Scenes of the Crime

At the time of the Yuba City Draft Board Murders, some newspapers and magazines did carry photographs of the five death spots, as they looked after the bodies had been removed. There wasn't much to take pictures of - a few sidewalks, a hole in the ground, the edge of a highway. I've included the pictures too, for the record, as they say. They don't show much, but maybe that's their point. They're not exactly worth poring over in minute detail for hidden clues. If you want, you can look at the map again too, so you can see where these are in relation to each other. I won't stop you.

Once I was here, obviously I had to at least go by them all. The little excursion turned out to be more interesting than I expected. Hence this chapter. What follows is nothing more than a bunch of notes resulting from on-the-spot visits. As the murder locations had already been gone over thoroughly by many badge-carrying public officials imported for the purpose, I had no expectation whatever of finding anything important. I was just out to get the feel of things, the lay of the land, all that shit. That's about what I got.

Following some general observations, I will list my comments in chronological order, that is, in the sequence of deaths at each location.

A. Although it's now nearly five weeks since the killings, at least one armed guard is still posted at each location. The guards appear to be there 24 hours; I noticed one about 2:15 A.M. They are not police, they're soldiers (two Air Force, three Army), an apparent official acknowledgement of the military nature of the deaths of five civilians. What are the guards guarding? Why are they there? I asked several. No reply.

B. The sites are still roped off, except for the highway spot where David Smith (usually referred to as Victim #3) had the grenade thrown into his car. Keeping that site off-limits would have required closing the very busy Highway 99, the main road from California to Oregon (and one of the big reasons for Yuba City's existence, a place to pass through from here to there). Smith's car, or what's left of it, if that would count as the murder location, is now kept in a locked, fenced-in compound behind the Sutter County Sheriff's office, headquarters for the investigation, so I guess you could call that one roped-off too. By the way, the FBI and the other police insist on calling their headquarters "Command Control Center", but that's a term I refuse to employ again.

C. At three of the locations, there are outlines marked in white tape of where the body was found. None was apparently needed in Smith's case, since he was in the driver's seat of his car. The more unusual exception is the spot outside the hardware store where George Dryden was incinerated (Victim #l). The spot is marked literally by an X. There must not have been enough of a body left to outline.

D. The sites get very little public attention. I've been told the bank of the river where Juan Corona left his deposit drew a fair number of passers-by for months after. This time, maybe because each spot had only one death, you won't exactly find Grey Line busses flocking around. Once this book is out, that situation might well change, but when I was there, I pretty much had the places to myself, just me and the guards.

E. All the spots, like the entire town, seem sparsely populated and unusually quiet. Yuba City has about 6,000 more people than it did when I left in the mid-Sixties, but they have been spreading out rather than bunching together. It's hard to imagine a murderer with military equipment lying in wait at any of the locations, or pulling up and getting all his paraphernalia arranged. Inconspicuousness looks impossible in such open, placid surroundings. Neil mentioned this before and I may have too, but when you stand at each place, it really hits you. You'd think any unusual activity would be spotted right off. It might be that the equipment was left at each spot ahead of time, which would only have been necessary I guess for murders #1 and #5, the napalm stuff and the rifle. The other three had less logistical problems of that sort. Well, in those two cases, getting away with the stuff might have been possible. I don't know why I'm saying "might have been", since it sure was possible, as that's how it happened. Standing in these spots, I try to picture what it would have been like to watch the killings take place. Even now, I can't imagine violent murders in the daytime in these locations, here in this town. That's obviously a failure of imagination on my part, but at's hard, very hard. If you were here and did see things like that, you'd convince yourself it was a hallucination. It couldn't happen here, you'd say, a cliche which has always implied its opposite.

F. From the photographs, I would have expected the spaces involved to be much more expansive. While the people have spread out over the years, the place itself seems so very small. That may not make much sense, but that's how it is. The downtown locations, in front of the hardware store and the bank, look the least like I had recalled. "Downtown" here still doesn't mean much. Cars continue to park diagonally, backing out and blocking the one lane on their side when it's time to leave. If you're driving down the street, you just wait while this goes on. Parallel parking is an overly urban concept, probably due around here about the start of the next century.

Even though I knew each spot roughly from memory, being here gives me the feeling of everything slightly in miniature, an undersized movie set not meant to be lived in. The distances feel distorted. From the sidewalk in front of the bank to where the rifleman was supposed to be (murder #5), for example, appears in person to be the length of my living room at home. You could kill someone with a rock and not strain your arm. Getting them right between the eyes with a good highpowered rifle is a job even I could have handled. In my mind, I kept seeing this spot like Dealey Plaza in Dallas, thinking the killer must have been a tiny smudge in a distant window as the victim clutched his wound. Instead, it looks near enough for powder burns. Scary.

These are the notes about each individual spot.

Victim #1(Dryden - napalmed in front of hardware store)

A. X instead of body outline already mentioned. Sidewalk still black beneath the tape. Size of the burn that's left is remarkably large. The dark patch stretches maybe five feet on both sides, and out past the sidewalk into the street about the distance of the width of a car. The window has been replaced, but heat marks are also still visible near the top and bottom edges, grayish scab-like wrinkles imprinted in blistered yellow paint. Napalm must grab on and burn awhile. I wonder how long the flames lasted.

B. I went up on the roof of the hardware store where the killer was supposed to have been, and looked down. Again the surprise was how small the distance appeared from here to where the victim last stood. If Dryden was about six feet tall, his head couldn't have been more than eight or ten feet away. I can see why nobody was sure where the flames were coming from. At this distance, it must have seemed like a fireball appearing from nowhere in one whoosh. The nozzle, or whatever it was, must have sprayed fire at a very wide angle to darken so broad an area on the ground below. I'm glad I wasn't around.

C. If the equipment made even a slight noise before anything erupted out of the nozzle, Dryden would easily have been able to see his killer. It appears pretty certain this could have been part of an intentional pattern. There must have been at least an instant every time for the victim to know what was to happen, to look violent mechanical death straight in the eye.

I'm glad no one before has noticed this extra bit of anger in the plan. Michael might have been lynched by now.

Victim #2 (Neville - shot from plane at his tractor company)

A. The only death on private property. It was a little harder to nose around. Salesmen clearly prefer business as usual. I stand around anyway. My main impression is how unprotected the site looks, and how natural the airplane-plan seems once you're standing here. What had sounded the craziest of all makes perfect sense when you look at it. The spot reminds me of that cornfield in the movie "North by Northwest" where the plane went after Cary Grant. The tractors don't look as if they'd afford much protection from an aggressive plane; you can't really crawl under them. Also, I guess by the time Neville knew what was going on, he was already shot. I can see him lying here, with a clear view as the plane circles around to come back, Neville knowing what was about to happen and once more being powerless to prevent it.

B. "North by Northwest" reminds me that maybe this killing wouldn't have been so difficult. Despite what Roger Templeman was saying about how hard it might have been to rig up a plane for this job, it didn't look so tough in the movie. The difference, I guess, is that was a movie. This isn't. And Cary Grant walked away, or rather drove away in that stolen pick-up truck with the refrigerator in back. Willis Neville was riding in back when he left here, not quite in shape to be driving.

C. I try to talk to either of the two guys who were with Neville when he was killed. One has quit, the other has been on vacation ever since. At least that's what they tell me.

Victim #3 (Smith - grenade in his car)

A. The car, as I said, is behind the Sheriff's office, but I drive out to the spot on the highway anyway. This time, one killing that had sounded simple looks a bit tricky. The highway is straight and flat along here, as is most of the hundreds of miles of 99 all through the joined-up San Joaquin and Sacramento Valleys. If Smith was just driving along, as the reports say, it would have been a hell of a job to toss that grenade right in the window by complete surprise. The way I picture it now, especially after seeing the first two sites, would be for the other driver to pull alongside, moving in the same direction, and wave or yell at Smith. Smith would then roll down his window, and in would go the grenade. Once again, a good look at your executioner, at least a few seconds to know your death had arrived.

B. I try to tell, back looking at the car through the fence of the locked compound, whether the windows had been rolled up at the time of the killing. That would support the above scenario. The car is too much a mass of junk now to figure anything from it. There's a lot of broken glass visible, but you can't tell which windows it came from and how far closed they might have been. At this point I realize it doesn't much matter either way. If they were up, he could have rolled one down by request. If it was already open, a grenade landing next to you making funny noises would already be a thing to notice without someone warning you first. I wonder why I thought about the windows at all.

Victim #4 (Ferguson - impaled on spikes)

A. This one's been talked about a lot, but you really have to see it to believe it. The spot where the pit is, it's so normal, there's no other word I can think of to describe it. The idea that death lay waiting beneath some branches and dirt - if I didn't see a guard standing there now, I could have walked into it myself. This is not a spot to expect death, and I'm sorry if I'm repeating myself.

B. The pit looks unusually deep, down probably eight feet or so. Digging it alone would have taken a long time. Of course looking at it reminds you of nothing so much as a grave, one of the most prevalent cliches in the reporting on the Yuba City Draft Board Murders. It makes you wish it didn't look like a grave because of how often it was described that way, but it does. Seeing the depth, though, does make me question something else Roger Templeman said, about how uncertain you'd be that a death device like this would deliver. Maybe they made them shallower in Vietnam, but just from looking at this one, I can't imagine how a person could survive. It looks like the fall could kill you without the poles waiting for you at the bottom. Shit or no shit. This method - the hole, the poles, the excrement - looks triple-certain. to do the job.

C. The holes where the poles were are still clearly visible, but none of the poles remain in position. All held as evidence, I would expect. The bottom is marked for the position of the body, no mean trick given that the dirt is probably pretty soft way down there. How do you lay tape down on dirt? Yet another question for which I expect no answer whatsoever.

D. I realize standing here that Ferguson must have fallen face down into the spikes, so again there was a moment when the victim saw what was about to happen. Ferguson's time was probably the shortest, but could have been the most horrible. Don't ask me how I can judge which vision of impending death would be the most terrifying for its victim. This one seems to me as grim as they come.

Victim #5 (White - shot by sniper in front of bank)

A. After going to, and living through, the first four, the last seems almost ordinary, as if the killer tired of invention and just got on with it. This one looks so simple, saying "The other four could have been done this easily, had I chosen." While it may have been less flashy, the result was the same. As White crumpled to the ground, how straightforwardly his demise was accomplished likely mattered to him very little.

B. Just going through the motions of all five, winding up here looking across from the bank, it's hard to imagine what the killer would have done after this last one was over. You don't exactly go out and get a pizza after completing something like this. My own momentum makes me want to go on to the next one. A certain steadfastness of purpose must have been there to allow him to stop, a clear sense of the job finished. By five, he must have felt he might have gone on a lot longer, killing and killing on through the day in ever more intricate ways. The restraint of the fifth, the single shot, the unembellished plan, comes to appear like a transition back to normal existence, a return to life without killing, a natural part of the plan.

This brings up an obvious question, though one I had never thought of until this moment at the end of my brief odyssey. An unsurprising conclusion to this spree (if so elaborately contrived a series of murders can be called a spree) would have been for the killer to take his own life. Why in all this was so much effort taken to elude capture?

C. While at location #5, I stood on the roof of the Sears and Roebuck building across the street from the bank. (I should recall this was the suspected location of the sniper, though there was some question as to whether this was indeed where the assassin had fired his single shot.) While there, I looked over at the death spot, noting the apparent size of the taped-down body outline on the sidewalk. My eyes wandered along the piece of rope strung between two stanchions to keep people away from the spot, and then I noticed that just to the side of the left post, the Army guard was keeping close track of my movements too, close enough to want to keep his hand perched just above his unbuttoned holster. I then realized that taking up a spot on a roof where a sniper had done his work isn't the smartest thing in the world to do when there is now someone with a gun at the place where the victim had stood. I resolved to make no quick moves and not to reach into my pockets for anything. I was thankful I no longer smoked. I turned around ever so slowly and quietly beat a retreat to the door of the stairway that had brought me up here. As soon as I was on the street I went over to the guard and apologized for the nervous moment I may have caused him.

"You were the one who should have been nervous," was his quite proper reply. That was the longest sentence I had extracted from any of the five guards, but when I asked him why there were guards here and who ordered them, he went back to the clipped negative replies I had come to expect of these guys. I should have known that if he was ready to shoot me a minute before he might not be in the mood to answer any questions. I saw how young he looked, twenty at the very oldest. I had an extremely difficult time seeing myself shot down by someone who was no more than four when "I Want to Hold Your Hand" came out. That's the kind of semi-humorous irony I was very happy to avoid.

The speculation this led me to (and probably the reason I began the present note in the first place) was how much more credible some sort of revenge in the reverse direction would have been, or still could be. I don't want to be accused of putting ideas into impressionable minds, but I'd be more ready to believe that some weapon-happy Army kid very much of the sort who could have done me in on top of Sears and Roebuck, that one of these guys could decide that there were still a few too many Sixties-peaceniks around, and could take it upon himself to wipe out four or five of the more visible representatives of this now older generation. The aged dictum never to trust anyone over thirty could take on new meaning for one of these young Establishment types who might have nothing but hostility for older brothers and sisters (and pretty soon parents) who they'd see as dangerously radical and out of it and a general threat to their well-being. That would make more sense, to see something like that happen, than the highly anachronistic mass murders which have happened here, an apparent attempt to right wrongs now so old that most kids today would be more likely to sympathise with the values of those who were killed. Anyway, that's what I was thinking when I felt like I came close, if only for about half a second, to winding up a taped-down outline on a sidewalk myself.

All the general notes were supposed to be at the beginning of this section, but I'm left with a few that fit better here at the end. I'll go back to the first of the alphabet again, and I've been keeping them as lettered notes mainly to retain the flavor of the on-the-spot random thoughts which they are, thereby yet again trying to excuse their frequent awkwardness in the name of accurate, immediate eyewitness observation.

A. I realize going to the murder spots has led to results that are up to this point very close to my whole experience of being back here. I'm surprised by the difference there is between getting newspaper or television reports and actually being present. I'm still rather staggered by how difficult it is to figure anything out about what happened. My thoughts, and facts, are disorganized. My objectives remain uncertain. Yet I feel like I'm getting somewhere, wherever that may be.

B. I wondered as I went from spot to spot if the killer ever rehearsed the route before the day he went through it. Was I repeating a journey my old friend had made many times? As I was doing so, I must admit I was getting into the rhythm of the experience, starting to marvel in a way both partly horrifying and partly exhilarating, coming to grasp the hundreds or thousands of details that had to have been worked out for this to take place. Those of you who always found these murders to be insane atrocities from the moment you first heard of them will hate me (or ignore me) for saying things like this, but I am reporting truthfully about the feeling that retracing the steps of the killer gave. I think you could feel the same way if you did it, even if you believe you wouldn't.

B. While on the subject of retracing steps, it's time for a childhood recollection. I remember once going to Ford's Theater in Washington, D.C. I think I was about eleven years old, and my family was on the standard tour of the capital. I can distinctly recall standing at the spot where John Wilkes Booth had jumped from the balcony onto the stage as he cried out his Latin epigram and broke his leg. I wanted to jump right then myself, an impulse I am sure many others on that infamous spot have experienced. I wonder now if the significance I felt then was a prescient anticipation of this moment, when as I child I in some way felt this future to be, a time when I would again vicariously experience violent political assassination in the place where it happened. More likely, my thoughts on that balcony were just to wonder what it would be like to jump, a childish playful curiosity probably closer to my present feeling than the pomposity of the previous sentence. I shall also remember not to vacation in Dallas.

C. Just for the record, as the old saying goes, the total driving time between the four sites a single killer would have to have driven (leaving out the possibly unattended death at the pit) is no more than about twenty minutes. What makes this figure difficult to compute in a meaningful way is that we'd have to know better the place where the plane would have taken off and landed (rather than only where it let loose its bullets), but even making a generous allowance, there'd still be no problem, just in terms of driving time, in one person getting everywhere he'd have to.

D. More than at any point yet, I'm extremely frustrated by reporting on events I haven't witnessed myself. Even though I've bragged already about the value of on-the-spot experience, this is still a long way from being an actual eyewitness, in person, to the events themselves. There's so much conjecture in doing this indirectly, it might not be worth trying. I don't know how history can be written under any circumstances, when being this close in time and right at the site, the past seems irretrievable. If I can't do it here and now, how can someone else who would know so much less than me do it there and later?

It may be that just being a former resident and a past acquaintance of the person involved are extremely flimsy credentials to be doing this. I can also feel acutely a problem that the reader may share, which is to wonder how much what is now past matters, either the more immediate past of these killings, or the events further back which set a mind in motion to commit these deeds. It's so easy to say that what's happened is over and done, and other commonplace observations of that sort, and not look for historical links or causal connections or any of that crap. Should I just forget these crimes and get out of here? Might the killer have asked this same question of himself? It's pretty tough to know when to let bygones be bygones, even when you can tell with some certainty that there are crimes to be accounted for, whether the crimes of an individual or a nation. When is it proper to forget, and when is it the correct activity to doggedly continue the search, not knowing either its outcome or whether there will be any, or if anyone will care either way. Making up questions like the ones I have just posed could be one of the more elaborate methods of jerking off.

E. I'm especially struck after all these notes by how easy it is to become clinical and dispassionate about these murders, not to mention flippant and inane This must be very like wartime, when one keeps track of body counts and casualty statistics without thinking about the lives those numbers used to be. I realize I've given virtually no thought whatever to who the people are who have been killed. Besides knowing they were all on the Draft Board, seeing their photographs, and reading their occupations, they are nothing to me. What I don't know is if this is the right distance to keep. If I find out more about them, will that make me more angry about their deaths or more sympathetic with whoever finished them off? Again I've got a real problem with knowledge. It may be better not to dig for details, since they shouldn't have bearing in judging their killer. They could all have been horrible right-wing assholes, the worst kinds of militaristic stereotypes, and if I presented evidence of that sort, nobody would believe it anyway who wasn't already so inclined. If I told you they were loving family men who performed their civic responsibilities with the utmost reluctance and devoted care, would that change the circumstances of their actions? Either way, I feel in no position to judge. I have often been surprised by the authority with which self-appointed moral experts can pass pronouncements of responsibility. We've all read too many times when politicians or commentators will blithely inform us of who is or isn't to blame for things, whether national atrocities or individual crimes. All I know of such questions is not to venture off upon that kind of ego trip. I'll just continue to try to dig up what seems to me to be helpful and unique material, and how you wish to judge it or whatever use you wish to make of it can still be entirely your own.