Excerpts From Unused Interviews - Night Six

I hate to keep talking about the amount of work involved in putting this book together, but you might otherwise get the feeling everything here just naturally fell into place of its own accord. Factual reporting can give that impression. It can look like events have dictated their own way of being told. I don't want to toot my own horn too hard, since obviously a lot of the material I've included owes more to the people being interviewed than to my own skill in drawing them out. Still, I shouldn't be too modest either. A good deal of significant selection has gone into pulling the material into shape, and I'm the one who's done it.

Partly to preserve some valuable tidbits and partly to indicate more clearly the extent of my efforts here, I have decided to include the short sections to follow. I know you're probably sick of these thrown-together and apparently off-the-track chapters, and if you are, you're not the only one, I can assure you. If you want to skip ahead past this chapter, you won't miss anything essential to the story. I wouldn't blame you one bit. I just can't prune my hours of transcripts and notes any more ruthlessly than this, and the stuff in this chapter deserves being kept in, however much a few impatient readers might gripe. I've warned you from the start I'm going to do this my way.

In all, I've so far interviewed twenty-seven people. That's a lot considering I've done it in six days and evenings. Figure out for yourself how many per day that is. It's true, though, a lot of them were short. As soon as I saw I wasn't going to get much I could use, I was pretty direct in cutting people off. I'm also counting a number of phone discussions, where I didn't even have to leave my motel room. They were still interviews, after all, recorded and then transcribed, so just because we weren't in the same room doesn't mean they shouldn't count, does it? And there were a few times when I recorded some conversations other people were having about the case, generally while I was in a restaurant. I'm counting those too.

As I said, I'd be the first to grant that a lot of that material is pretty useless. What I'm after here is to rescue those parts which rise above the otherwise mundane context that bred them, those transitory moments of interest and insight spaced out over so many hours, those anecdotes too priceless to remain unprinted. In addition, they cover several important areas that haven't come up too often, so I've tried to arrange them in useful ways.

Because I'm taking brief sections from more extended talks, I don't think it's fair to specify by name the people being quoted. I've often gone for the atypical remark or story, so I wouldn't want to misrepresent old friends by identifying uncharacteristic comments as theirs. Also, I don't think it's fair to indicate the names of people I've chosen not to quote from any more extensively than this. How would you feel to be labelled as uninteresting save for a single sentence or so? What was said is more important than who said it, anyway. Besides, his is generally background stuff. Nothing here is in the nature of relevant evidence or testimony, unlike so much elsewhere in this book.

What follows is divided roughly into three sections. The first is quotes or little stories that give some impression of what Yuba City is like, or are expressive of attitudes I was reminded were typical of here. The second section pulls together some interesting remembrances of the day of the murders, and the third is made up of those few quotable remarks I've heard offering opinions about the crime itself and its possible perpetrators.

To make them easier to read, these vignettes are presented without quotation marks and without indicating the remarks I may have made to jar their memories, thus giving the speakers the appearance of smoothly flowing speech and tidy narrative powers. Despite occasional consolidations, every actual word was spoken by them. I wouldn't want to lay claim to any of this myself.

A) Since I've Been Gone

1. A Veteran's Homecoming Story

The thing that got me the most when I came back from Nam was all the new food places. When you left had the Shakey's opened yet? Naw, I don't think so. We used to go to that Dairy Queen on Colusa Highway all the time, so the Shakey's must have been after. What else did we have then? There was the A&W, of course, and Shan's drive-in, and that burger stand near the bowling alley, Lucy's something-or-other. Any I forgot? That was all if you wanted to eat in your car, wasn't it? If you went in, you'd add Hal's Grubstake, then when we were seniors there was Denny's. Those were the main hangouts. Not many, but we ate OK. And it was easy to find people, you could hop from one to the other no sweat. None of them were places that would hurry you. Sit all night. There was nowhere else to go anyway.

When I got back, I knew it was all changed. I saw the MacDonald's first thing, before the Hound pulled into the station. That was a shock, let me tell you. No more driving to North Sacramento for a Big Mac and fries. They didn't taste as good when you could get them down the block. That was supposed to be big-city food. I could see civilization closing in around me.

I didn't notice the Jack-in-the-Box right off. I was too depressed the first few days I was back to go out much. Funny what pops up when you're gone twenty-two months. This town must look even funnier to you, being away all the years you have. Remember the Auto See Drive-In Movie, that snack bar with the square pizzas we'd eat in the back of the pick-up with our girls, all them mosquitoes over everything? That had closed down for good, and instead this new stuff was here. Just think, while I was dropping shit from an airplane halfway around the world to keep my country free, back home my very favorite place to hang out was getting shut down. Hardly seems fair.

Once I was back, more places opened, of course. There was the Lucky Dog on Peachtree Lane, the Arby's, the Roy Rogers Roast Beef, and the Minnie Pearl Fried Chicken. Those had the consideration to wait for me to get home. At least they didn't sneak up without warning. After that it's hard to keep track. By the time there was a Burger King and an H. Salt too, this place was far down the tubes. All sense of community was gone. You couldn't find where anybody would be hanging out. And a lot of guys would just pick up their food and drive off. Kids from Marysville would be crossing the river to get a Moby Jack or something else you couldn't get on that side, so there was no telling who was who. Yup. Yuba City was franchised to death. I guess it had to happen sooner or later. I was getting too old to hang out anyway. Still, seeing that golden arch from my bus window that day made me wonder what I had been fighting for.

2. The Cow and the Tractor

Were you here in '75? I guess not. Then you missed the prize cow that was run over by a tractor pulling bumper cars. That was the end of an era, believe me. The 4H Club at the high school had this big ol' Guernsey they were entering in the Sutter County Fair. Five years they'd been raising her in that half-barn out past the auto shop. They called her Lady Bird, who was First Lady at the time they got her. The calf was a present from a local rancher, Calvin Harkness, and he said it had a pedigree or papers or whatever it is prize cows can have. The kids had Lady Bird on a special alfalfa and soybean diet they had worked out, and by the time she was full grown, that was one chunky piece of beef. They had charts claiming increased milk efficiency based on what they fed her, or some such thing, and they thought they had a real scientific breakthrough.

Well, along comes the fair, the big moment of glory, and they decide a truck ride would upset that cow too much, so it wouldn't be up to stuff when the judging and milking test was given. As you know, it's no more that four blocks from the back of the high school to the fairgrounds, so the whole club gets together real early one morning, all forty or so, to walk on over to the fair, standing around Lady Bird so she wouldn't run off or nothing. It goes OK most of the way, so they tell it, until they get to the fairgrounds, when around a corner of the exhibition hall, without so much as a sound of warning, comes this Cat half-ton, pulling a load of bumper cars to the Fun Zone. It being 6:30 A.M., the driver wasn't exactly expecting forty kids in funny club jackets surrounding a prize Guernsey to be around that corner. Those tractors don't stop too good, especially if they're pulling a load, but they don't go fast. It just takes awhile to get it slowed down. The kids got out of the way, but that cow was so used to being fawned over, she must have thought that Cat tractor was bringing some more alfalfa right to her pampered mouth. I won't get graphic with the rest of the story. There's no sense being more gruesome than you have to. It's enough said the 4H Club didn't win any ribbons that year. Imagine. Five years of feeding that thing and giving it a cute name and everything, just so it can keep an appointment to be spread out under a tractor. There was a little investigation of the driver, whether he was drunk or screwing around or did it in purpose or anything, but nothing ever came of it. Some goddam lousy drivers around here, killing cows or glee clubs or anything they've got around them. I don't know why I'm telling you this. Dumbest thing that ever happened around here. Too bad you missed it. Bet you never saw that in LA, no sir.

3. The Drug Problem

The biggest difference now is all the drugs. In high school it was a big deal for us to score a six-pack of Coors, that American Graffiti kind of shit. Couple of years later, you wouldn't know the place. Not every kid from here who went to San Francisco was on a school field trip. The Fillmore, the Haight-Ashbury, that whole scene, can you picture what a sixteen year old was like who spent summers shaking almond trees when they had a look at that stuff? It's wierd how right here, the straightest part of California, as uptight as Kansas or Iowa or wherever, is in driving distance of all that. The way California has deserts like Death Valley as parched as the Sahara and high mountains so cold you'd think you were near the North Pole, and you can just about see directly from one to the other, it's the same here with how people can think. You've got some in Yuba City who still act like Theodore Roosevelt was President. And it's not just old geezers who are that way. The only generation gap problem there's ever been here is trying to find one. Things were bound to explode sooner or later. The extremes were too close together, the choices of what to be influenced by Drugs were the first thing you could see, but obviously, considering what you're here for, and what else this town has been through, that was only the start.

4. Local Conditions

It's the same place as ever. There's always something to screw up your senses. August and September, the stink of rotten peaches is so bad you can hardly walk around. Around December you start getting that real thick tooley fog all over. It's so thick you can't see any part of the ground beneath you if you're over four feet tall. It can stay that way for months, all over this fucking valley. Then when Beale starts its maneuvers, the sonic booms and jet noise can send you up the wall. I know everybody keeps saying how simple and easy it is to live here. That's the biggest lie going. They've told it to each other so often they actually think they believe it.

5. Shooting a Movie

You may have been here during A Gathering of Eagles, but you left before tick...tick...tick was filmed. Did you ever see that, the one with Jim Brown as a Southern sheriff? It was supposed to be Alabama, but the whole movie was filmed here, took most of a summer. Funniest part is the opening, where the first thing you see is a real egg frying right on the sidewalk. The joke around here was they must have filmed that at night, since the egg would never have cooked that slow when the sun's up on a July day. It would have fallen out of the shell hard-boiled.

6. How the Town Works

What makes this town different is you've got a lot of people doing a bunch of things at once. It's not specialized in a city kind of way. Fingers are in a bunch of different pies, if you know what I mean. The mayor will be only half a mayor, for instance, the rest of the time he'll run his furniture store. A lot of the farmers have other things going for them too, processing food, contracting labor out to other farmers, commodities investing. So everybody's connected up a dozen different ways, not just because it's a smaller place but from all the hats they switch around. They're dealing with each other frontwards, backwards, and sideways. Maybe other towns are like that also. I wouldn't know. I hope not, for their sake.

7. Traffic

The traffic here's gotten unbelievable. 99 has always been lousy, I guess, all the people passing through on their way to some real place. If you live here, you've always known to avoid the main highway. But now you'd be surprised, downtown, at the shopping center, if you closed your eyes and smelled the auto exhaust and listened to engines and horns, you might as well be in Fresno or Modesto. It's become that bad.

B) The Day

1. A souvenir

I did a stupid thing the day it happened. I was in the crowd outside the hardware store, where Dryden got napalmed. It was maybe an hour after, about 1:00. A store employee was sweeping up the debris on the sidewalk around the roped-off part where the X was marked. There was a lot of glass all over. He was filling a cardboard box with the stuff, and when he was done he walked to their metal. trash bin in the alley and tossed the box in. I waited a couple of minutes, and then I climbed into the bin and pulled the box back out. I sorted through it and decided on a big chunk of melted glass. It was mostly smooth, not quite a crystal ball, but almost. It wasn't like a piece of broken window. I felt I was holding an art object in my hand. I held it up to look through and I expected everything to appear twisted and bent out of shape. Instead, it was wierd. You could look straight into it and see very clearly, as if the heat that formed it made it pure enough not to distort. I've still got that blob of glass. I feel like I own a moon rock or something. Maybe someday it will be worth a little. I can't imagine selling it, but it's certainly a curiosity people might want to see. I'm not going to throw it away, that's for sure.

2. At the Local Radio Station

It's just a 500 watt station, the only one in town, but the ground's so flat here they get us up past Redding and well down beyond Stockton, at least as far as Turlock. Every now and then we get a card from Seattle or somewhere way south like San Diego. Not bad considering we're licensed daylight hours exclusively.

You can imagine what hell broke loose here that day. The funny part, if you ask me, wasn't the people in town calling up going crazy or the number of news organizations trying to contact us. That's pretty predictable. What I didn't figure on were the damn radio talk-show hosts, those big city hot dogs who get a kick out of laughing down their noses at out-of-the-way places. There's so many of 'em, calling at all hours. We must have had fifteen or so on that first day alone. I did most of them for awhile since I'm in charge here, but later I let anybody who felt like it talk on the phone, the janitor, a kid who brought in sandwiches, anyone. They thought we were ignorant hayseeds anyway, so I gave them a few.

You being from LA, you must know that asshole with what sounds like a phony English accent. I think he was from LA. Might have been Chicago. Get this. He has me on the phone and then asks me to hold on until after the next break. I'd been on the phone straight since 11:30 or so and it was now late afternoon, but I'm an easy going guy and he's in the same racket and deserves some professional courtesy. So I wait through a whole segment while this guy does open phones, and I never heard such an idiot. He kept talking about all the newspaper he reads and twice in ten minutes he made some remark about how important it was to be well informed, all the while not sounding too up on things himself. I was nodding off, right on the phone. Then he finally gets me on, and I can tell he figures we power our transmitter with cow shit and peach pits. All he wants to know is how big are we and where are we, like it was any old day of they year and five of our best-known citizens hadn't been scraped off sidewalks. I couldn't believe it. He asks if we do farm reports, and do we get newspapers from big cities, and crap like that. I tried to be polite, but I'll tell you, if that guy ever came here and asked for a job, not that he ever would, I'd tell him to take that funny accent back where ever it came from.

A week or so later I was talking to Marge Phillips, the chief dispatcher at the Sheriff's Office, and she told me she had a lot of them talk-show guys calling there too. We both had a good laugh or two swapping stories of the fake stuff big city people love to hear about places like this, and how guys there can make a living talking to us on the phone and acting smart.

3. Messed-up Plans

I'd been waiting for a cool damp morning to do my apple pies. When it's real dry or too warm, the way it can be for weeks at a time, the pastry dough won't hold its shape. So finally a nice Thursday morning comes along and I'm rolling out my crusts into tins just pretty as you please and setting them in my Amana. About 11:00, I go out to buy the Gravensteins I needed at the Shop Rite, then all I can hear is sirens, cars screeching. I didn't know what was happening. When I reached B Street, a policeman was blocking my side of the road with his patrol car turned sideways. I asked him what was going on and he told me I should head straight home and not stay out on the street I did what he said. A little later one of my friends called and told me about the horrible thing that had happened.

I never did finish those pies. When I saw I couldn't make it to the store, I finally wound up freezing the crusts. It took every bit of Reynolds Wrap I had in the house, and the last few I could only cover with a single layer. They should be OK once they're thawed, but it's really better to protect them with a double thickness. Boy, was my whole day turned around.

4. At the High School

We were eating in the Multi-Purpose Room like we do every day, and one of the monitors in the principal's office comes in and tells some of her friends what she's heard about the killings, and in a few minutes word is all over. Some of the football players who hated Mr. Ferguson thought it was a joke him being dead, and they were clapping and cheering to play along with the gag. I hope they were just playing along. You shouldn't clap when somebody dies, should you? Even if they did give you a lot of detention.

Just when lunch was ending and fifth period was about to begin, Mr. Floyd, the principal, gets up on the stage in front and tells us what we knew already, but he only mentions that Mr. Ferguson is tragically dead, not the other four. I know there is no such word as tragically, but that's what he said. I asked Mr. Larsen next period, my English teacher, if tragically was a word, and he said it wasn't. If a principal can't make announcements in good English, what's the point of us being in school?

We thought school would be let out to honor Mr. Ferguson. Mr. Larsen said he didn't think Mr. Ferguson would have wanted it that way. None of us could argue with that.

5. Across the Street at Sears

If I never go through another day such as that one, it will be far too soon. It was horrible. Maybe I'm overly sensitive, but I haven't been the same since and I don't think I ever will be. If I knew where we could move to be safe, I'd do it in a second. That's why we always stayed here. You won't find all the things you could get in a metropolitan area, but it's worth it to feel you're living in a decent place. These killings are an obscenity.

Where was I the day it happened? I hate to think about it. I was in the Sears across the street from the bank where poor Mr. White was murdered. I didn't see it and I don't think I heard the shot. I wouldn't go out and look. I would have no part of that mob scene, and as my Stevie and Linda were with me, I certainly was not going to endanger them for the sake of idle curiosity or implant images in their young minds they might find it difficult to erase as they grew older. We went directly to the parking lot and drove home immediately. There were enough cars driving towards the calamity, I'm happy to have been one going the other way. I shall never forget that experience. You have no idea what it was like to be there. That was enough excitement and terror to last me for a long time.

C) Opinions

1. A Mother's Story

We're an unusual family here, because two of our boys served in Vietnam. Danny was a Marine, signed up soon as he got out of high school. He lives in Placerville now. Victor was about to be drafted. He was grading peaches at the S&W Cannery, but he got smart and enlisted in the Army before they got him. Me and Dad are so proud of our boys. Whenever we used to get letters we'd call over to the paper and they'd always print something about them. I'll show you my scrapbook if you'd like. If one of those things was in the papers, there'd be all kinds of people call up and congratulate us for the fine things they were doing. Sometimes the callers didn't even know us, just looked us up right in the book. That's the kind of fine town you moved away from. When Danny or Victor got a promotion or decoration you could feel the whole town was proud of them. Every time it sort of made us more a part of America. Victor may have had a few problems when he got back, those dreams I told you about before, but they were a small price for the good he and Danny accomplished. We were behind him one thousand percent. So was the entire town.

2. A Local Rancher-Philosopher-Historian

Did you know that Marysville was started by one of the survivors of the Donner Party? They were the pioneers who became famous for eating their dead in order for the rest to stay alive during their winter crossing of the Sierras to reach here.

I didn't see much difference with the whole Vietnam thing. We gave up some of our own so the rest could survive. No difference. It's how this whole area came into being in the first place. I may be just a dumb farmer, but it sure seems to me like the same damn thing. Some die so the rest can stay alive. It's like pulling out dead tomato vines.

3. A Businessman Tries Another Parallel

This town has received a terrible image, no doubt about it. Mass murders are bound to leave an imprint. In both the short fall and the long run, however, except for the PR problem, we come out smelling OK. People driving through now make more of a point of stopping here, even if it's only for gas or a sandwich. We're on the map now, so to speak, and that's surely the main thing if you're talking dollars. You think Dallas doesn't get its share of tourists because of the Kennedy thing? Why do you think that Textbook Depository is still standing? It's not so they can keep books in it, I'll tell you. Same way here. There haven't been a lot so far, I'll grant you, but I wouldn't be surprised if it weren't sort of a cyclical thing, and eventually we go into an upturn on this.

Come to think of it, we could count you as something of a tourist now, couldn't we? There's sure to be more where you came from, and anything you write will only serve to remind people where we are. So say whatever you want about us, it'll only be to our benefit Just spell the name right, as the saying goes. The Chamber of Commerce ought to give you a Certificate of Appreciation.

4. One Theory

There's been so many of those bands of hippies from San Francisco moving to farms to grow their marijuana, I'm sure what happened is they decided to cause some trouble for us as they were passing through. Imagine those bearded crazies trying to farm anything. They could tear things down pretty good, but they'll find growing is another story entirely. You know, that's why you don't hear about hippies anymore. There's still plenty of them around, they're just not in a convenient place like they used to be. Lots of those Manson-type characters must be all over. Like that Air Force doctor whose family was killed by a bunch of them, the one who was charged with the murders himself Those hippies can be damn tricky if they put their mind to it.

Nobody from here could have done this. The worst of us is too good to do such a thing. Some bunch from outside could easily have taken advantage of our good natures and trusting dispositions. Hippies would be the right ones. Can't tell them apart anyway, so five could do it and make it seem like one. And it probably happened at all different times because of what they were smoking. That's as close as five longhairs can get to doing something at the same time.

5. A Complaint About the Coverage

Why is it the media wants to report only the bad side? Instead of telling stories about a killer, why can't they write about all the good, decent kids around here? Most of them do what they're told and get jobs and raise families, and if their country calls, they'll do what they have to. Why aren't they the ones being written about? It's not fair to take these murders out of context. It gives an unbalanced view.