The Kerrigan brothers Jerome Jr. and Lionel were not the ringleaders in the assault—if there was an “assault.” This was much-reiterated by my brothers. All they’d done (they would claim) was follow other boys tramping through muddy playing fields and past skeletal trellises in the municipal rose garden to the swimming pool, to the weatherworn stucco building where refreshments were sold in summer and where there were foul-smelling restrooms and changing rooms. In the off-season the building was deserted, dead leaves blew about the cement walk. But the restrooms were kept unlocked through the year.

The boy who was Liza Deaver’s “boyfriend” led Liza into the men’s room saying they had “nice surprises” for her.

It was so, Liza Deaver liked “surprises.” Usually candy bars, snacks in cellophane wrappers from a corner store, cans of sugary soda pop. Sometimes these were given to her by kindly persons who knew her and her family and sometimes by others who were not so kindly.

Questioned afterward by parents, school authorities, Family Court officers the boys would claim that Liza had “wanted” to come with them. Going to the park had been “her idea.” Into the men’s restroom, her idea. She’d told them that she had done such things with her brothers and other boys and sometimes they gave her “surprises,” and sometimes they didn’t.

Liza Deaver denied this. Liza’s parents denied it, adamantly.

Liza Deaver had not been injured enough to require hospitalization but she’d been examined in an emergency room and treated for cuts, bruises, bloodied nose and teeth, “chafings” in the vaginal and anal areas. Clumps of hair had been pulled from her head and (it was whispered) the boys had “grabbed and pulled out” pubic hairs of which (it was whispered) Liza had many.

Still the boys insisted that it had been Liza’s idea. They’d been “nice” to her, they said. These gifts they’d given her: a Mars bar with just a small bite missing, a plastic bead necklace found in the trash, a small stuffed puppy with button eyes, a perfumy deodorant. (Liza Deaver was notorious for her strong, horsey odor.) It was not clear how long Liza remained in the restroom with the boys for Liza lacked a firm grasp of the passage of time but the boys insisted that it had been for “only a few minutes”—“definitely no more than a half hour.” It was 5:40 P.M. by the time Liza limped home, a distance of about a mile; it was estimated that the boys had led Liza away from school at 3:30 P.M., though accounts differed about who exactly had been with Liza from the first, and who had joined later. The fact that Liza had brought home with her the “gifts” the boys had given her seemed to suggest that she’d been happy to receive them, for otherwise—wouldn’t she have thrown them away, in disgust?