About an hour later, there was a rumbling sound outside the house. No one paid much attention to it. Broadhurst’s 911 was not the only sports car parked out there, and a couple of people had decided to leave early.

But a few minutes later, Broadhurst came storming into the living room and said, “Where the hell’s Jeremy?” He announced that his car was missing.

The remaining guests came outside. The driveway from the Broadhurst home to the road was three fifths of a mile long, and crested a hill about a hundred yards from the house. Once a car passed that point, it was no longer visible.

But there was a reddish glow, and the sound of an idling motor, beyond the hill.

Bob and Broadhurst led the pack of people running to the scene, but everyone saw the same thing.

Sian’s bloodied, twisted body lay in the grass to the left of the road. About fifty feet beyond that, on the other side of the driveway, was the Porsche, nosed into a tree, the front end crumpled. The engine continued to race.

The door swung open.

Jeremy, his forehead bloodied where it had hit the steering wheel, stumbled out of the car. Being an older-model Porsche, it was not equipped with an airbag. He looked around, dazed, blinked several times at all the people staring at him.

“What the fuck?” he said.

Reece and Megan McFadden were hovering in horror over their daughter’s body. Megan had taken the girl into her arms and was screaming. Reece looked at Jeremy and ran at him full force.

“You son of a bitch!” he cried. He threw Jeremy up against the car and started hammering him with his fists. Bob, Broadhurst and another man had to haul him off before he killed the boy. (Gloria, perhaps not surprisingly, had wanted Reece McFadden charged with assault. And equally unsurprisingly, the prosecutor had opted not to.)

Jeremy was charged with aggravated vehicular homicide. The amount of alcohol in his system constituted recklessness, and he was facing up to twenty-five years in prison.

Grant Finch, lawyer to and friend of both Galen Broadhurst and Bob Butler—and, I believed, Madeline Plimpton—was brought in. Several defense strategies were hatched. The first was to spread the blame, highlight the mitigating circumstances. There was the easy access to alcohol at the party, coupled with Galen’s foolishness in leaving the keys in the car after Jeremy’s first attempt to make off with it. That struck me as astonishingly stupid.