off a multi-storey car park trying to catch aeroplanes,' he said. 'Other times I would have frightening trips where everything would go black and white.'\n\nAt Farnstead, Terry hooked up with a guy called Chris. They not only took drugs, they stole drugs, and then they stole money to buy drugs.\n\nAt night, he got high and touched the sky but one nightmare refused to go away: the letter, the letter, everything revolved around that letter.\n\nEverything gained momentum from that letter, the letter that told Terry Hodgson he was not needed or loved or wanted. It is the letter that sent him crazy.\n\nYou are not wanted, you are not wanted.\n\nWords on paper.\n\nWords on paper.\n\nWhen Terry reached sixteen years of age he had to leave Farmstead. Those were the rules, my friend. So he joined the armed forces. Lots of care kids do. The world is too large, too scary to cope with. The forces shield you from civilian life. You serve, they protect. It's a good deal.\n\nTerry went to a Merchant Navy training school based in Arundel, Kent, got assigned to a ship called The Bembridge. One night on duty he got drunk, thought the ship was on fire and hit the alarm. Everyone jumped into the water. False alarm. The smoke Terry had seen was steam from a boiler room.\n\nTerry was discharged, moved back to Woking. He found a job at Tesco's but he was too out of control. No one could tell him what to do, where to go.\n\nTesco's sacked Terry. So he did what all sacked employees do. He set light to the store. In his mind, he was the singer Arthur Brown shouting, 'Fire! I'll leave you to burn!' at all his enemies.\n\nThen he got a job at Superdrug across the road on Woking High Street. Again, he was sacked. So he set light to Superdrug as well, and then hotfooted it down to Bath, where he began another campaign of revenge.\n\nThis time, it was against his foster family.\n\nHe called the local undertakers, told them that his father had died and gave the house address. He asked could they please come round with a coffin. Imagine the father's face when he opened the door. 'Come to bury you, sir.'\n\nOne night, high on LSD in Bath, he came across a burger van. He bought eight pounds worth of burgers and spent the night chucking them at passing cars, laughing hysterically.\n\n'I was mad at the world,' he said. Others disagreed. They said, Terry Hodgson is mad in this world.\n\nHe left Bath, and went back to Woking. He stepped onto the High Street, the boulevard of my teenage dreams, and was promptly arrested for arson.\n\nTesco's and Superdrug, they do not forget. Or forgive.\n\nHe was put on remand at Ashford Centre. Then he was taken to court. The judge was told that Terry was borderline insane.\n\nHe remembered a big row then going on in the court between doctors from two hospitals, one of which was Broadmoor.\n\n'They all wanted me,' he drily noted.\n\nHe was given a bed in a hospital called Longrove, in Epsom, Surrey. He did not stay long. Soon, he had escaped and was on the run.\n\nHe got a job at a fruit and veg wholesaler. At the interview, Terry said yes, I can drive a fork-lift. The first time they asked him to drive a fork-lift he puts its spears through the side of his manager's car.\n\n'Then I got a job at a petrol station, on the night shift. It was all right, I was relatively normal. But I got pissed off, so one night I took all the takings and pissed off. This was about one o'clock in the morning. I filled up my car with petrol, I shut up shop and I hit the road. The next morning I hit upon a brilliant scheme.\n\n'I ring the police and in an Irish accent tell them that I am the IRA and that we have kidnapped a Terry Hodgson from a service station near Sheffield and unless they release the Price sisters he will be executed.'\n\n(Marian and Dolours Price were part of a unit that placed four car bombs in London on 8th March 1973 and were subsequently imprisoned.)\n\n'I waited a bit and then I called them back. I told them the Price sisters were not free, therefore Terry Hodgson was dead. We, the IRA, had murdered him. Goodbye.'\n\nNow that he was dead, Terry assumed the identity of a criminal he knew to have disappeared. He carried on stealing and robbing. His chaos was at work and in full flight. Eventually, he was caught and he went to court. At his trial, the IRA scam was revealed. Terry got off with a suspended sentence.\n\n'And I got a great headline in the local paper,' he said.\n\n'What was it?' I asked.\n\n'IRA Killed Me Said Thief,' he replied.\n\nBoth of us dissolved into waves of laughter.\n\n* * *\n\nHis was now a life of utter abandonment. There was no control, no boundaries. The world had rejected him and so Terry created a life without top or bottom to it, one without any sides. He had no future, no direction, just anger and criminality, and making sure he threw back at the world what it had thrown at him.\n\nHis violence was one long scream.\n\nHe ended up in Dover and appropriated a car. He ran, he schemed, he stole. It was all madness; a life lived in an endless whirlwind of cops against Terry, Terry against the world, Terry against himself.\n\nYou are not wanted, you are not wanted.\n\nFinally, he was committed to Broadmoor psychiatric hospital. Broadmoor. Reggie Kray was a fellow inmate, so was Peter Sutcliffe the Yorkshire Ripper.\n\nHow did he survive, I wondered.\n\n'I pulled the poor, hard-done-by number on the doctors there.'\n\nI instantly understood.\n\n'The poor little me you can't punish me routine?' I asked.\n\nHe nodded and we both smiled, conspiratorially. All orphans used this trick. I used mine at school.\n\nIf a teacher started telling me off I would count to three and then interject. 'Yes sir,' I would say, 'but in the Children's Home I live in...' and instantly they would pull up, and say 'Well, don't do it again,' and walk off and forget to punish me. I would turn and smile and skip away.\n\nTerry was careful at Broadmoor. Compared to his inmates, he was the sane one. In Broadmoor, he told me, matter of fact, he saw people raped and killed. So he kept his distance, befriended no one, tried to sink into the surroundings and not be noticed.\n\n'There were people in there that I could have had sex with but you wouldn't risk it, because there was a good chance that while you were shagging or whatever they'd put a knife in your back. So, I played the game and I got out. But to show you how mad I was, I'd been out six months and then I went back and pleaded to go back in. I wanted to go back. I hated the outside world at first; it was such hard grind living in central London.'\n\nThey would not let Terry back into Broadmoor, so he headed for London, ended up in a Richmond Fellowship hostel. Ladbroke Grove. It was here he became a professional villain.\n\nHis scams were devious, and clever. He told me one of them.\n\nTerry bought a Cortina Crusader car and advertised it in the local paper. He sold the car and told his client that as soon as the cheque was cleared he would hand over the car. An hour later another man calls. Car advertised still available?\n\nYes sir. More men come and hand over cheques. He banks all the cheques, and, after three days, he ran off with the money.\n\nWhat does he spend his De Niro on? What else? Women, wine and song, of course. What else is there in life?\n\nTerry turned gangster, began acting the big shot. You know the number. You've seen the films. Get yourself smart, get yourself a gang, get yourself some money, drive the big car, and here come the girls.\n\nTerry moved to Eastbourne and earnt eight hundred quid a day. Fraud, mainly. At night, he partied. He went to nightclubs, slipped doormen wads of notes, ordered bottle after bottle of the good stuff, and the girls came and sat with him.\n\n'It was the crack you know? Made me feel good.'\n\nI would never have been so flash. My life in care drove me to stand on the side-lines, watch others. Terry's impulse drove him centre stage, into the spotlight. Look at me, I am the one.\n\nThe police get interested in this Flash Harry. Terry ended up in a car chase.\n\nA day later Terry Hodgson woke up in Lewes Prison.\n\n'And that was when I met God,' he said, casually.\n\n'How is He?' I asked, facetiously.\n\nTerry considered me carefully. 'Do you believe?' he said.\n\n'Forgive the smart ass remark. I do,' I said.\n\n'I'm sitting in my cell and I'm a hard man, I'm known in that prison and there are people out to get me. So I'm sitting in there and I suddenly said, \"God, you know, if you're real you gonna have to prove yourself to me now because I am in deep shit.\" And He did. He spoke to me, I heard words in my head.'\n\n'What did He say?'\n\n'He said, \"Terry, I've been here all the time and I am ready to help you, just believe in me, just trust in me.\" And I said to him, \"You know my reputation, there are people here who are going to give me grief if I believe in you, they're gonna think I've gone soft and they're gonna get me.\" And he showed me a verse in the Bible. I just opened a Bible and there was this verse that said, \"I will give trouble to those that trouble you.\" And I just knew in my heart that this was right and I went for it, and I had a great time.'\n\nTerry thought this act was preparing him for the next step. Which was miraculous. He was set free from court. He did not serve a prison sentence.\n\n'God had been true to his word,' Terry said.\n\nI have already sensed your uneasiness, reader, your discomfort. I understand. Mention of God, suspicious eh? The idea that He might be directly helping people is too much for the many to bear.\n\nDid God speak to Terry Hodgson, as he claims, or did Terry simply find some kind of peace through the idea of a God talking directly to him, around him for so many years?\n\nThis must be said, though.\n\nSince that day in 1982, Terry Hodgson did not commit any more crimes. Not one. Instead he dedicated his life to God. God the Father, God the Son, God the Holy Spirit.\n\nAs a free man, he regularly attended mass. He began a website where he posted his musings on the subject and later on bought a printing company so he could publish Christian magazines. The business failed. He went to work for a bookseller, then onto driving the lorries.\n\nThe personal life has not been smooth, either. In 1984 he married a woman named Ginny and had two daughters. In 1999 his marriage fell apart but in keeping with his new outlook he and Ginny remained friends.\n\nLater on, he suffered a heart attack and was told he had just six months to live. By now he was in with a woman named Claire and she was the one, the love he sought. They decided to move down to Devon so they could be with his daughters for the last part of his life.\n\n'I started going to a hospital for tests and treatments and on the first day,' Terry said, 'they turned round to me and said, \"What do you mean dying? There's nothing wrong with you, you've got the heart of an ox.\" I said, \"What do you mean? I've just given up a perfectly good life in Surrey to move down here.\" So, there's nothing wrong with me and I haven't had any trouble since.'\n\nThe couple stayed on in Devon. Then, disaster. Claire fell ill, was diagnosed with benign inter-cranial hypertension.\n\n'It's a brain disease, it's to do with epilepsy. When's she at her worst she really believes she is fourteen years old,' Terry said. 'Other times she'll just sleep for days, sometimes she just wanders around, doesn't see me, doesn't know me, doesn't see anything, just on automatic.'\n\n'Must be so very difficult for you.'\n\n'It's very difficult, thoughts of suicide are a constant companion,' he admitted.\n\n'For you or for her?'\n\n'For me, it can be very depressing, I never will, mainly because I haven't got the gun. But I just get through, when I get a run of my really bad depressions I just turn round and say: tomorrow's another day.'\n\nWhich seemed as good a place as any to leave it.\n\nI was exhausted. Terry's life had been so rich, so adventurous I needed a day just to assimilate it all. He walked me back to the station.\n\n'By the way,' he said, as we parted, 'don't get me too wrong on this God thing. This geezer took the piss the other day and I did have to threaten him with a little slap.'\n\nAnd the boy who once sat alone in a field for four days and the man he came close to killing, both laughed together.\n\nAnd then we both slowly faded upwards into the early evening sky, high on the trip we had just taken.\n\nFrom: paolo@gmail.com\n\nTo: desh@hotmail.com\n\nSubject: RE: RE: RE: The New Book\n\nDes \u2013 Hope all well. Last week met up with Terry Hodgson, Jesus that was some day. His life was absolutely crazy. Parts I did not believe but then I checked some of his story and it came out true. And he seems all right now. God saved him. His life was crazy and chaotic and then he called on God and the madness stopped. I know where you stand on this matter but even if God does not exist is that not a fantastic reason for His existence? That there is a force where just the idea of Him is enough to turn people's lives around for the better. Today I am off to see my sister in Yeovil so better shoot. How you getting on with The Sopranos? Talk soon. x\nInterlude\n\nThings Seen at Dawn\n\nGod's breath is the early morning mist that gently invades the Somerset hills. At the bottom of those hills begins a carpet of green that slowly undulates itself towards me.\n\nThe sky is an unblemished blue, the sun is a yellow ball slowly breathing itself into heat, second by second and minute by minute.\n\nIt is seven in the morning and I am sitting in my sister Nina's garden sipping espresso and thinking about the poet, Shelley. Was it not he who said that heaven is here on earth, that the curse of our existence is that we are just too blind to see it?\n\nI want to shake the man's hand. If the view in front of me was made beautiful by one more inch I don't think I could stand it.\n\nEverything is so right, so perfect, so tranquil.\n\nVan Morrison now appears in front of me, singing that beautiful song of his about the angels that live in the land just across the bridge, and how to see them I must close my eyes.\n\nSo I close my eyes and I wonder and I dream yet I feel a slight disquiet in my soul. I know the problem.\n\nEven though I am having a relaxing weekend I cannot help thinking about this book. I go to bed at night with it on my mind, I wake up in the morning thinking on it. It is a familiar set of instructions.\n\nDon't forget to insert that sentence, don't forget to resolve that issue, don't forget to introduce that character, make sure you write Terry's in a fractured style so as to reflect a drug trip, keep this section in the present tense so as to insert some energy, and \u2013 most important of all \u2013 think up a great opening line for the next section, one that grabs the reader and won't let them go.\n\nAlso keep Norman's chapter terse, so as to reflect his character on the road and the same with David so as to mirror the frustration of a child that no one listens to.\n\nAlthough I have now interviewed the four guys and written their chapters, there is something missing, someone I have not met and faced up to. First off, I think it must be that I have not spoken to any of the girls who I lived with.\n\nThere is an explanation for this anomaly. I found two girls from my Burbank days, and both refused to talk. They had no interest in telling their life stories. When they told me their reasons, I understood why.\n\nSo if it wasn't the girls...\n\nAnd then, a beautiful realisation.\n\nBurbank Children's Home. That is the character missing from this book, the character that binds us all together. Burbank Children's Home.\n\nMany years ago in my memoir, The Looked After Kid I described Mount Vesuvius in the bay of Naples as a brooding, imperious presence. I think I was actually describing Burbank. For so many years, that is exactly what it has been at the back of my mind.\n\nWhen I moved to London, I did so because I wanted to escape its dark shadows, its ghosts, its bitter sweet memories. I wanted to forget I was an orphan, escape from that title and re-invent myself.\n\nAt first, I told no one of my past in London. My aim was to write for the music press and I did not want to achieve that dream by playing the sympathy vote. I wanted to be judged fair and square.\n\nOf course, when I did land my dream job, I became convinced that my employers IPC had a huge secret computer stashed away somewhere which had given them my details and that is why I had been given the job.\n\nLet us put that thought aside. The reality is this \u2013 I need, no, have to meet Burbank, and face it head on. I have to visit every one of its rooms and dispel forever this dark presence in my soul.\n\nThe wheel has turned, the bell has rung: I have no choice now. It is time to face Burbank full on. And I knew just the man to do it with.\n\nI reach for my phone and I call him.\n\n'You are coming to Burbank with me and you can't say no,' I say, and then I hang up.\n\nHappy as the morning sun now, I took some more coffee, closed my eyes and lost myself in those fields of wonder.\nFive\n\nHome\n\nInside Burbank a million of my ghosts lived and breathed. Today, I must go inside, firmly shake their hands and bid them addio forever.\n\nI had actually visited Burbank once before but I had TV cameras following me. We had three hours to film and so I had quickly moved through its rooms, refused to engage with my ghosts.\n\nToday, I will go eye to eye with them. Today, I have to.\n\nAs I waited nervously for Des Hurrion, a plane passed above me and I looked upwards. It was June and I saw that God had awoken in an uncertain mood. Thin grey clouds stretched themselves thinly across a sky blue canvas as if He couldn't make up his mind between sun and rain.\n\nThe air's temperature fluctuated, hot and cold, cold and hot.\n\nThe arrangement was to meet each other at Woking train station at ten in the morning and take a leisurely stroll to the Home. Only I got there late and Des was nowhere to be seen. I figured he had already made his way to Burbank and I set off in pursuit.\n\nFifteen minutes I later I turned into the drive that led up to the Home and received my first jolt of the day. The garden that stood to the right of the drive, the garden I had spent so much of my time in, was no longer there.\n\nTwo massive houses now stood in that space. They cost half a million each.\n\nThe hallowed ground I had spent countless hours upon as I played football, smoked ciggies, chased girls, fought other boys, was now covered by bricks and mortar.\n\nI felt a surge of hopelessness, and a tinge of anger. My teenage spirit was soaked in that soil. Now the foundations of my youth were the foundations of two strangers' homes.\n\nIt felt terribly wrong.\n\nI continued up the drive and suddenly Burbank came into view. I stopped, looked. Still the same colour, still the same structure. I had heard rumours in faraway London that there had been plans to knock it down and even though I had spent many years running from its presence, the very idea of its disappearance had been strong enough to induce in me a faint kind of panic.\n\nNow, I knew better. It had not changed one iota. This house will stand forever.\n\nI reached the porch and rang a bell. The front door opened. A young staff member called Gary stood in front of me. He had blond hair, a good build.\n\n'You're Paolo?'\n\n'I am.'\n\n'Des was here but he's gone looking for you,' Gary informed me.\n\n'I'll wait for him out here,' I said. 'Don't worry, I'll be fine.'\n\nI was doing Gary a slight favour here. These days, there are strict rules and regulations concerning visits to a children's home. You have to be accompanied by a staff member at all times. As Des wasn't with me Gary didn't know whether to invite me in or ask me to wait outside.\n\nI had just saved him from having to make that awkward decision.\n\nHe closed the door and I waited to meet my past. It felt strange to loiter by the front door. During my time at Burbank, as you may recall from Norman's testimony, the front door was only used for special occasions.\n\nMine was the day the police picked me up at school and drove me back to Burbank after burgling Woking Football Club.\n\nI remember Barry waiting for me by this very front door. He wore lime green socks with no shoes, and the expression of rage on his face was fearsome.\n\nThose lime green socks were the colour of my fear.\n\n'There you are!'\n\nI looked down the drive and saw Des.\n\nWith blokish irony, I shouted, 'Oi! Come on, Hurrion! Where've you been?'\n\n'Waiting for you, you plonker,' he chided back. And in that very moment we suddenly stood glorious again in 1972, transported there by our words, our pact, the language of our bodies.\n\nToday, Des looked great. The man had a smile on his lips and air in his steps. His face was beaming and his enthusiasm obvious. He had lived in so many places since leaving Burbank but had settled in Guildford, the town he loved. And it showed.\n\n'Look at what they have done to our garden,' I said, motioning to the two houses. 'I learnt to play football on that grass.'\n\n'Were you any good?' he cheekily asked.\n\n'Better than you my friend,' I shot back.\n\n'Yeah right,' he said.\n\nBoth of us looked down the drive.\n\n'Do you remember the phone hoaxes that someone used to make once in a while?' Des unexpectedly asked. 'I think one of the kids had left the Home and would ring the fire brigade and tell them Burbank was on fire.\n\n'I'll always remember fleets of fire engines roaring up this drive to put out non-existent fires. In fact one time Barry had to wrest an axe from an over-zealous fireman who was about to smash his way through the front door.'\n\n'I wonder who made those calls,' I said.\n\n'I remember Barry said the name of some kid I had never heard of,' Des replied.\n\n'Wouldn't be a Terry Hodgson by any chance?'\n\n'Could well be,' Des said.\n\n'I also remember finding the house dog, Shandy, dead on this very porch we are standing on,' Des said with a small laugh, 'and me and Barry hurriedly rushing to bury it in the grounds before anyone got home from school.'\n\n'You buried the dog?'\n\n'Yeah, round the side there, in the slope leading down to the road. Barry and I did it one afternoon. I remember we were really rushing because everyone was going to be home from school soon so we had to get it done before you guys got back and got very upset.'\n\n'Jesus.'\n\nFive minutes in and already dark secrets are being revealed.\n\nGary opened the door.\n\n'Come in,' he said warmly to both of us, 'Come on in.'\n\nWe walked into the house, into the hallway, and now we stood on the familiar mosaic floor we had trodden so many times as child orphans, and I could not help but be taken by this moment.\n\nWhen I arrived at Burbank in August of 1968, I was a young boy, full of so much fear and confusion that I didn't know I was full of so much fear and confusion.\n\nI stood in this very hallway with a small suitcase in my hand, not knowing what to do, what to say, where to go. Now, I stood here, a grown man with purpose in my soul.\n\nInstinctively, I looked over to the right hand corner of the hallway. That's where Barry once placed a dog bowl in which he had mixed my cigarettes with water. He had caught me smoking and was determined to make an example of me in front of everyone.\n\n'You love cigarettes so much,' he cried to me, 'drink that.'\n\nThis from a man who smoked forty a day. In front of us.\n\nGary said, 'You understand I have to accompany you everywhere? I hope you don't mind but it's the law.'\n\nDes and I had no problem with this.\n\n'Actually, I am looking forward to this,' Gary added.\n\nCare had changed so much since our time there, Gary explained, and he wanted to measure the distances between then and now, see how far care had come.\n\nI liked the man's dedication.\n\nDes turned to Gary. 'How many children now live here?' he asked.\n\nThe number of children during our time at Burbank oscillated between twenty to twenty-five. Barry and Julie ran the Home and lived with us along with one other live-in staff member. Two other staff came in daily from outside.\n\nToday, Gary told us, Burbank had just three children with five staff to look after them.\n\n'What?!' we both exclaimed.\n\n'Five staff, three children. That's the numbers,' he replied. 'Different times now.'\n\n'Certainly are,' I said. 'Did you see that TV programme the other night about care in Germany?' I asked. 'The kids there get massages every week.'\n\n'The kids here get one-on-one counselling,' Gary said.\n\n'We could have done with some of that,' Des softly noted.\n\n'I know,' I say, 'but let's face facts. The staff had enough on their hands getting twenty-five of us clothed, fed and watered every day. They had to get us to school and back, make sure the house was in order, provide food and then get us to bed. There wasn't time to do anything else. I don't blame them at all.'\n\nDid I say this to hide my jealousy at the care now lavished on orphans? It was a distinct possibility.\n\nThere were four doors that led away from the hall. First door on the right took you into the old dining room. It is a sitting room now but back in our time this was where we ate breakfast and tea, and lunch, if it was a school holiday.\n\nAt the time, five dining tables dominated the room. A member of staff sat at the head of each one.\n\nBarry was at the head of mine and Des's.\n\n'I'll always remember how I hated cheese on toast with a passion,' Des said, 'but one day you told me to put brown sauce on it and since then I've loved it. Every time I eat that I think of you.'\n\nI was touched. It was always the little details that made the bigger impact.\n\nDes recalled the seating arrangements and suddenly the names of our ghosts spilled out from his lips.\n\nJulie and Rebecca over there, Maggie over there, Mothy over there, David there, Terry there, Norman the boy who stuttered here, Ann and Anais there.\n\nThis room had another memory for me.\n\nI remembered being called into it one Sunday afternoon when I was twelve years old and Barry and Julie sitting at a table and telling me not to worry, that all would be okay, that I was special and they would never leave me, that they would be at the Home for as long as it took to get me to university.\n\nAnd I recalled thinking how strange this pledge was. I had not asked for it nor even thought about the pair of them leaving Burbank.\n\nI should have known something was up then.\n\nAt that time I was settled, and not because of Barry and Julie but because of my fellow Burbankians. They had saved my life. There was Big Tommy and his brother Frank, then Terry, Graham and Jimmy B.\n\nThey were older than me and smarter and wilder. I didn't particularly get on with all of them but they accepted me, made me feel wanted. I was ten years old and it was one of the first times in my life that I had been made to feel this way. It was a valuable feeling. I felt safe in their company, truly looked after.\n\nI saw that in them which the rest of the world could or would not. I saw their humanity. That made me blessed.\n\nIronically, it was in this room that Barry and Julie fell apart. One tea time Barry sat at the table, brooding. He and Julie had argued badly.\n\nFinally, Barry snapped. He rose in a fury, went to Julie's table, picked up a bowl of rice pudding and smeared it onto the head of a girl sitting at her table.\n\nThen he strode out of the room. A minute later we heard his car start up and screech away down the drive, heading for the pub, heading for oblivion.\n\nThe girl sat in shock, rice pudding dripping down onto her curiously small ears. But we all knew that Barry did not intend to put a bowl over her head. It was Julie's head he wanted.\n\nLater on in life, a conservatory was built onto the side of this dining room. It acted as a second but very small sitting room. There was a TV and a record player, a couple of chairs. The smaller kids never really went in there but I sat in there for hours and hours.\n\nI watched Fawlty Towers here, and got so obsessed with The Sweeney, it actually hurt me to miss an episode. I fell in love with Brian Moore the football commentator, and swooned to The Persuaders who dressed in clothes I thought I would never be able to afford. But I was wrong.\n\nI watched every episode of Top of the Pops in this room, and later on, The Old Grey Whistle Test. This is where I fell in love with certain bands \u2013 The Faces, Genesis, Bowie, Lindisfarne, T. Rex.\n\nBut my one over-riding memory of this room was sitting by the record player playing one particular song over and over again \u2013 The Long and Winding Road by The Beatles.\n\nI was thirteen and that song moved me like no other and did so for years. Later on in life, I wondered how Paul McCartney had managed to tap so vividly into the orphan's soul. How had he done that? I kept wondering until I read Paul McCartney lost his mother when he was just eleven years old.\n\nI think he carried that sadness around with him until the day he sat down and God gave him those opening chords and that opening line.\n\nThe song is not just about sadness and loss but it is also about love and light and beauty, symbolised by the wild and windy night that the rain washes away. That song spoke to my soul and it still does. Even now, I find so much solace in those words and that music.\n\n'Come on,' I said, to Des and Gary, 'onwards.'\n\nWe left the dining room and went into the kitchen.\n\nOn the right was a very large oven and over in the left hand corner, a walk-in larder, where loaves of cheap bread and countless jars of Robertson's marmalade once lived.\n\n'God, I had forgotten about that,' Des suddenly exclaimed.\n\nHe pointed to a room to the right which had been built onto the original house and sometimes acted as either a sitting room or a staff bedroom.\n\nI felt a little jolt in my stomach. In 1975, my social worker took me into that room and told me, as best she could, that the man I had been told all my life was my father was not.\n\nHe was a lie, cooked up by the authorities to cover up the true circumstances of my birth. My father did not live in Canada as I had been told. He was not the man who had fathered my two sisters. My father was a ghost, a real ghost. No one knew his name, his identity.\n\nThat day will always live with me. I remember I sat there in that gloomy fading afternoon light, taking in this shocking information and thinking to myself, God, haven't you done enough? Haven't I taken enough blows in life without having to deal with this? You take me away from my mother and give me a foster mother who beats me senseless. Then you place me in a home.\n\nNow you tell me that I have been lied to all these years, that I have no idea who my true father is. What did I do to gain such favours?\n\nFor weeks after, I moved slowly. I kept thinking to myself, they have made a mistake.\n\nMy social worker will come back to Burbank and sit me down and say we are so sorry the files were switched, a secretary messed up, this hasn't happened to you. We got the wrong boy, everything is good, everything is as it should be. We are so sorry to have upset you. Here take this money, buy whatever you want.\n\nI seemed to spend a lot of my time in care daydreaming in such a fashion, always thinking that the wrongs in my life would be magically corrected and I would be returned to normality. And in these dreams, sunshine and lemonade were always present, always, and I don't know why.\n\nBut it never happened. Every day dawned and every day closed, and no one came and no one apologised. A month I spent in gloom and then I snapped. I used the orphan's fuck you.\n\nWhy should I let liars and deceivers ruin me? I am not going to give you that satisfaction. I am going to carry on as normal and this whole affair can melt away into the background and stay there for all I care. And that is what I did and that is how I put a smile back on my face and a spring into my footstep.\n\nI went over and I opened the door and peered inside. I took a deep breath and I closed the door.\n\nAnd as I did I saw my ghost stand up from that chair and fly out of the window.\n\nI turned and moved through a door which led into the old cloakroom. Des and Gary followed me through.\n\nThis is where we hung our school blazers, polished and kept our shoes.\n\nI glanced at the bench and saw myself sitting there in my school uniform, my eyes greedily scanning the Daily Mirror, consumed by the football reports, fascinated by the picture of Peter Wilson, their sports writer, thinking how great must it be to have such a job.\n\nAnd many years later I got one just like it myself. But I was unhappy the whole time and knew then and first-hand the power of illusion: You are in the paper, you are on TV, you must be fine, oh so fine.\n\nThe door of the room led out into a small courtyard, the space where the staff hung our bed sheets and clothes and as they blew like crazy in the autumn wind, we loved to run through them, and then down the back drive to the garden.\n\nToday, sheets are still being hung here. Des and I both smile at this picture. Some part of our world remains the same.\n\nIt was also here that I first proved myself to the gang by mounting a bicycle and hurtling down the back drive across the main drive and then flying into the garden at about ten feet high before landing successfully.\n\nIt was not the fact that I had successfully completed the mission, it was the fact that I had taken it on in the first place that won me respect and friendship. Another valuable lesson.\n\nThen I noticed a locked gate at the end of the wall. I walked over to it with growing excitement.\n\nThis was the boiler room where we spent so many hours smoking and talking. This is where Frank V. once said to me, 'You know Paolo, it don't get any worse than this,' and I absorbed those words and even if they lay dormant for years, I now see that it was their truth that helped push me onwards.\n\nFor if Frank's words were true, then I only had one place to go \u2013 upward.\n\nI looked down at the bottom of those stairs and barely made out the lumpy grey boiler that once heated the whole house.\n\nSuddenly, I heard the boiler ignite and a thousand memories rushed up the stairs towards me.\n\nI saw Jimmy B. teaching me to punch the dirty dark walls so as to toughen up my hands for fighting. I recalled the dark coal powder that smeared our hands and how, when I gazed upon it, I was reminded of the books I had read containing little orphan boys who were chimney sweeps.\n\nI thought of the girls we enticed here, hoping to push eager tongues into their mouths, fumbling with their buttons, and how sometimes a few of them did not wriggle away from us, and how some let me do what I wanted and how very special that made me feel because I was wanted.\n\nSo much resided in that darkened room it really was quite incredible.\n\n'It's a bit cold out here,' Des said.\n\nI dragged myself away from the gate and followed him and Gary back inside.\n\nWe went through the back door and into the old playroom.\n\nA piano once stood in the corner of this room. I thought of other pianos I had seen in other houses, other places, and they all had something ours didn't \u2013 photographs. People place photographs on piano tops. Ours was bare.\n\nDes had a camera, as did some staff members, but in truth there were few photographic records of my time in Burbank. My photographs were songs and books and certain items of clothing and footballers and smells, such as that of newly cut grass; those were the things that triggered the memories which will never be eradicated, not pictures.\n\nThe playroom. We stand in wonder. I reminded Des of the chest of drawers that used to stand by the door and how every year he would dump his Christmas presents there.\n\n'I hated Christmas here,' I told him.\n\n'I didn't,' he said. 'I liked it.'\n\nI was taken aback. I always presumed Des and I felt the same way on every matter. We moved as one, remember?\n\n'Really?' I said. 'I found it horrible, waking up and going downstairs to get useless presents.'\n\n'Those gifts were crap,' Des agreed. 'Things like socks and slippers, crap stuff. But I'm not talking about that bit. I'm talking about later on in the day. Don't you remember how the staff wouldn't let us into the dining room after lunch? How we had to stay away from the dining room all afternoon? And then at five o'clock they opened up the door and the room had been transformed? Don't you remember that? I'll never forget it. It was magical.\n\n'The tables were taken out, chairs put around the wall, candles lit, and special lighting and decorations installed. And then there was a large table, a great buffet of treats with pork pies and sausage rolls and crisps and coca cola, food which had been denied us the rest of the year.\n\n'Then Barry announced that Father Christmas had delivered more gifts,' he continued. 'But these presents were different to the morning one. They were personalised and thoughtful. I remember I got a lovely pen and you would get something like a really beautiful book or an album you wanted. Don't you remember? God your memory is bad.\n\n'Then we would go into the main sitting room and sit in a circle and play games. Barry sat at the piano and he sang songs such as, On 'is 'orse with 'is 'awk in 'is 'and and then Empsie, a friend of Barry and Julie's, would perform a number which always ended with a fearful scream and we would all jump up in fright. Don't you remember any of this?'\n\nSuddenly, Des's Christmas past appeared in front of me.\n\nI remembered how I sat on the floor by Nan's chair. She was Julie's mum and she would slyly slip me her glass of snowball and I would take a sip and I would hand it back and she would smile, and so would I because it was our secret and it made me feel special. It made me feel wanted.\n\nI remembered also that there was no fighting and no arguing between us kids that day, nor was there trouble with any of the staff. It was just thirty human beings of all ages, from all different places in the world, sitting in a room, joined as one.\n\nDes's enthusiasm moved me. He was right. It had been a good day. The staff had done their very best for us, had made it a time to remember. Their work, their care, it had counted for something.\n\nI felt vaguely ashamed I had never acknowledged this before.\n\nAs we left the playroom and moved back into the hallway we had entered, I noted one of the kid's CDs. It was by Puff Daddy.\n\n'Tell whoever owns this,' I said cheekily to Gary, 'that there's loads of better rap stuff out there than this guy.'\n\n'I will do,' Gary said. 'He might not listen, though. He's eight years old. Shall we go upstairs?'\n\nWe walked upwards, reached a small landing.\n\nDes pointed to a part of the floor and laughed.\n\n'Remember that?' he asked.\n\n'No.'\n\n'You came home so drunk one night you couldn't make it to your bed which was about ten feet away from here. So you simply laid down on the floor here and went to sleep.'\n\nIn my final years at Burbank I got drunk quite a few times. I loved the way alcohol loosened my tongue, allowed me to express the thoughts that I kept strictly caged for fear of ridicule and exposure to others.\n\nOf course, I hated the time spent yearning for sleep as the ceiling above whirred round so fast you thought it would never stop, and your stomach churned and your head throbbed. But that sensation of freeing yourself from yourself and the chains inside exhilarated.\n\nDrugs never really made it into our world. At Burbank, the only drug I could recall being used on a regular basis was shoe perfumer. I tried it one night, got dizzy, coughed a lot, and told the guy who had given it to me that I was really high. But I wasn't.\n\nPeople-pleasing at its finest, people.\n\nWe moved across the landing and into our old bedroom. Des and I gasped. One bed stood in the centre of the room. One bed. On the small cabinet next to it there was a clock, a DVD player, a stereo unit, a radio and a big TV.\n\nDes and I were speechless. I turned to Gary.\n\n'Only one kid sleeps here?' I asked.\n\n'Yes,' he replied as if I had just asked is it true that humans need air to breathe. 'Why do you sound so surprised?'\n\n'Because eight kids slept in this room,' I answered, 'including myself and Des.'\n\n'How on earth did you get eight in here?' Gary asked.\n\n'Simple,' Des replied. 'Six kids in single beds, four along that wall, two along that wall and then two kids in a bunk bed in that corner over there.'\n\nGary swallowed this information slowly. There was silence. I broke it.\n\n'And we did not have an alarm clock let alone a TV and a radio and whatever else he has got there. Orphans today,' I said to Des, 'they don't know they're born.'\n\n'Actually they are called looked after kids now,' Gary said and I nearly snapped back that no one \u2013 no one \u2013 had the right to tell me what to call myself.\n\nBut I bit the tongue and tried to recall where my bed was placed.\n\nI think it was to the right and third along. It was important. This was the room where the Home's routine began. Seven in the mornings sharp a staff member came into the room and shouted at us, and we stumbled out of our beds and went into the nearby bathroom and splashed water on our faces.\n\nBack in the room, we dressed in clothes, either bought at a local cheap shop or donated to the Home by kindly souls. Every morning, all of us rag dolls walked to school in black trousers with the knees frayed, horrible white nylon shirts and shapeless blazers.\n\nWhich was fine, until I got to thirteen, and my friends started dressing in the Suedehead fashion, and they arrived at school beautiful in their white Ben Shermans and their black Sta-Prest trousers, and their loafers so shiny.\n\nThey looked like young men, young adults, and I felt so inadequate in their company. So feeble.\n\nI nearly died in this bedroom. After Laz and I robbed Woking Football Club and had been caught, I contracted bad pneumonia. It was the second time this illness had invaded me. The first time was at Mrs K.'s when my temperature soared to 104. The second time around my temperature hit exactly the same number. I spent two weeks in a haze and then recovered. Close run thing. Get to 106 and it's addio.\n\nI smartened up after the illness. Barry told me that school had seriously considered my expulsion. I swallowed hard at that revelation, for that was a punishment I had to avoid. To lose my friends there would have taken me to a place I knew I was not strong enough to visit.\n\nYet this bedroom was also a happy place. Love and laughter lived here. This is where friendships were made and strengthened, eight boys in a room, eight boys in thin pyjamas and thin beds, unable to resist the temptation to disturb the stillness that hovered above us, breaking the hush with whispered conversations that furtively darted around the room, issued from one bed to another and then back again.\n\nStories about the staff, stories about girls, stories from school, stories from the world outside the Home's grounds, stories about neighbours and local characters, stories from television shows, but never stories of one's past, never stories about your life, or stories that expressed the reason for your presence in this darkened room.\n\nSometimes the words were angry, threatening \u2013 'I'll get you in the morning, I fucking will' \u2013 other times you had to bury your face in the thin pillow to stifle the laughter that would alert the staff, rouse their anger. And then before sleep finally arrived, trying to gaze through the crack of the curtain to see a star, to see a full moon, find something, anything, that would tell you that tomorrow would come, uncertain in nature, but always on time.\n\n'Shall we go?' Gary asked.\n\nBehind us was Barry and Julie's bedroom, the room we never saw or entered, as sacred to us as an altar in a church. The only time I knocked on its door I was in bits, tears scalding my face.\n\nMothy had bullied me for over a year and I could take no more. Although he had told me he would kill me if I split on him I simply didn't care. 'Kill me,' I cried and I ran to Barry's bedroom door and I knocked on it and Barry opened it, in surprise. No one knocked on his door.\n\n'You have to help me,' I cried. 'Mothy keeps beating me up.'\n\nAnd I told him of the beatings, the terrible beatings that had taken place.\n\n'I'm sure it's not that bad,' Barry said. I couldn't believe his words.\n\nCould he not see the true terrible story painted upon my face, drawn there in tears and painful gulps? Actually, he did. Soon after Mothy was moved to another Home and life turned better for me.\n\nWe moved on. I glanced to my right and saw three rooms. One was a toilet.\n\nI recalled sitting on that toilet one Sunday morning reading my book and staff member Maggie Patterson ripping open the door and grabbing the book off me and repeatedly slamming it onto my head, crying, 'Do not read on the toilet,' and I sat there and as I took the blows, I thought, but why are you hitting me? Reading is good. Don't you know that?\n\nThe room to the left was Barry and Julie's bathroom. The room opposite the bedroom I shared with David Westbrook.\n\nI was fifteen when I was given that room and I remembered it fondly.\n\nMusic and books and football consumed me. That's all I cared about. They took me out of the past and the future and placed me right in the present.\n\nAll I had to do was to sit by the record player in my bedroom and read and listen and sing along to my favourite band \u2013 probably The Faces at that point \u2013 and suddenly I had no memories to taunt and haunt me. I could submerge myself into different worlds and fantasies and turn the world bright and beautiful.\n\nI had a good time in that room.\n\nI also recalled vividly standing outside Barry's bathroom every morning and hearing him cough and retch up the result of the previous night's cigarettes and alcohol. We didn't know at the time he drank so heavily, had no idea. He was clever like that, able to cover up his vices and act normally. Only Julie his wife knew the full extent and she was hardly going to call him out on it. It could mean losing her marriage and therefore her job.\n\nWe moved on, upwards to the top floor of the Home.\n\nThere were four bedrooms on this floor, plus a toilet.\n\nWe walked into the boy's bedroom and went through to the back room.\n\nInstantly, Des and I thought of Rod, the brother he and I shared for so many years. Rod was unlike Des. He didn't read, wasn't that bothered by school.\n\nSure he liked football, music, girls but for Rod money was the most important thing ever. Nothing else mattered. He was obsessed with the stuff.\n\nI differed, I believed in art. Music and books were the way to reach happiness. Not the filthy lucre, that was fool's gold.\n\nHour after hour, Rod and I went at each other, argued our corner until finally we made a pact. We swore that in twenty years' time wherever we were in the world we would meet up in a pub and see who was the happiest and therefore who was right.\n\nTwenty years later, in Guildford, we met up. Des was there too.\n\nRod had gone into the building game, was very successful. Lived nearby in a big house with his wife and kids, worked every day, maintained a large bank account. He had read my book The Looked After Kid and was nonchalant about it.\n\n'It was all right,' he said when I asked, 'it was okay.'\n\nUnlike me, the past was something Rod paid little attention to. He called his childhood, 'a book I have put on the shelf. It's there and if I want to get it down I will. So far I haven't felt the need.'\n\nWhich is why he didn't want to be interviewed for this book. I had no problem with that. He had to do what was right for him. Vive la difference.\n\n'So Rod,' I said slyly, 'remember the conversations about money and art, how you went on about money and I went on about art?'\n\n'I know,' he said brightly, 'and you know what? Fuck money. I chased it and I got it. In fact I have got loads of it. Can make you some if you want, it's easy to do, no big deal. Do you know what I would really like to do?'\n\n'No.'\n\n'I would like to write a book.'\n\nI smiled big time at that one.\n\n'Suppose you think you have won,' he said.\n\n'No,' I said. 'I'm laughing because I chased the books and I got them. I have written many books now. But you know what?'\n\n'What?'\n\n'I'd love to make some money now.'\n\nI raised my glass to my teenage brother. 'A draw,' I said.\n\n'A draw,' he agreed and we clinked glasses.\n\nI looked at the wall on the right and remembered a picture I had hung on it of David Bowie. I recalled lying on the bed for hours looking at that picture of him as Ziggy Stardust trying to work out what song he was playing at that exact moment in time, where he was, what he was thinking. I did the exact same thing with my poster of the Spurs centre forward Martin Chivers.\n\nIn the picture Martin was either receiving the ball or passing it. I spent hours wondering what game he was playing in and where the ball was going next and was he about to score and who were the opposition?\n\nI never did get the answer but two years ago I met Chivers. My agent called me and said he wanted to write a biography and they were looking for a writer.\n\nWe met him at a hotel in London. I could hardly look at him. When my agent told him that he was a hero of mine, I actually blushed and looked away. I got to write the biography with him and throughout the whole time I spent with him in his car, in his home, I could never tell him about my past and what he meant to me.\n\nChivers once played for Southampton Football Club. In April 2009 we went there together to interview some of his old team mates, get information.\n\nWe caught the train from Waterloo. And it stopped at Woking. Burbank stood half a mile away. I could not believe it. For two minutes as Martin spoke, oblivious to my position, I sat there thinking to myself, My God if you had told me back in Burbank that at some point in my life I would be sat on a train in Woking with Martin Chivers I would have thought you were mad.\n\nAs the train slowly slid out of the station I said a little prayer, one of thanks, one of gratitude, that life could be as wondrous as this.\n\nThat book, his biography, started here in this bedroom.\n\nI looked over to the small closed window, remembered Rod and I hanging out of it as we smoked Number Six cigarettes, blowing smoke into dark winter nights before we dived back into our beds when we heard a noise, feigning sleep, trying to bury nicotine breath into yet another painfully thin pillow.\n\nDes laughed. 'You know what I remember best about this room? Being woken by Barry at all hours to keep him company as he went off to pick up kids who had run away, usually named Norman Bass, from various parts of Southern England.'\n\n'You and Barry got on well didn't you?' I say. 'I found him hard to warm to.'\n\n'I liked him. I know he had his faults, like pretending to go to the shops and then diving into the pub every evening but he was a good sort, Barry. He was usually all right with me.'\n\n'Gone now, you know that don't you?' I ask.\n\n'I know. I heard it was the drink that did for him,' Des said.\n\nWe left the boy's bedroom, went into the staff member's room. This room was so special to me. It had once been occupied by a young woman named Rosie. She was a hippy and she introduced me to so many new worlds, so many new experiences.\n\nIt was here that I read Jack Kerouac's Town and Country and thought it so much better than On the Road. It was here I read Hunter S. Thompson's Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail, and I knew it to be so much better than Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. It was here I heard Blood on the Tracks by Bob Dylan and thought it to be the best album in the world.\n\n'That woman gave me so much,' I told Des and Gary, 'I will never forget her.' She taught me that in this world there were a million other worlds and that no one world is better or worse than the other.\n\nThere was dignity in the road sweeper as there is in the professor. She hoped I would find my world and I did and in part because of her.\n\nBut I couldn't tell them everything she had given to me and it was then that I felt a piercing to the heart. For Rosie rests in peace now, struck down by MS.\n\nShe lived in south London then and I should have seen more of her. But I was on the run from my past and I so couldn't find the strength to cross the river. But Rosie knew me and she understood. Above all, she forgave.\n\nOn the landing we stood outside the bedroom the older girls once slept in. Des and Rod and I occasionally sneaked in here for midnight kisses and fumbles with girls who opened their lips, and occasionally their hearts.\n\nBut we did not say anything in front of Gary. It just did not feel right.\n\nInstead, Des and I nodded at each other and in that gesture alone we knew.\n\nAnd then it felt right to go.\n\nWe had seen our old home, exhausted the past.\n\nThere had been more laughter than sadness.\n\nBurbank had dark memories for all of us but it also contained wonderful moments that in the passing of time have gained in strength and colour.\n\nBurbank represented such a huge part of our lives that to feel bad every time you thought about it was a terrible life sentence to carry. I didn't want that for Des and I didn't want it for myself.\n\nLife in Burbank had been tough. A child without love is always in a bad place. But life in Burbank had also been rich, exciting, adventurous, a life that very few people get to live.\n\nI can only speak for myself and for the guys I had spoken to but I think Burbank made unique people of us all. I think care makes unique people of us all.\n\nWe said goodbye to Gary, headed down the drive towards the pub for food and refreshments. At the end of the drive I turned back to take one last look at the house and it was then that I saw a little boy come out of Burbank and look up at the sky.\n\nStrange. There had been no children present during our visit.\n\nDes and I turned out of the drive and began to ascend. We walked past the old post office where we spent so much of our pocket money on packs of cigarettes, and fashionable sweets, past the small houses, and we went up and up and up the hill.\n\nAt the top was a pub. Des went in and got drinks and I found us a table outside.\n\nThe day had broken now. God had decided in our favour and the sun was bearing through. I felt a warmth inside and outside of myself.\n\nThe morning had been one to remember. I had faced Burbank and no bad had come of it. I felt stronger now than I did when I woke up.\n\nA good feeling.\n\nDes brought the glasses to the table and we saluted each other.\n\nThe book, this journey, was now finished.\n\nAll that remained was for a question to be answered: had Care been a good thing for the guys? Had Burbank made or destroyed them?\n\nI believe it had done both. All of us had been through the darkness. But more importantly it seemed that all of us had discovered a light we could happily live in.\n\nDes had his work and his music. He had his freedom and that made him happy. Norman and David both had women they adored and work they loved. They also had children in their lives that they sought to make well and happy. And in doing so they healed themselves.\n\nTerry too had love but he also had God. God gave him certainty. Faith had turned into his valuable ally.\n\nBefore Burbank, my life was a hell. I lived from the age of four to ten with a very sick woman who beat and humiliated me. At Burbank I found all the things that were absent from my life up until that point.\n\nLove, friendship, warmth. Not once did I experience anything like that woman's cruelty at Burbank, except for maybe Mothy's bullying of me.\n\nYet despite that unhappy period, most of my memories of Burbank, of my teenage life in care, were positive.\n\nContrary to what you might believe about life in care, life there was not doom laden or stultifyingly miserable. Some days were, for sure, but weren't some of yours?\n\nAt Burbank, we were joined at the hip by our shattered childhoods. That made us as one. It did not matter where you came from, how you spoke, what you had been. We were all in it together and somehow \u2013 mystically, unconsciously \u2013 we recognised that fact and acted upon it, even if we never verbalised it.\n\nAt Burbank, I learnt to accept people for who they are, regardless of anything. That is a great quality to take into later life. I learnt not to judge people on their accents. I learnt not to discriminate.\n\nAt Burbank I learnt about the deep value of friendships. The giving, the taking, the creating of something meaningful and worthwhile between people. Friendships remained hugely important for me. The five closest friends I possess now, I have known collectively for over a hundred years.\n\nI developed courage in Burbank. I have been braver in life because of my past, because of Burbank. I think it gave me an advantage. I was better equipped to realise my ambitions than others with parents. Why? Because I had no fear. What could you do to me that had not already been done? Nothing.\n\nRemember Frank V.'s words. It don't get worse than this. So I shot for the stars and occasionally, I reached them.\n\nMy hope is that every child in care does so as well.\n\nIf I had learnt anything, it was the power of the human spirit to absorb blows so terrible that sometimes their fury and anger surpassed all incomprehension, and yet still be able to emerge into a light of safety and healing. To see that in Des, Norman, David and Terry, immensely moved me. I don't know why I use the past tense. It still moves me and it always will.\n\nI finished my drink and stood. I said goodbye to Des with a hug and I left the bar.\n\nI walked down the hill and the sun hit me and enveloped me in a special warmth. I stopped and took a last look at Burbank. As I gazed through the trees at that old familiar house, I was disturbed by a noise.\n\nI looked and saw a small child walking down Burbank's driveway.\n\nHe was wearing a blazer, a white nylon shirt, a tie, scuffed up shoes and black trousers that were frayed at the knees.\n\nI know the boy. I know him well. The boy is me aged twelve, walking to school in the early morning air. He is thinking about Teresa Driver, the record at number one, the book he has just read, thinking about the friends he is about to see and play football with, thinking about the lessons that lie ahead.\n\nI stood back. And the boy passed. And as he did he looked up at me and he gave me the most beautiful smile on what was probably one of his most terrible days. And in that very instant my heart knew it was all truly meant to be.\n\nHalf an hour later, I boarded the silver train to London.\n\nI settled in my seat and then realised something \u2013 I was on my way home.\n\nFinally, I was going home.\nAlso available\n\nThe Looked After Kid\n\nMy Life in a Children's Home\n\nPaolo Hewitt\n\nISBN 978 1 84905 588 8\n\neISBN 978 1 78450 042 9\n\nPlaced in care at a very early age, Paolo Hewitt went to live with a foster family where he endured extreme abuse and humiliation.\n\nFollowing years of abuse he was sent to Burbank children's home at the age of ten where he met a gang of children. Like him, they were outsiders struggling to find their place in the world. Paolo paints a vivid picture of his coming of age in the children's home; of bruising fights, failed love, brushes with the law and enduring friendships, and describes how his salvation eventually comes through his passion for music and literature.\n\nGripping and perceptive, The Looked After Kid is is a testament to the resilience of children who 'go to sleep at night believing the world to be a dark and terrible place', but wonderfully emerge from the darkness to shine their lights on all.\n","meta":{"redpajama_set_name":"RedPajamaBook"}}