OVERVIEW

I began putting this together in late 1993, after I came into possession of a very curious manuscript and a box of related materials (newspaper clippings, photographs, audio tapes, and a few home movies). They belonged to a friend of mine from high school named Stephen Cornell, and related to other people I knew from that time. Stephen committed suicide in 1991, and his mother recently contacted me and asked if I might do something to get this material out into the world.

The events it recounts are an extraordinary series of five killings which took place in Yuba City, California, on February 29, 1976. To get this forgotten (but it seems to me quite significant) event back into the public consciousness, I have done the best I can to assemble and present Stephen's work. As the end of the Vietnam War (and also this incident) are now more than twenty years in the past, perhaps we can start to put some perspective on this period.

The whole story of how this came about is too long to tell right now, and I don't want it to overshadow the events themselves. (For a little more, see the "On The Making Of..." section.) The short version for the moment is that Stephen tried unsuccessfully through most of the 1980's to get a book published. He was rejected by dozens of publishers. (I have reproduced one of their rejection slips to give a sense of what he went through.) The story he was telling was very complicated, and I strongly suspect that politics may have played a role in his work not coming to light. Whatever went wrong, it struck me when I went through his book that the best way to tell this story is in a digital environment. I see Stephen now as a bit ahead of his time, as these events can only be followed clearly through some of the advantages that the technology you are using now affords, particularly the ability to see recreations of murder scenes, be able to browse through large amounts of text, and experience the multimedia fragments which are part of the story.

I am a Professor in the UCLA Film/TV Department who teaches film history and criticism. I am not a professional artist or trained computer person, but I have developed barely enough skills in using multimedia and 3-D tools to be able to present this history as I think it should be presented. I am, as I hope others are too, interested in how to tell a story like this and to keep significant events alive, and I trust you will be able to see (through) my work and understand why this new medium of the digital document(ary) is worth exploring. I hope this will be taken as the work of a dedicated amateur, and not looked at by the standard of professional offerings. For better or worse, this is an attempt to do something interesting on my desktop with very limited resources.

What I have not done myself (due to time constraints and, more importantly, a desire to let Stephen's work speak for itself) is undertake my own investigation of this event. I hope to do so at some later point, but for now I have expended my energies in working directly with what Mrs. Cornell passed on to me. I am impressed by the authenticity and thoroughness of these materials, but have not myself done anything to verify what I was given.

The 3-D recreations, other illustrations, and the scanning of original materials I have done myself, so for those, and for the overall work, I take full responsibility. I have obtained all necessary rights to these materials for this publication.

This work is dedicated to those who have written so eloquently about the Vietnam War period, and especially to the memory of Phil Ochs, who I was fortunate to know for a too-brief period.

Comments or inquiries can be addressed to smamber@ucla.edu.