The Beginning

To be honest, I'm not really sure how to begin. This is the story, I guess, of a real crime you may recall reading a little about at the time it happened. There was a good deal of coverage for awhile, both in the newspapers and on television, but don't be surprised if you can't recall many details right off. These things make a big splash and then the water smooths over once again, and we sail on as if nothing ever happened. Whether you remember any of this isn't that important, but I didn't want you to feel bad right at the start over being ill-informed. There'll be enough to feel bad about before we're through, so don't worry about a small thing like that. It can happen to anybody.

I have to say right away what's already probably pretty clear. I'm not really a writer. We'd be better off here with a Norman Mailer or a Truman Capote or even a Tommy Thompson. Since two of them are dead anyway, you've got me instead. You better get used to it. Due to certain circumstances which I'll explain, I was in a rather special position to investigate what happened in a way that hasn't been possible for anyone else. Rather than try to get fancy and overextend my abilities, most of what I'll be doing is presenting evidence I've obtained and that I'm just passing on. It's the correct way to tell this. The events in all their complexity are far more important than my own role in them. My decidedly modest intention is to get the facts out and not intrude on my own too much.

The people publishing this, were more than willing to pay for a ghostwriter, and they said the cost wouldn't have to come from my share of the proceeds. I'm sure there are very good "as-told-to" guys who can do a lot for people like me, who have been through important experiences but don't know themselves quite how to write it down. Several who ought to know said we could wind up with a real slick exciting tale that would attract a lot of attention. A lucrative movie sale under those circumstances would not be unusual, at the very least as a movie-for-TV docudrama, not to mention the paperback rights. So they told me.

I told them to forget it. I wasn't going to let things be done that way. I'm the one with all the facts which have so far not come out, so I present them as I found them or they don't come out at all. If that louses up a film deal, so be it. I'll take that chance. If this is a little harder to read than it has to be and if it drags in spots, that's your problem more than it is mine. For now, take my word for it. There's big stuff here if you can be a little patient now and then.

I will also be direct enough to say I know I'm sitting on valuable material, and if I'm not the most skillful literary stylist there is, somebody a lot worse than me could still turn out a highly readable account. There's almost no way to mess this up is what I'm saying, though I might feel a lot differently about that by the time I'm through.

I ought to say too, and not to brag, that I don't think I'm that bad. It may take me awhile to get to the point sometimes, but I do eventually reach the place I've set out for. More importantly, I know when to leave the truth well enough alone, and that's a lot more than might be said about some of the others who have written about this case. I'm banking heavily on my obvious personal integrity and upon my ability to care that the truth be reported fastidiously. Isn't that far more important than being glib, Presumably you're not reading this for personal enjoyment anyway, which I can assure you will always be sacrificed for the sake of presenting accurate data. If the prospect of large doses of real material unadorned by stylistic filigree isn't what you're after, then stop right here. Nobody's twisting your arm to read this stuff, last of all me.

I do realize that because of the notorious, sometimes gruesome nature of the events to be discussed here, that even if you have read something about these crimes before, you might have some difficulty believing all of the things you are going to be reading. When true things happen which are more bizarre than what writers ordinarily invent, it is natural to be skeptical. Especially when we are talking about revealing fresh facets of a once well-publicized case, we can surely wonder why these aspects had not come out earlier. I understand that kind of suspicion. I am that way myself. If I read about something that's pretty strange, I have a hard time believing it really happened. Even if I've seen something about it on the 6:00 news or maybe read an article in Time or Newsweek, there've been plenty of times I've still wondered. Obviously this attitude can be taken to crazy extremes, like the people who claim that the manned trips to the moon have been faked publicity stunts or when Neo-Nazis say the Holocaust was blown considerably out of proportion, those kinds of idiocies Pretty much any event you're talking about, somebody will come along and either say it never took place or that what you saw was totally at odds with the truth. Assassinations are easy examples of this kind of thing, but you name the event, and I expect I could find some so-called responsible group or expert who will talk about how it never happened and what-are-you-talking-about and things like that. But those extremes notwithstanding, in more normal circumstances, even with your everyday lurid spectacular news story such as the one we have here, of course we all wonder whether there's been some fast-and-loose reporting of the truth.

I'm not talking about giving things a certain slant. I mean just plain "did this stuff really happen" kinds of concern. Well, all I can say in the present case is, what do you want in order to believe me? Newspaper reports? I've got loads of them. The very words of the participants themselves? I have more of that than ever before in reporting on this case. Maps? Photographs? You name it, it's here. I think this whole question is pretty boring, but I realize I have to bring it up. I'm sure I won't be the only one, so I might as well beat everyone else to the punch. All I can say is if you are one of those planning to attack my work in print over questions of accuracy, then do your own checking. Don't just take cheap shots by giving voice to wholly unfounded suspicions. Go back and look at news reports. It's not that long ago that they'd be hard to locate. If you really want to be sure, you could make a few phone calls. Go through whatever verification procedures you think are necessary. It's fine to disagree with something I've written. I'd expect that. But don't go calling me sloppy with details or in any way loose with the truth. Attack my grace less prose all you want or my occasional tendency to stick in my own opinions, but don't cast doubt upon the scrupulous dedication with which I present my material.

I don't want to go on about this, but it's an important enough issue that I'd like to get it out of the way now, and I promise you it will not be brought up again. If you think at any point in what is to follow you have serious reason to doubt the truth of what you are reading, then this is my second invitation to you to give up immediately. Don't read one word more. I wouldn't want you to. If you're that skeptical or cynical or whatever you'd call it, as to believe I'd go to a lot of trouble to make things up, then I don't want you to be reading this. What possible motive could I have? I don't care one bit if what follows is entertaining, and I also wouldn't make things up just to have it look like I had "new" revelations never before presented. Of course my material may well be extremely engrossing, and there are things here that haven't seen the light of day before, but none of that is intentional. I haven't gone through all this to get a hard time from people who'd accuse me on sleazy grounds like those. If you think I'd make stuff up, then OK, think what you wish. It's all a tissue of lies and you can blow your nose with it. Fine. Just go away. I'm writing for people who really want to know what happened, who have some serious interest in learning about a highly significant event which has never been approached with the seriousness of purpose it deserves. Maybe you're too young to recall the events which set this in motion, or perhaps you ignored the news reports when this took place because you failed to see the implications of the crime. You're the ones I'm interested in and that I've tried to do my best for. Whatever maddening problems the material to come may present, I don't want to have to worry about whether you're doubting my account, those of you who choose to stick with me. If I was going to make any of this up, believe me, I'd do a much better job. The uncertainties, loose ends, conflicting testimony, and unanswered questions are here in such profusion that even I would not create a story so replete with these difficulties. One could never be this sloppy with fiction. Only the truth lends itself to such meanderings. I hope we've got that settled now.

One other little problem we better get out of the way at the start is that I know I will not be able to resolve a good many of the perplexing problems that are part of this case. I have done my best every now and then to put forth a few guesses, and within the main body of material there's lots of ideas you can draw from to reach your own conclusions, but beyond that there isn't much I feel I can do responsibly. I could come up with neat little theories, make some sweeping generalizations about the times which led to these acts, and make it look like I've really got a handle on the whole thing, but don't look for any of that here. Most of what's been written about this case that I've read is worthless because of these tendencies to get heavy on big issues, with little direct knowledge of what really took place. I mean everybody thinks they're an expert on crime, politics, small towns, the Sixties, and whatever else they feel like spouting off about. It's amazing, really, so many thinkers going on about the dark undersides of this or that, the nightmare visions of our recent history, the crazed acts of a single individual - you know the kind of junk I'm referring to, I'm sure. Worthless commentary has been an easy commodity to come by here, I guess because the elements are so inviting. Well, it's not that simple, not that simple at all. It's a fucking confusing mess, if you don't mind my saying so, and it'll still be a mess after I'm through with it. I'm not going to pretend it's anything else.

As this is the first chapter, I've got a few things I ought to explain. I'll start out by discussing the area where the killings were committed and what my connection to the place is. Then I'll give an initial quick run-through of what happened, the part of the story you may already know. Finally, I'll tell how I came to get involved again, and maybe I'll talk a little about who I am, another thing I'll be doing just to have it finished early. From there we'll be ready for the real stuff.

Get out a map of California. Believe me, it will help. If the map's halfway decent, a little bit above Sacramento, about two-thirds of the way up and right in the middle, there will be one or two dots. Next to them it will say either Marysville or Yuba City. Some maps have one, some the other. I've never know why. They're about the same size and equal in importance, or lack of it, so how you'd pick one for a map and stop there is anybody's guess.

The one of greater concern to us here is Yuba City. If it's not on your map, it would be a speck just to the left of the one that's there, on the other side of the squiggle that's the Feather River. If you've heard of it at all, it's probably in connection with the murders and related events to be detailed here. It has also been the site of one other more famous multiple murder some years ago, been connected to a big highway accident, and they've had a major natural disaster or two. We're talking about one unfortunate town.

The Juan Corona killings in 1971 are pretty well known. Corona allegedly murdered a bunch of migrant farm workers, some twenty-five in all, and buried them mainly in an orchard on the banks of the Feather River. A good account of the case can be found in The Road to Yuba City by Tracy Kidder (Doubleday, 1974, a few years before Kidder wrote the best-seller, Soul of a New Machine). The book is riddled with accusations that the original police investigation and then the prosecution of the case were both exceptionally inept. Kidder must have been on to something, as in 1981 the conviction was overturned on appeal and Corona was retried. The verdict remained the same. We might well recall the mess that the local Sheriff's Department and District Attorney's Office made of their first go-round with a mass murder when we get on with our present story.

The Corona killings are still the biggest mass murder case in American history. There have been several since involving more victims, but so far no single individual has been charged, tried, and convicted for more than twenty-five deaths, as Corona was, even if the original conviction has now been overturned. Except for the quantity involved, however, there is not a great deal to distinguish the case. While next to that the mere five coming up here might seem like small potatoes, the second Yuba City mass murder is much more intricate, contradictory, and complex. In the Corona case, the number left in shallow graves is certainly serious, but the killings were stretched out over a period of some months, and why they happened is still pretty cloudy. The prosecution never attributed a motive to Corona, though there were hazy suggestions of homosexual aggression, a history of violent tendencies, that kind of standard thing, but nothing very well argued. Each of the killings was a simple knifing, so again there wasn't a great deal of imagination involved. Had Corona killed only eight or ten, maybe even a dozen, I doubt whether anyone would recall his name today. His distinction was to continue at it long enough, not that different from citations in the Guinness Book of World Records for sheer duration alone. Instead of doing something well, you can readily gain notoriety for doing ordinary things more times than anybody else.

The one angle about the Corona case I find interesting links the motive for the killings to another major Yuba City event, the Christmas floods of 1955. Thirty died when levees along the banks of the Feather and Yuba Rivers (which join at the point where Yuba City and Marysville meet) collapsed, flooding most of Yuba City. According to Kidder (page 74), Corona was plagued from that point with "the delusion that everyone he saw was a ghost." This eventually led to his being committed to a mental hospital, receiving shock treatments, and possibly the continuing psychiatric imbalance that led to the murders. All this from a flood.

One very Yuba City-like aspect of the Corona killings was what you could call the agricultural mediocrity of the crimes. Like so much of the area itself, the killings were uniform, repetitive, and linked closely to the earth. The alleged killer was a farm labor contractor, the victims farm workers, the graves like another row of trees in an orchard, the bodies discovered by a farmer who noticed shifts in the soil. You'll thank me later for avoiding this kind of facile theorizing when we get to the real case. I'm just showing you I'm not without real ideas when I feel so inclined.

Another in the litany of Yuba City pointless tragedies also got a surprising amount of national media coverage. On April 27, 1976, a bus load of high school kids, it was the entire Yuba City Union High School Glee Club with several faculty advisors, took a field trip to San Francisco, the closest real metropolitan area and a little over two hours away. Well, this group made Walter Cronkite that night by not getting there. The bus ran off a freeway exit in the Bay Area and twenty-eight died. There were reports after that of the driver having been cited previously for all sorts of violations, but I think finally the official claim was a brake malfunction. Yuba City got the record again, worst school bus accident in American history. (I might add, for no reason whatever, that I went on club field trips this way many times myself, and could as easily have ended up suffering an identical fate, a circumstance that must bother me a lot more than it does you.)

One last newsworthy event, before our big one, took place on May 24, 1974. It even got mentioned in the New York Times (May 25, page 11, if you care to verify). On that day, four bombings took place - the local FBI office, the city police station, the Department of Motor Vehicles office, and a Sutter County Sheriff's car. No injuries were involved, and no individual or group claimed responsibility for the bombings, nor were any suspects ever caught. For Yuba City, it was oddly the first crime that seemed in keeping with the times, though still out of place for a town that I don't think could ever claim a genuine hippie or flower-child of their very own. That's why it's impossible now not to see this as anticipatory of a day almost six years in the future. A pretty wide interval between events, it's true, but the spirit of the crimes feels the same, as others were to remark later.

If there's any pattern in all these - the floods, killings, casualties, and bombings - it may be simply the apparent excess so out of proportion to what meaning we can look for in the events. The bus accident would already seem pointless if only a couple of kids had died, the flood claimed many more than necessary, and so on. It's an odd kind of being out of control that's happened too frequently in one place to be ascribed to total coincidence. In this setting, the crimes which will be our subject can almost look prosaic. Not quite, but almost Every few years something has to happen in Yuba City leading to a bunch of people dying, or so it seems by now. It's another pattern of repetition of its own, multiple deaths multiple times.

Besides all these past death events, I don't know what else there is to say about Yuba City. It's too typical in other respects, your standard backbone of America kind of place, with one main street, a couple of shopping centers, one high school, all the usual stuff It's very definitely the sort of town where the locals would have to ask "why here" when any unusual event took place, so by now that question's been asked an awful lot.

I guess I should get to how Yuba City and I hook up, since you know nothing about me yet or why I ought to be telling thin story. I lived here for a few years in the early Sixties, from 1960 to 1964 I graduated from Yuba City Union High School in 1964. I gave one of the two commencement speeches at graduation that year. You could check the school yearbook if for some reason you doubt this is true "Union" in the name of a high school, if you're not familiar with it, means that the district the school covers is much larger than the town itself, so some kids have to travel from as far away as a hundred miles every day, mostly from outlying farms. The area is pretty much agricultural - peaches, almonds and walnuts, asparagus, tomatoes, rice, a few other things. You ban look that up too. The town slogan is "The Fastest Growing Little City in the USA," pretty funny by now, given the number of times there have been rapid declines in population by less than natural causes.

My family moved to Yuba City because my father was doing some training work for Beale Air Force Base, a major Strategic Air Command Center just outside of Marysville. If you ever saw the movie A Gathering of Eagles with Rock Hudson and Robert Stack, that's where it was filmed. There's an outdoor roller skating rink on the base with a plaque to commemorate its donation by the film's producers. I've seen it. More local trivia, but again quite true.

In 1964 I left to attend college at Berkeley. My family moved away a short while later as well. I got interested in social work and eventually went on to get an M.A. in Social Welfare at Columbia University. I've lived in Boston, Denver, and for the last six years in Los Angeles. I'm employed by the Department of Social Services, where my job could best be described as a welfare case worker. I do field checks on welfare recipients, light investigative work on suspected eligibility offenses, that kind of thing. It's not really the most satisfying job in the world, but I shouldn't complain. I'm a sort of detective-bureaucrat, doing his best to keep a useful program functioning. Of my personal life there isn't much I'd care to tell at this point. I've never married, but I'm not about to launch into that story, at least not now.

I guess like a lot of people who move away from their home town, I kept in touch with a few people for awhile, but in a year or two I had managed to lose contact with all of my friends. It's a little more involved than that, but that was the outcome. When Yuba City news made it to wherever I was, of course I followed it avidly. During the time of the Corona story, I kept recognizing most of the names in newspaper reports. In a town of 13,000, you'd still be surprised how many people you knew, at least by name, but often more closely than that. Someone from the football team would turn up as a sheriff's deputy, a girl you worked with on a summer job would now be a lawyer, that kind of thing. At the time of the bus crash, even though I'd been away over ten years, the names of a number of kids who had died rang very distant bells. Three were brothers and sisters of people I had gone to school with, and one was the child of a next-door neighbor of ours. You get the idea, I guess. Maybe that's pretty ordinary, but Yuba City is still small enough for people to get to know each other well. I realize it's not exactly maintaining strong hometown ties to recognize names from a newspaper death list, but I did keep up some interest. It's the kind of place you'd always feel a connection to for all the corny reasons anyone's ever felt close to small towns for, no matter where they've gone since or how mundane the place they left might actually be.

We move now to the present and to the big events concerning us from here on, the five murders which took place on Leap Year Day, February 29, 1980. I'll give you only a quick recap, both because you may recall this part and since we will be exploring what happened in much greater detail as we go along.

On that day, beginning at about 11:00 A.M. and ending by noon, five men were killed on the streets of Yuba City. The five, varying, in age between 58 and 66, had one thing in common. From August 1964 to March 1973, they were the Executive Committee for California District VI, Selective Service System. That is, they were the Draft Board.

Their deaths were all unusually violent and military-like: one napalmed , one shot from a low-flying plane, one kilIed by a hand grenade tossed in his car, one fell into a camouflaged stake-filled pit, and one died from a sniper's bullet. They were each in separate locations, and no one else was killed or injured during the commission of the five murders.

There were no reliable reports of witnesses able to identify the person or persons responsible. Panic was naturally quite evident in the city, coupled with the equally inevitable demand for speedy apprehension of the perpetrators. The Yuba City Police and Sutter County Sheriffs Department, (who shared jurisdiction because three of the deaths were within the city, two on county land just outside the city limits), likely sensitive to how the early stages of the Juan Corona case had been bungled, immediately requested FBI assistance. As the Draft Board affiliations of the five were well known, the possible Federal nature of their deaths was sufficiently clear to warrant their taking charge.

Needless to say, right from the start I was paying close attention to what was going on. If a bus crash could get me all excited about the old home town, you can imagine what this was doing. Well, you don't have to imagine, I'll tell you. I was far more fascinated than repulsed. I was reading every-thing I could get my hands on, including buying some out-of-town newspapers at a Hollywood news-stand, and catching whatever TV stuff there was. I thought right away about using this as an excuse to go back and see what was happening, but I didn't have any real reason to and I wasn't sure what I'd do when I got there. So I stayed in LA and just kept following the story.

For the first few days, the coverage of the crime was pretty thorough, especially if you made some effort to follow it. The story was only page one the first day, but the stuff further back later in the week still provided a lot of information. By the end of the week, though, the action shifted from the news pages to the editorials. There, and in the weekly newsmagazines, the story was an opportunity to voice all sorts of thoughts about possible ramifications of the case. In Time, for example, the three-fourths of a column the story got towards the end of the "National Affairs" section had only a single paragraph describing the crime itself. The rest was speculation about whether this was a story worth national attention or just a "bizarre small town incident."

The uproar these deaths caused I'd still categorize as extremely severe. The invective employed we'd associate with the rhetoric usually reserved for assassins of Presidents and molesters of young children. I'm not saying these reactions were improper. I'm only trying to describe the high degree of anger these killings provoked. The careful planning obviously required, the thoroughness with which the plan was executed, the harsh methods of death, all brought out wellsprings of hatred. Especially in Yuba City itself, there was an incredulousness that murders like this could happen at all, and in 1980. It didn't seem possible to anyone that five well-respected citizens could die the way these did. It was far worse than the Juan Corona case, they said, where only a bunch of shiftless migrant workers were involved and the guy who did it was obviously a nut case. Who'd do a horrible thing like this?

Of course I wondered too who might have done it. I enjoyed thinking at first that the murders could have been due to some entirely different reason from their being Draft Board members, like those mystery stories where it turns out they were all soldiers together who buried gold under a tree outside Berlin in the last days of the war and together they tried to kill a sixth guy who was going to spill the beans, and now he took revenge against them. I'm just trying to show you the odd bent I'm inclined towards, again as an aspect you'll not be seeing once we really get underway with the actual evidence.

Unfortunately, at least for my little theory, the reasons why somebody would have a grudge against a Draft Board are only too obvious. You didn't need some mixed-up conspiracy to explain it. The hard part was to figure why it took so long to happen, especially given the severity of the revenge-taking. This long after, you couldn't exactly call it an anti-draft protest, not quite on the order of demonstrations in the Sixties where cards were burned or records doused in blood. And these guys were no longer actively involved in Selective Service activities anyway and hadn't been for six years. So somebody sure held a grudge for an awful long time, a real big grudge that had to be fairly specific. As getting even goes, you can't hardly get more even.

It took awhile after I figured out that the reasons for this could go back some time before it dawned on me that I might know some of those involved. It would make sense that a person graduating high school around when I did would have been about as draftable as anyone was during the Sixties, so they'd be in the best position to have had things go wrong. I figured there was maybe a two or three year leeway on that. By the time you get to `66 high school graduates, the college deferments are over by `70, and then we were into the lottery period, and no one could have reason to napalm a bunch of bingo balls. Once I figured this out I felt really wierd, because that meant when I was a senior in high school, a mass-murderer-to-be was somewhere on the grounds. Maybe realizing a thing like that wouldn't affect you very much, but then you're not me because I was totally spooked at the thought. If me riding those busses that were later to catapult over an embankment had no effect on you, at least try to picture this one, hanging around a school lunch room with people able eventually to do a thing like this.

The next step made me no less queasy, though it should have. Besides the mass murderer, I wondered how many deaths that same group could have toted up in the years since we last rubbed elbows in the Multi-purpose Room, the name for the cafeteria-auditorium. Let's see, there were about 250 in my graduating class, so half of that were men. Times four for each of the year-levels at school, and you had about 500 men who could have gone in the Army. (That's not to mention other possible normal civilian one-at-a-time killings, which of course could have been committed by women as well.) Being real conservative and figuring that lots of guys managed to wriggle out like I did, let's allow for about 150 actually going in. About here I stopped wanting to figure. I wasn't sure how many deaths-per-person to compute, and I didn't want to reach a total anymore. I also realized one of these kids winding up pushing buttons on a B-52 would blow my calculations sky-high, as he must have done to thousands of real people. I wasn't trying to equate all this with the five more recent and more local peacetime casualties, but it didn't make me feel quite as nostalgic for the great old days. I'm not trying to judge, at least not now. I had no idea what was right or wrong, and I'm not out to condemn all the kids I grew up with. I'm just reporting what I was thinking. My big kick was feeling wierd about what other people I used to know had done. That makes me stranger than them, I'm sure, but I wasn't inclined to any greater concern than that.

So, there I was with no theory on the murders more extensive than the decidedly minor deduction that I could well have stood in a lunch line a decade and a half ago with the perpetrators. I'm sure glad that my years of training and experience as an investigator weren't entirely wasted. But then, no sooner had I narrowed the field down to the 500 likeliest suspects, I hit another snag. In a newspaper story filling in background "color" on the case, it reported that Draft Boards in rural areas cover up to six counties. This Board, as it happened, designated Regional Branch III-B, Office 16, was responsible for not only Sutter County, but Yuba and Placer as well, so that meant my odds of knowing anyone directly involved were cut at least in half. (Sutter is the most populous of the three.) I knew a few people from Marysville (which is in Yuba County, while Yuba City is in Sutter County - you figure it out), but not many.

Stealing one bit more from the same newspaper story, a method I'll be employing occasionally as we go along, in case you're wondering how hard it would be to find out names and addresses of Draft Board members, you might like to know that Selective Service Regulation 1606.62(b) requires that the information must "be posted in a public part of the office," so someone would just had to have kept note from back then, since the office hasn't been in operation since 1973. These days, they'd probably treat a Draft Board like CIA agents in a foreign country or like undercover cops - names which if divulged could lead to serious endangerment. I bet that's one regulation not long for this world, should those offices ever start up again. Those were more trusting times, I guess, when it looked like both sides were at least playing by the rules. And that's an example of lofty generalizing about the times, another cheap ploy to be avoided in these pages, if I can withstand the temptation.

There were several close friends I should have called right away, but I didn't. I wish I had a good explanation for not making more of an effort. I don't. My motivation, as they say, is poorly developed. If I had known at the time how involved I'd get, of course I'd have done things differently. I was slow to act, interested but not quick enough to translate that into anything. So shoot me.

On March 21, 1980, three weeks after the murders, a suspect was arrested and I certainly did know him. So much for the odds. I heard the news first on television, and if you can imagine seeing your best friend from high school in a TV news clip being led around in handcuffs, that's the shock I had. I know I've asked you to imagine all sorts of unlikely situations, but they really did happen to me and I can't explain very well how I felt, so I'm asking you to do some of the work. Anyway, not only were his hands cuffed together, they were also chained to a kind of leather harness tied around his waist. He looked like some crazed animal bound securely so he could do no further damage. I guess in everyone's eyes that's what he was. His name is Michael Willetts, age 31.

Michael's arrest, according to the news accounts, came in the process of an FBI check on people who might have had a grievance against the Draft Board as a result of an unsuccessful appeal to be excused from service. It was a pretty smart idea, since Yuba City couldn't have been an appeal-heavy place. It wouldn't take long to check the locals our for a suspicious character. Michael was near the top of the list, as the first in Yuba City ever to try for conscientious objector status, a classification he was denied by the Board. According to the FBI spokesman at the press conference following the arrest, some pieces of physical evidence were found at Michael's house which "definitively" linked him to at least one of the murders, and he was to be arraigned the following day on that single charge.

Michael didn't cooperate with the investigation. He wouldn't talk. He was supplied a court-appointed attorney who appeared with him the next day, when a plea of not guilty was entered at the arraignment. There was no further public word about Michael's response to his arrest, and that silence was interpreted by lots of people, especially newspaper writers, to mean he was guilty. He met with his lawyer and members of his family, and none of them would say anything in public about their conversations.

I should tell you a little about Michael Willetts and me. He graduated high school when I did and we were close friends the whole time. He's still probably the smartest person I've ever known, and I always thought he'd go on to make some kind of real impact, though of course not like this. His parents were a curious but not uncommon breed of small town intellectuals. His father was a pharmacist, but I remember Mr. Willets better for all his opera records and for getting more newspapers and magazines than anybody I'd ever seen. It was strange going over there on a Sunday, where his parents would be poring over an Acrostic puzzle from either the, New York Times or Saturday Review, with dictionaries and almanacs and atlases all over the place in search of a code-breaking word or name, and the entire time they'd hum and tap rhythm to "Cosi fan tutte" or "Coppellia.." I never found them to be too politically concerned, beyond having the customary opinions-about-everything that a lot of people have, but they had an incredible range of interests, a trait that was definitely passed on to Michael. He won a Northern California Mathematics Competition when we were juniors in high school, beating out kids from San Francisco and Sacramento and everywhere else north of Fresno. He did a Science Fair project that same year about tracing eye movements while reading that got written up in Western Optometry Journal. He used to stay up late either listening to a short wave radio or watching all night movies, and when he wasn't doing that, he was sorting through the piles and piles of comic books, science fiction, and other kinds of reading matter that overran his room. Like his parents, he was also very good at puzzles and games. I think we spent most of one summer playing a Japanese game called "Go" which involved placing flattened beads representing armies over a large grid pattern. Michael had taught me how to play in order to have some competition, but I think the only times I, ever beat him were when he got bogged down in an overly intricate maneuver that he could never quite work out, while I plodded on rather methodically.

I was completely in awe of him, I guess as much because he was so unassuming about his talents, He acted like everyone was capable of what he was, but he just happened to do it instead. He wasn't at all withdrawn or strange, and he did all the things kids in high school did. He had a girlfriend, went to every school football game like all of us, and didn't do much that I can remember which would set him off from others.

Well, I guess that's not entirely true, but I can't make total sense of the offbeat things I recall, and I don't think they amount to much, Michael started a school group he christened the Friday Club, which he said was the name of the first secret anti-Nazi organization in Germany, but the club had little reason for being that any of the rest of us ready to follow him could figure out. It seemed to exist mainly so that Michael could write funny announcements for the school bulletins about club meetings, and to have yet another activity he could list among his school accomplishments when he applied to college. I guess you couldn't call that entirely ordinary. He was also inordinately attached to committing petty jokes against teachers, things like making endless puns involving their names and each day writing different ones on the blackboard before they got to class. These were usually obscure plays-on-words that he'd have to explain later to any of us who asked. Teachers would be angry about what was written, knowing Michael was the culprit, but you could never quite tell what it meant, so they had difficulty being fully offended. That's pretty dumb stuff to do, but I don't think you could call these the first stages in the formation of a mass murderer.

Michael's troubles after high school and his early run-ins with the Draft Board will be discussed in sufficient detail later, so for now all that need be said is he had plenty of both: troubles and run-ins. Things didn't work out for him. I don't exactly know why, and it's not a question I like to ask very much. All I knew was that five or six years after we graduated, that would make it around 1970, I heard while I was living in Denver that Michael was still in Yuba City and working as an accountant. I forget how I found out. I think my mother talked to someone from there who knew his mother, something like that. Whatever, I remember being incredibly depressed by that news. I was more shocked then to hear he had become an accountant than I was recently to hear of his arrest as a mass murderer. I guess I felt that Michael would wind up doing something sufficiently glamorous and interesting that I'd get the kind of vicarious thrill his abilities and accomplishments had always given me. I felt let down, as if he had failed for the both of us, since I wasn't exactly setting the world on fire either. When I heard what he was doing, I was glad I was far away from there, just out of the grip of mediocrity that looked like it had grabbed a person so superior to myself. I'd be mediocre on my own, and not blame it on a place.

Well, to get close to being really underway, on March 26, five days following Michael's arrest, I got a telephone call at work from Matthew Donovan of Yuba City. I had been out in the field on a case, verifying the non-residency of an absent father in Willowbrook, and that was the message when I returned to the office. I still have the yellow "While You Were Out" slip recording this, the bit of paper that started it all. I called him right back, since our office has a statewide WATS line we use for investigations, so I could call for free, no expense to the state. Mr. Donovan said he was Michael Willetts' lawyer and he had traced me at Michael's request. He said Michael had hoped I would remember him, and could I please do him a favor and come up to Yuba City and help him out.

I naturally asked Mr. Donovan what he thought Michael had in mind. Donovan said his impression was Michael wanted someone to talk to, and possibly to collect some material about what was happening. Donovan told me he might someday do a book about the case himself, depending on how things went, so he wasn't too crazy about the idea of Michael talking extensively to someone else. He said, though, he expected his own book to be more about the eventual trial and the legal aspects of the case. Because of his personal slant, he thought maybe we could cooperate with each other, that there were things I could probably do that he wasn't interested in writing about himself.

Of course, this was all pretty wierd. I was five minutes into a call that already had me getting access to my old friend and in the middle of writing a book. I had to say yes, but I really had no idea what I was doing. I still had my job and not very much money and no idea at all of what I was getting into or would be expected to do.

Donovan warned me not to tell anybody what I was involved in because of the pressure that would result if it was known I was talking to Michael, He also said what I might do is try to check into the case as much as I could once I got there and not just depend upon Michael for information, both because Michael might be evasive on a lot of things and also because he didn't think talking to Michael would be enough to turn into a book anyway. Having considered these questions for all of ten minutes by then, his advice sounded pretty sensible.

So, the next day I was on my way. As perplexed as I was by my own involvement, I was excited by going back to Yuba City under these circumstances, But I only had ten days I could get off from work, and I wasn't sure what I could do in that time or whether my going there would amount to anything. I was just thrown into it, not at all prepared. I had read a lot, but that hardly qualified me to land right in the middle of this.

I had said earlier I'd give you a little more information on my own background and what I'm like, in order to get it out of the way now, but beyond what's already slipped out I've decided that won't be necessary. My personality, such as it is, will creep through anyway, and I realized that going back home to Yuba City would get me involved in enough personal stuff, that we'll wind up with more of me than ought to be included as it is. I don't need to add more preparatory material to that.

I should make clear what will likely be apparent in everything to follow without my saying it, but I'll say it just to be sure. I will be presenting my interviews, reports, and random thoughts entirely as they happened. This is an on-the-scene, eyewitness, undoctored account, presented just the way I prepared it while there. What is lost in hindsight and historical perspective will hopefully be gained in immediacy and direct honesty. If the gain turns out to be illusory, at least it was easier for me to write this way.

As to the form of the interviews in those chapters where they appear, I have used Q and A for me and the person I'm talking to, even though I'm not always Q-ing and they are not always A-ing. It's just the simplest method, and the kind of transcribing I was used to from my job. Except for that mundane matter, the material to follow, for better or for worse, entirely speaks for itself. And now to work.