CALIFORNIA STATE PRISON, LOS ANGELES COUNTY, CALIFORNIA

AUGUST 2018

Humans adapt quickly. By the second weekend, I had gotten used to waking up at four and driving the hour and a half to the prison while the dawn broke over the desert. I blasted eighties pop music, nineties power ballads, ear junk food. One foot on the gas pedal, the other on the floorboard.

On the days I visited Sam, I did nothing but journal, organize my notes, and listen to music. No vicious text threads with my girlfriends, no guilty social media dalliances, no distractions. Mind in the game, but don’t think too much.

I was willingly entering a situation I knew to be dangerous. It was not a scene from a horror movie. Norman Bates may have been his mother, and that was scary. Sam was something else. Sam was in Technicolor and could smell when I had my period. He knew if I was doing my push-ups from a hug hello. He smelled the garlic on my hair if I made spaghetti the night before. I willed the bile from the back of my throat.

There was no pure way of removing distractions, of course. My friend Sasha concerned me. Thoughts of his recent downward turn nudged at me. I listened to the Ramones, Depeche Mode. I was tired that morning. I opened the windows to the cool air. In an hour or two, the temperature would soar forty degrees in an hour, an express elevator to hell.

Sasha was a surrogate son. He met my husband, Scott, at a support group for men in recovery from drugs and alcohol (he was the one who told me about the quarters). For five years, he’d spent nearly every holiday with us, every birthday. My kids called him Uncle Sasha. He carried my son Jovi on his shoulders at my husband’s concerts.

Sasha had grown up in a family that valued hardness in men above all. He was three inches shorter than me and a marshmallow. I found his compassion a rare and precious thing. He hated it. He liked mean girlfriends who called him a pussy to toughen him up. He took up bodybuilding, trying to turn himself into a fortress.

He showed up at our house with shaker cups of a vile smoothie that included grilled chicken and rice. He gagged as he choked them down. One day after a rainstorm, our driveway was blocked by palm fronds. He furiously tossed them aside to clear the way for my car, as if he was the Hulk. His mood had darkened exponentially.

I pulled off at Lancaster and took my place in the line of cars stacked along the shoulder of Avenue 60.

6:15 a.m. Eighth car in line. Not bad.

At 9:30 precisely, the line inched toward the guardhouse. A sheriff’s deputy with a wide- brimmed hat and a face out of Cool Hand Luke approached my window. I fumbled for my ID.

“Don’t be nervous, pretty lady.” He checked my back seat. “You’re not going to prison. You’re just visiting.” He handed me a slip with the number 13. “Don’t worry. We’ll get you back out again.”

“I’ll hold you to it.”

“I won’t be here,” he replied. “Follow that red car.”

The waiting room of the visitor’s center was packed that Saturday. I filled out my paperwork on a shelf of children’s books, signs around it hanging at haphazard angles:

NUMBERS!

TOGETHER WE CAN PREVENT CHILD ABUSE

LETTER SOUNDS!

WHEN TO CALL 911

The plug-in air-conditioning unit was no match for the 110 degree heat. We fanned ourselves with outdated copies of Cosmo and Parenting while a Paleolithic boom box played Eminem’s “Lose Yourself.”

Women who would probably never be in the same room for any other reason talked easily and lightly with each other. The only tacitly forbidden topic was why you were actually there. Some had forged unlikely friendships over the months or years they’d been visiting. A tall girl with a lank braid and an Eastern European accent traded recipes with a white-haired Black grandmother in a hot-pink tracksuit and matching Ugg boots.

A nervous newbie with a cherubic face and a swirl of blue and purple braids had brought a plastic baggie full of dollar bills instead of quarters. When she learned some of the vending machines only took quarters, she just about hyperventilated.

“I didn’t know! I went to the bank to get all these singles. The teller asked me if I was going to a strip club and I was all, sure. I mean, which is worse?”

A middle-aged white woman with a voice like a lawn mower and flip-flops revealing poorly rendered toenail art offered to change some of her dollars. I had forgotten to pick up the rolls of quarters that week and had spent the night before digging through a mason jar full of coins, separating out any quarters from stray euros, yen, and Chuck E. Cheese tokens.

When in line to enter the cage, I met the deputy’s eyes only briefly, answered what they asked, held up my hand to show my wedding ring. I pulled back my hair to show my earrings, showed the prescription for my glasses, turned around, emptied my pockets, ran my fingers along the lining of my waistband. I handed over my driver’s license, got my wrist black-light-stamped.

Once inside the visiting room, I bought two Cokes, a container of honey-garlic wings, some chips for me. I checked in with the deputy at the front desk, learned his name. I said hello to the trustees, gave ol’ Everett a little love. He was an ancient gangster who would smuggle me one of the pencils he kept for the kids for a wink. An enormous man named Calvin always wiped down my heavily guarded table and pulled out my chair with a limp and a kind smile. Turn on your bright eyes and let men help you. They grow three inches, glow like little boys.

I heated Sam’s food and set it up for him. When Sam entered, I hugged him. I kept a bead on the guard, estimating the distance in yards. I popped the tab on Sam’s Coke and served him. I sometimes wiped the corners of his mouth with a napkin.

Sam’s stories flowed free-form, hypnotic. He followed bread crumbs of association rather than chronology. His eyes were either black holes or glittering disco balls. Around us, hard men with neck tattoos held babies as if they were made of glass and smiled down with the only unguarded facial expression of their week. Cans dropped from vending machines with a thunk. Microwaves beeped with every burrito.

“Five words you’d use to describe yourself?”

“Mad. Misunderstood. Unlikable. Angry. Hateful.”

“But you weren’t unlikable.”

“What now?”

“Women devoted themselves to you. Jean. Ninah. They loved you. You had all the evidence in the world that you were lovable.”

“Jean…”

Wrong move. Get him off syrupy sentimentality.

“How did it feel to kill them?”

“Oooeee, it felt like heaven. Felt like being in bed with Marilyn Monroe!”

A cartoon woman. Bed was not where he wanted to be with a woman, Marilyn or otherwise.

“It felt like being in love.”

I wondered what he had for comparison.

Sam told me he loved women, worshipped them. Especially stuck-up white women. As a child, he didn’t realize women ate and slept and shat. He thought they were angels.

“Must have been disappointing when you figured out the truth.”

“I suppose it was.”

“You wouldn’t be the first man to be disappointed by the humanity of women.”

“That’s my smart baby. You got the psychology.” He tapped a finger to his temple.

Sam told me about four more murders that day, in exquisite and haunting detail. He lit up like a child on Christmas. He hugged himself and made kissy-kissy noises. With one outstretched arm, he demonstrated how much force it took to crack a hyoid bone.

His face twisted into a grotesque mask of rage. Just as quickly, he went back to Perv Grandpa mode.

“I got only two things left now, my memories and my feelings.”

Sam believed he owned the souls of every one of his “babies.” Mine, he said, over and over. Mine, mine, mine. A deranged and diabolical toddler. He believed God was going to reunite his “family” in heaven.

“If I had a daughter, she’d be just like you.” He brushed my leg with his hand. “You are my play daughter. My adopted daughter. I love you.”

He told them all he loved them. He told them they were beautiful. He told them they were his, forever. Sometimes he made them say it back to him before he killed them.

Mirroring body language is a common interview technique. As he described the murders, I leaned forward, matching some version of what I thought was him lying in wait, ready to pounce: his words the apex of charm, his muscles coursing with threat. It probably never got better than that moment for him.

Maybe it would never get better than that moment for me either. After a lifetime of free-floating anxiety and sometimes paralyzing fear of the unknown, here was the real-life monster under the bed. He was neither spooky nor scary. Those words are far too twee. After a short time, I wasn’t scared anymore for my safety. I willed myself to feel nothing. Give him nothing. When a tiny snarl, almost like a twitch, curled my left upper lip, I snapped back to my question list and my default sympathy/poker face. The more I did it, the easier it got for me. I wondered which was preferable—overwhelming fear for your safety or the inability to feel at all. I hoped I’d find something in-between.

“Why do you feel like you need to own women?”

“I wanted their helplessness. All I ever wanted was for them to cry in my arms.”

“Denise cried. If it was all you wanted, why didn’t you let her live?”

“Well, you got me there. Maybe it wasn’t all I wanted.”

“I had my own hard days, you know. I’m glad I never met up with somebody like you one dark night.”

“But I never killed nobody like my smart baby here. I never killed no senators or governors or fancy New York journalists. Nothing like that. I killed you, it’d be all over the news the next day.”

“How did it feel to finally get caught?”

Sam argued that the presence of his DNA didn’t prove he killed those women. He said they railroaded him, lied and said he beat women. They got the three living witnesses who testified at his Los Angeles trial to come to town by promising them a free trip to Disneyland. Lying whores. He never beat women. He never raped women.

This last point was essential to him. He didn’t box those women. He was no rapist. He didn’t have to. They came to him.

“But you killed those women.”

“You think you know me? You think you in here sparring with Mr. Sam now?”

He shadowboxed, throwing mock punches an inch from my cheekbone. I noticed he liked to scare me a little when I stepped out of line, reminding me he was in control of the conversation. I flinched.

“I like to think we know each other a little by now. I think you killed them.”

“Well, you’re right about that, little miss. They still set me up.”

“What do you feel you deserve?”

“What’s that question?”

“We live in a society that has rules. One of those rules is that you don’t just go around killing people for fun. What I want to know is, what do you think you deserve for what you did?”

Sam lived in a world of wanting and taking, not a world of just deserts.

When I reached my car, I turned to the prison and instinctively spat three times on the ground—a tradition used by old Jewish ladies to ward off the evil eye.

I fumbled with my glasses, dug around for my key, before I remembered it was still in my bag of quarters. When I was safely down the road, I pulled to the side of the road and folded over the steering wheel, my chest collapsing with thoughts of Mary, the Norwegian blond, the barrel, the Everglades, the fresh grave, the bathtub. I looked around, making sure there was no one to hear, and screamed. Then I drove to the nearest Olive Garden, ordered myself a glass of crappy white wine and a salad, and wrote longhand for three hours, not wanting to lose a single detail.

As a civilian, it’s impossible to bring a recording device into a maximum-security prison in California. You can’t bring a writing implement. You can’t take out anything you didn’t bring in.

I did it all from memory. I use a popular and simple technique called a memory palace. I learned it from my father, who played decent chess, legit tournament bridge, and had a pretty vicious poker game, until my mother had it with his gambling and he took up the market instead. Early on, my father deemed me sharp, good on the fly, short-tempered, and short-sighted. Not worth the time for more than poker. Memory helps.

He taught me a simple technique of turning memories into images, the funnier and filthier the better (because that is what our minds seize on), and storing them in various places in a remembered or invented but familiar location. Most people start with a childhood home. When it’s time to remember, you walk back through this location and retrieve each memory, one at a time. It works with cards and at social functions. It also allows me to remember up to about ninety minutes of conversation with remarkable accuracy, without recording or notes. After that, I can get a little hazy. It takes practice and concentration. Joshua Foer’s excellent Moonwalking with Einstein discusses memory palaces at length.

In the case of Samuel Little, my memory palace involved populating my childhood home with the memories of a serial killer. It was a mind trick, not a metaphor. Sometimes a memory palace is just a memory palace. I cleaned the place with a power washer when I was done writing it all down so it would be ready for the following week.

I put down the pen and picked up the phone as I headed out to the parking lot.

“This is Detective Roberts.”

“Hi, Mitzi. It’s Jillian Lauren. I saw Little today. He’s talking. I don’t know what to do.”

“Okay. Don’t say another word. Hang up the phone. A Texas Ranger is the chief IO [investigating officer] on Little now. He’ll be in touch. You’ll do fine.”

Shit. Talking to the LAPD was nerve-racking enough. The cowboy himself—Ranger Jimmy Holland—was gonna be in touch?

My husband called right after Roberts hung up without a goodbye to tell me he was still in the studio. A sitter was covering until I got home.

“Who’s sitting? Sasha? I can’t get Sasha on the phone.”

“Honey. I didn’t tell you this yesterday because I knew you had a long day today, but his messages have been green for two days.”

“What does that mean? So?”

“It means…it means his phone is off.”

“No, it doesn’t. Lots of people have those green messages.”

“That is what it means on Sasha’s phone. I know him and he would never turn his phone off. I called the building manager this morning. He just notified the marshals, and they’re going to the apartment. You need to prepare yourself.”

A voice in my own head, as if watching from just above me, had to translate Scott’s words as I pulled into my driveway and the last of the sun melted into the mountains.

He’s saying be ready for the “Sasha killed himself” call.

I gathered my duffel bag from a day in prison and kicked the car door closed as I held the phone to my ear.

So dramatic. He’s jumping to conclusions.

Except Scott never jumps to conclusions. He’s methodical to a fault.

“No. Because his girlfriend is a bitch? He’s in college. His girlfriend is supposed to be a bitch. No. This is ridiculous.”

The other line buzzed. There it was: the Texas number.

“I’ll call you back.”

I picked it up.

“This is Texas Ranger James Holland,” said a slightly accented voice, neither overly concerned nor overly friendly. The space cowboy himself. “I hear you’ve been talking to my boy Sammy.”

I flopped onto the front steps. Jovi bounded out the front door, eyes alight, palm outstretched.

“Look, Mommy! Look! Try it!” Our first fig.

“Excuse me…” I said to the ranger and took a quick bite. “It’s delicious. Can you go get me some more, please, honey?”

Jovi ran back to the yard.

“So. What did he say?” Holland asked.

“I mean, do you want me to just read from my notes? I could organize them better.”

“Go ahead and read.”

I paged through my still disorganized notes of murder after murder.

As I read, he said “Okay, okay…” or “Skip that one.”

“Wait,” Holland said after I told him about a victim in Omaha. “Read that one again.”

“Um, okay. Well, I asked him who else knew about his secret life. If anyone else knew about the murders. He told me he thought his girlfriend Ninah knew. She was a Black prostitute. It was sometime in the mid-seventies. They were driving his white ’69 T-bird through Omaha, and Ninah was fiddling with the radio. A story came on the news about a woman who had been strangled and left in a barrel behind an old factory. He said Ninah side-eyed him in a way that let him know she knew.”

He cut me off. “You did the right thing. This is an open investigation, so…much appreciated if we could keep this to ourselves for the time being.”

He hung up without a goodbye and without my getting a promise of an interview. Tough crowd.

Scott called twenty minutes later.

The kids had come in from the backyard and were downstairs rinsing the garden mud from their feet, the little-boy sweat from their hairlines, getting ready for their infuriating nightly argument over the remote control. The sky was a swirl of rose and deep gray, the trees silhouettes in the dying light.

I’d been right: Scott rarely jumped to conclusions. And he’d been right: Sasha had hung himself from his doorknob three days before.

For the second time in a day, I screamed. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d screamed before that day.

We talked to a grief counselor. Scott and I decided we’d tell the kids immediately, each in developmentally appropriate ways, whatever that meant. I called my mother, who said a Hebrew prayer. I greeted my husband at the door, and together we sat on the couch. One at a time, we changed our children’s lives forever.

I have a strong stomach. I’m not homicide-cop level, but I can look at crime scene photos and coroner’s reports over lunch. I can study fly larvae in a nose cavity and eat a garbanzo bean salad.

I would love to have lived my life without ever having to see the expression on my older son’s face when I told him his uncle Sasha hung himself.