It hit me, as I sat in bed watching television: this was not even a danger I’d thought to fear. The notion that I had let this happen, that my daughter had been asleep while on the other side of her wall two girls were raped and murdered, sent me into a panic. I reached for the phone and the piece of paper with the number Margo had given us, but the line was busy again, that goddamned automated message. Dennis wrapped his arms around me. One of the many things I felt at the time was anger—at myself for letting her move off campus in the first place, and at both of us for letting her stay in Gainesville while this killer continued to choose new victims. Of course I understood that living next door to a murder is not a fate equal to the murders themselves; I’d never felt a stronger sense of gratitude. But I knew that this experience—her proximity, her unbelievable luck—would haunt Margo. The knowledge that this might have happened to her would change her life. This was not the carefree college experience we’d wanted for our daughter. “It’s my fault,” I said to Dennis, because I’d approved of her moving off campus, and he said, “It’s not your fault.” But I’ll always remember the tone of his voice as he said it—weary, guilty, and impatient—because in that moment, if not after, I think Dennis might have agreed.
We heard from Margo again that afternoon. She’d moved with friends into a vacant dormitory suite, which meant she now had her own bed. We continued to insist she come home—Dennis packed a bag in anticipation that she would finally relent and he could go get her—but she was determined to stay. It was as if she had seized on staying as the only way to get through it all intact. She reminded us that she was twenty years old. Twenty! How old this seemed to her, and how young it seemed to me. The next morning Dennis left for work as if it were a normal day, though I stayed home. I got dressed and straightened the house, but left the television news on in the bedroom and the living room, and whenever the coverage shifted to the murders, I sat down and watched, and it was many minutes before I could return to my feet. I called Margo in the morning, then twice in the afternoon, then Dennis and I called together when he got home from work. “It’s like a ghost town,” said Margo when we finally reached her. The university continued to remain open—President Lombardi explained to the press that many students couldn’t reach their homes, and the university was better equipped to ensure student safety by continuing business as usual. We watched the news together that night: stores were selling out of Mace; Southern Bell was begging people not to call Gainesville unless absolutely necessary; pizza joints were losing money because of a rumor that the killer might be a delivery man; gun shops were reporting record sales; hardware stores had run out of deadbolts and door chains.
And the following morning, August 28, there were two more victims, which brought the total to five murders within seventy-two hours. This time, the killer had varied the profile. One victim was a petite twenty-three-year-old brunette named Tracy Paules, but the other was her male roommate, Manny Taboada. Manny was—these details were included in the reports—six feet, two inches, 200 pounds, and a former football player. Again, the killer had entered through a sliding glass door by jimmying it with some kind of tool. These killings had happened in the middle of the night, when Tracy and Manny had been sleeping. When I reached Margo on the phone, Dennis grabbed his packed bag and headed to the kitchen to get on the other line. “Don’t let her talk you out of it,” he said to me, and I nodded. But again she repeated what she’d been saying: that she was safe on campus, that she was with people all the time, even at night, and that she knew the university was forgiving tuition for anyone who needed to leave Gainesville—this is when Dennis picked up the other line—but she really didn’t think it was necessary, and besides she really liked her American history class. Her professor wore a tunic and took off his shoes when he came into the classroom. “Don’t let him sell you any baloney about the ‘good’ war,” said Dennis, who had always had, in my estimation, an enviable talent for switching focus. “If he does, ask him about the internment camps.”
Before she hung up, Margo reassured us again. “They gave us whistles. If I get in trouble, I just blow on it and someone appears in the blink of an eye.”
“They gave you whistles?” I said, thinking of the tools this killer had: a knife, obviously, and duct tape, and cleaning products of some kind—there were reports that all the bodies had been cleaned up before being staged for discovery. And of course he had something unnameable and unknowable, something Margo and Dennis and I could not understand: a force. I found it amusing and terrifying, this fact: the university had issued my daughter a whistle.
Dennis reluctantly unpacked his suitcase. In the face of Margo’s determination not to let us rescue her, I realized that the transition we’d been so worried about had come to pass. She really had left home.
Despite the fact that a man had been killed, I was reassured by the roster of Margo’s bunk mates. In one suite, there were two rooms and three kids sleeping in each room—the housing division had hastily made space and provided cots—and four of the six kids were young men. Normally, I would’ve been appalled to learn that the university was allowing my daughter to room with boys, but in these circumstances, I think the administration showed an admirable willingness to depart from tradition. They did what they had to do. We can go on about the benefits of equal rights, but when a killer is loose, you want a man—or men, plural—looking out for your daughter.
Several times when we called Margo’s suite we reached a young man named Stuart, whose name we’d never heard before. “Margo kicked ass on her biology assignment,” he would say to me. Or, “Yesterday we rode out to Hampton Lake for a swim.” By the third time we’d talked, I’d developed the sense that this boy and my daughter were close, in no small part because of the speed with which she reached the phone whenever he passed it to her—physically at least, geographically, they were together. Once, Dennis asked him bluntly how tall he was, and Stuart said, “I’m not tall, but I’m fast and strong. You don’t need to worry about your daughter. We’re taking good care of her. We’re taking care of each other.” This was something I’d seen stressed in televised interviews with the university’s director of psychological services—students relying on each other not only for safety but for comfort. Dennis choked up when Stuart said good-bye. He wanted to be the man protecting his daughter.
A day passed with no news—no leads on the killer, no new victims—and then another day passed, and then it had been a week. Five thousand students had left campus. There was a lot of nonsense in the Gainesville student paper, the Alligator—Margo sent us a copy—linking the murders to Ted Bundy, who had been executed a year earlier. (The theory went: Bundy was born on November 24 and executed on August 24 at the age of forty-two; the Gainesville murders started on August 24 and happened in a neighborhood off State Road 24; the second murder was on SW 24th Avenue, and so on.) I ran into Kathleen Beck at the grocery store—her twins had come home and were enrolling in classes at the University of Miami so they wouldn’t fall behind. Kathleen seemed confounded when I told her Margo was still in Gainesville, so I rushed to reassure her. “She’s not off campus anymore,” I said. “She’s in a dorm with a bunch of kids—half of them are boys.”
“Boys?” said Kathleen. “She lives in an apartment?”