Contents ( 53)
- Dedication
- Epigraph
- Map
- Contents
- July 6, 1978
- 11:45 p.m.
- 1
- July 7, 1978
- 7:30 a.m.
- 2
- July 7, 1978
- 7:30 a.m.
- 3
- July 7, 1978
- 8:05 a.m.
- 4
- 5
- 6
- July 11, 1978
- 6:00 p.m.
- 7
- 8
- 9
- July 11, 1978
- 9:30 p.m.
- 10
- 11
- 12
- 13
- 14
- 15
- 16
- 17
- 18
- 19
- 20
- 21
- 22
- 23
- 24
- 25
- 26
- 27
- 28
- 29
- 30
- Author’s Note
- Acknowledgments
- About the Author
- Books by Maureen Johnson
- Back Ad
- Copyright
- About the Publisher
Stevie left as casually as possible, which was really not casual at all. She felt the girl’s eyes on her back. Her lie had been okay at best. What was she supposed to say? Don’t mind me. I’m just a weirdo who creeps into your bunk while you’re gone and crawls around on the floor by your bed. Why am I doing this? Oh, because of the murders.
She decided to skip lunch, even though she was hungry. She didn’t want to immediately face the redheaded girl again. She texted Janelle and asked her to bring a hot dog and soda to the cabin, where she was going to hide for a while with the door closed.
The red hair made Stevie think of Diane McClure, who in many ways was the least-documented victim. She wasn’t as bad as Todd, as good as Sabrina, or the well-meaning drug dealer who almost made it to safety. She was simply there, the girlfriend, the fourth victim. Stevie flopped onto her bed and picked up her tablet, paging through the files until she got to the very short one allocated to Diane. There was an excerpt from a book on the case about her:
Very few people had much to say about Diane McClure. Her school records show that she was a middling student, barely passing many of her classes but not quite failing out. She belonged to no clubs. Her yearbook photo shows a black-and-white image of a heavily freckled girl with a strange smile that looks neither happy nor sincere. Her thick red hair is long and straight, but the photo cannot capture how vibrant it was in life.
Diane was the daughter of lifetime Barlow Corners residents Douglas and Ellen McClure. Her parents met at Liberty High in the 1950s, marrying in 1956. Her brother, Daniel, was born in 1958, and Diane was born in 1960. In 1965, they purchased the Dairy Duchess, a local diner, from its owners. They would run the diner well into the 1990s. Diane worked there in the evenings and on weekends.
“Diane liked to have fun,” said friend Patty Horne. “She loved Led Zeppelin and Kiss. She loved going to concerts. She pretty much always wore a shirt from some band or other. That’s so much of what I remember about her—her red hair and her T-shirts from concerts. She had really strong feelings about which albums were acceptable listening. She was passionate. God, she loved Led Zeppelin so much.”
This was a time when high schools had smoking lounges, and Diane spent a lot of time in the one at Liberty High. Some of the only photos of her in the 1978 yearbook show her leaning out the window, cigarette in hand.
Diane began dating Todd Cooper early in their junior year, and by the end of senior year, they were considered one of the leading couples of Liberty High. But they were not king-and-queen-of-the-prom material.
“Diane was too much of a badass for that,” said another friend. “When I think of what happened that night, one thing that I always think is . . . Diane must have put up one hell of a fight. Whatever happened, she went down swinging.”