Cry For War, The Story of Suzan and Michael Carson

Author’s Note

I was driving into San Francisco when, out of nowhere, I received a message on my cell phone that a television producer was trying to reach me about Cry For War, a book I had written more than twenty years earlier. The producer wanted to interview me for their crime show documentary on Suzan and Michael Carson.

Do you still have any of the original tape recordings or pictures? the production assistant asked breathlessly when I returned the phone call.

I told the production assistant that I wouldn’t do the interview. It wasn’t my medium. The interviews with Suzan and Michael Carson and the ordeal of publishing Cry For War was one of the most traumatic episodes in my life. I certainly wasn’t interested in doing any interviews and besides, Michael swore he was going to kill me if he ever got out of prison, so why bring up old memories?

But I was curious. Whatever happened to the materials? That weekend I dug through the debris in the garage to locate the manuscript and photographs. Finally, I found the old notes, the photos, the original manuscript stored in a filing cabinet, neatly tucked away like a time capsule.

Within two weeks I changed my mind – as I always do – and I was on a plane to the East Coast for the interview.

Cry For War was the result of my interviews twenty-five years ago with Suzan and Michael Bear Carson at the San Francisco County Jail while they awaited trial for the murder of Keryn Barnes. Writing Cry For War was a horror show for me, the source of endless nightmares and a conflict that arises when you crawl into someone else’s mind and try to see things differently. During the interviews and throughout the period of time it took to research and write this story, I tried to become one with Suzan and Michael, and for almost a year I walked around as crazy as they were.

My interest in the story began with a news item in Herb Caen’s Column in the San Francisco Chronicle on March 7, 1983, and was sparked by seeing the Carsons for the first time during their arraignment in San Francisco a month later. As I took a seat in the courtroom and watched the bailiffs bring Suzan and Michael Carson into the courtroom, it was as if the Devil himself had walked into the room. The entire courtroom was electrified by their presence. As I stared across the courtroom at Suzan and looked into her cold, glinting eyes that were like those of a mad animal, I felt physically ill. A few weeks later, on July 6, 1983, I climbed the stairs to the seventh floor of the Justice Building and interviewed Michael Carson for the first time. After my experience in the courtroom I shuddered at the thought of meeting the Carsons. When I mentioned this to Nyna Crawford, the victim’s best friend, she handed me one of Keryn’s earrings and said that it would protect me from their evil. I jokingly tucked the earring into my wallet. The amulet was a joke at the time, but it soon became my tether rope. Through out the ordeal, I kept the gold wishbone earring in my wallet as a type of Protection against the evil forces of the Universe. I know it seems superstitious, but the earring belonged to Keryn Barnes, and while I was writing this book and interviewing the Carsons I didn’t want to forget that someone had been murdered.

Now, here it was, tucked away with all my manuscripts, photographs and letters from Suzan and Michael. I tucked it back into my pocket. If I actually agreed to the interview, I would need this. Suzan and Michael Carson were the most frightening people I have ever met, and at the time I interviewed them, shortly after their arrest, they were walking zombies, possessed by the Devil. Yet, to my surprise, when I first met Michael, he didn’t seem like a raving maniac. He was an extremely intelligent, articulate man who laughed when he first saw me. He said Allah had told him I was coming to tell his story. He wasn’t crazy, he said. He wasn’t evil, and there was a logical reason for his California murder spree. Then, with a heavy stutter, Michael started in on the first of our many, six-hour marathon interviews.

When our first interview was finished, Michael suggested that I talk to Suzan, a suggestion that scared me to death after what I’d seen in the courtroom. But it was carefully arranged with the Watch Commander and I was ushered into an interview room in the Women’s Division of the San Francisco County Jail. During my first interview Suzan refused to look me in the eyes, saying that a Muslim woman could only look into her husband’s eyes. But after a while Suzan stared into my eyes with her piercing, mad eyes, which made me feel invisible. Michael had told me earlier that Suzan was a psychic who could see the evil in people’s heart, and frankly there were things that I didn’t want to reveal to anyone. I particularly didn’t want Suzan to know that my family’s Derby ancestors had come from Salem in the 1600’s, lest she think that I was a witch and one of the people that Allah had directed her and Michael to kill. I also wondered if she could sense the wishbone earring in my pocket that I clung to as a talisman for protection against drowning in her hypnotic evil eyes. Suzan probably knew all about it, because she was the strangest, most psychic woman I’d ever met. She could look into my eyes and answer my questions before I asked them. After our interviews I would sometimes wake up in the middle of the night gagging and choking, dreaming of Suzan and my head ringing with the messages she was trying to send me. Once, as I was sitting in front of her at the San Francisco County Jail, I looked into her face and saw the most beautiful woman on earth. But then I turned away for a moment. When I looked at Suzan again, her face had changed into that of a gray-faced, wart-covered, evil hag. She was a changling and, like her espoused commitment to Allah and The Light, underneath her beautiful face was a hideous evil Dorian Grey corruption that she was somehow able to conceal. Likewise, I discovered that my interviews with Suzan, which made perfect sense to me while I was sitting in front of her, were often nothing but gibberish, and it took months to make any sense out of them.

Nevertheless, I was always amazed by the Carsons’ openness and willingness to talk about any and all details of their Northern California murder spree. They were completely frank throughout the interviews, giving me details that even the police were unaware of. It never bothered the Carsons that the police might be tape-recording the interviews or might use their statements as evidence against them in court. Only the truth mattered, Suzan and Michael said. They had been sent to Earth to warn Mankind against Satan on the Eve of the Apocalypse.

I wouldn’t know anything about that. Nor would I know anything about these so-called witches they killed. Those who knew Keryn Barnes say she was a very lovely - though very psychic - young girl whose only mortal sin was to share her apartment with the Carsons. The Carsons also claimed they were Muslims, though they acted as if possessed by the Devil and would have been executed in any Islamic country. But I kept my mouth shut during the interviews, afraid that anything I might say would provoke an argument and end the interviews. For the most part I turned on the tape recorder and listened. This book is really a third-person compilation of those transcribed interviews and tries to reconstruct several murders and explain how two extremely intelligent, gifted individuals from well-to-do families suddenly became self-styled Muslim assassins bent on murdering President Ronald Reagan and ridding the world of witches.

There had been a few changes in publishing since I produced Cry For War. In 1983, there were no IPODs, IPHONES, wireless laptops, Internet emails and digital cameras. My tools were an old tape recorder, a notepad and a 35mm Nikon camera. Does anyone even remember photographic film? But I had an Osborne computer; one of the industry’s first portable computers and it was pretty high-tech at the time. It had a video screen about the size of a waffle that hurt your eyes and you couldn’t see the entire page. But the worst part of all was the memory. It was limited to 64 K – meaning you could only type ten pages per floppy disk before the system crashed. At the end of the tenth page I had to conclude the chapter and insert a new floppy. I highly recommend this to wordy writers.

The interviews with Suzan and Michael were rambling, disjointed tirades against witches and homosexuals. The stories skipped back and forth between California and Arizona, was narrated through many of their past lives and editing the interviews was like defragging a computer hard drive. A year later, after endless editing, I had a story about a couple of killers who roamed the California highway killing in the name of Allah. Twenty-five years ago, nobody believed in such a thing. In 1983, the very idea was unthinkable and blasphemous. Nobody was THAT EVIL, they said. And Suzan and Michael wanted to kill the Head Witch Ronald Wilson Reagan, who was president at the time. Talking about assassinating Reagan wasn’t very popular in 1984.

Bin Laden and the airliners that crashed into the World Trade Center on 9/11 were seventeen years into the future. Now Americans have adjusted to the idea of Islamic fanatics blowing themselves at a crowded market and killing hundreds of innocent bystanders. Americans have to endure the news that a U.S. Army Major opened fire and killed thirteen fellow soldiers in the name of Allah. But in 1984, nobody believed people were so evil and misguided as to kill in the name of Allah. And nobody in the publishing business would touch a book that portrayed this evil.

The book was finally self-published in 1988. After Suzan and Michael were convicted I received a phone call from one of the psychologists who had visited him in prison. Michael slept with a copy of Cry For War under his mattress in his cell and he was going to kill me, the psychologist warned.

Now, twenty years later a television producer wanted to interview me? Why would I want to go on TV and stir up all these memories? After publishing Cry For Way in 1988 I never read the book again. Suzan and Michael were crazy down to the bedrock of their souls and they nearly sucked me in after them. No, after writing Cry for War, I didn’t need to listen to a couple of lunatics trying to justify killing in the name of Allah. I needed a quiet life – and that lasted almost twenty years.

As I read Cry For War on the plane to Philadelphia, the interviews with Michael and Suzan were as vivid as ever. But reading it fresh after twenty years, I was struck by the love story that held the story together beneath the surface. Suzan and Michael were star-struck lovers and their escape to Allah’s Mountain had an almost existential, cinematic appeal. I felt sorry for Suzan, alone in the cabin, spinning the wheel as she waited for Michael to return from Los Angles. I was sucked in again and found myself hoping they would escape. But Keryn Barnes’ murder wasn’t an anomaly. It was just the first of several murders. Who knows how many others Suzan and Michael would have murdered if they hadn’t been caught.

I finished reading Cry for War just as the plane landed in Philadelphia. Jesus, I thought, This is a great story. Did I really write this?

No, I had merely transcribed the thoughts of two Jihad fanatics who were twenty years ahead of their time. And as I stepped off the plane I had one question in my mind: Where were Suzan and Michael now?

ONE

IN THE NAME OF ALLAH

The Haight District

San Francisco, California

March 7, 1981

FREEZING COLD. The basement apartment at 825 Shrader Street was freezing cold, San Francisco Homicide Inspector Carl Klotz noted as he walked down the hallway and stepped into the room. That was the first thing that hit the detective. It was a damp, cold, early March afternoon and yet the heat in the apartment had been turned off. Another thing struck the detective as odd. There wasn’t a single electric appliance in the whole place. Not a single electric light, radio or phonograph. Except for a couple of throw pillows, a few votive candles scattered about the room, and a quilt on the floor that may have served as a bed, the two-and-a-half room rectangular apartment was stripped to the walls and practically empty. The pungent smell of incense filled the front room, and the walls of the apartment were covered with crudely drawn, bizarre crayon drawings that looked like they had been created by a seven-year-old kid or a freaked out acid-tripper. The Shrader Street apartment was in the middle of the Haight-Ashbury District, once a famous center of the Hippie Movement, and the apartment had all the markings of a hippie crash pad, a museum-class throwback to an era that ended more than a decade earlier.

There were several officers already on the scene when Inspector Klotz and his partner Howard Bailey arrived around two-thirty in the afternoon, March 7, 1981 to take charge of the case. Crime technicians Larry Dubour and Paul Fosland and the responding patrolman Officer Mark Porto were in the kitchen where the victim was sprawled out on the floor. Bill White of the photo lab was preparing to take pictures, and Dr. Boyd Stevens, the San Francisco coroner and forensic pathologist, was examining the body as Klotz and Bailey walked into the room.

The victim, a young woman in her early twenties, was lying in a pool of blood, partially covered by a quilt of some sort. Her body had been shoved into the corner of the kitchen between the stove and the counter, and to get a better view, the silver-haired, seventeen-year-veteran homicide detective tilted his head sideways, one of his habits when he was listening or trying to eyeball things. The young woman’s face was black with dried blood, and the blood from her stab wounds was splattered across the walls in all directions - against the side of the stove, the walls, and onto the counter. Dr. Stevens examined each droplet, hoping to determine the point of origin by charting the blood’s angle of flight and direction of travel.

Hairy legs, Detective Klotz scribbled in his notebook as the coroner peeked under the quilt for evidence of blood on the bottom of the victim’s white socks.

It appeared to Dr. Stevens that the repeated blows from a blunt instrument had crushed the woman’s skull. In addition, there was a series of thirteen stab wounds to the left side of the victim’s neck and face. There was also an incision into the jugular vein and a stab wound in the mouth cavity, some four to five centimeters in depth. By measuring the blood splatter-pattern on the wall and noting that there was no blood on the bottom of the victim’s socks, the coroner surmised that the victim had been bludgeoned and stabbed to death as she slept. The stab wounds weren’t particularly deep, so it was probably the moon-shaped cranial injury that crushed her brain and caused her death. Rigor mortis had already set in and passed, indicating that the victim had been dead for at least a day or two, though Dr. Stevens said he’d have a more detailed report ready for Klotz after the autopsy.

The detective left Dr. Stevens and Bill White from the photo lab to photograph the crime scene, but before he exited the kitchen, Klotz swept back his hair like a flag and took a long, hard look at the death scene. There was no sign of sexual violence. In fact, if you ignored the pool of blood and slinging of droplets across the wall, you’d almost think the victim was sleeping peacefully on the kitchen floor. There was something about the murder scene that gave the detective the feeling that the murderer might be a woman. For one thing, everything in the kitchen looked neat and tidy; there were two teacups sitting side-by-side on the drain board and a jar of tea had been left opened on the counter as if the victim and the murderer were getting ready to make some tea. Who would drink tea? Most likely a woman, Klotz reasoned. And whoever had killed this pretty young woman had taken the time to carefully cover her with a blanket and put a soft pillow under her head. These were soft touches Klotz would expect from a woman. As he carefully backed out of the kitchen, the detective noticed a crayon signature scribbled onto the refrigerator door.

SUZAN, it read.

Yeah, Klotz had this feeling the murderer was a woman. Maybe even this Suzan character.

Klotz walked into the front room again, and then into the other room which contained nothing but a rug and a small quilt, but revealed very little in the way of clues. There was a purse on the floor containing a little over nineteen dollars and identification belonging to the victim: Keryn Barnes, Date of Birth - February 13, 1958. With no visible signs of forced entry, the detective’s instincts told him he could probably rule out robbery as a motive. As he walked through the apartment, Inspector Klotz glanced again at the abstract scribbling on the wall in the front room. Beneath the crudely drawn crescent moon-like figure the name Suzan - Aquarius was repeated, and the detective directed the photographer to shoot a series of photographs of the drawings and signature.

A group of curious street people and nervous neighbors had collected on the sidewalk in front of the apartment as Klotz and his partner Bailey climbed the stairs to interview the landlord who had found the body and telephoned police. The guy and his pretty wife lived upstairs in the two-story, bay-windowed Victorian that was two blocks south of Haight Street. The landlord was renovating the place. In fact, he and a plumber had just gone downstairs to check on the pipes in the basement apartment around noon when they found Keryn Barnes, the tenant of 825A, lying on the kitchen floor.

The landlord and his wife didn’t know much about the victim, except that she was a pretty girl with auburn hair who spoke with a Georgia accent and exuded a kind of farm girl innocence and vulnerability. When Keryn Barnes moved in on January 14, 1981, she said it was against her religion to touch money and that the Welfare Department handled her affairs. That seemed queer, but then who wasn’t a little weird in the Haight? The landlord couldn’t remember much else, except that he once saw a couple of trampy-looking hippies sneak in and out of the apartment. But he didn’t get their names or get a good look at them. In fact, he didn’t even have an emergency number for the victim. All he had was the telephone number for a housepainter friend of hers named Lou which he dug out and handed to Klotz.

No one claimed to have heard the murder and there were no witnesses, so Klotz and Bailey had to do it the hard way, reconstructing the victim’s life by interviewing her friends. While they tried to get in touch with Lou, the sidewalk in front of the Shrader Street apartment filled with street people from the Haight. Boy, they were strange, Klotz thought to himself as he looked down at them from the window of the apartment. They were leftovers from the hippie era - street people mostly - with names like Sky, Sundown or Stryder. For the most part, the victim’s friends appeared to be people whose minds had been burned out on drugs or were off into strange religious cults. Only Klotz knew the Summer of Love was over, and the freedom-loving, marijuana-smoking hippies of the 1960s had turned into street hustlers, taxi-drivers, junkies, low-life con-artists, dead-soul street slugs and freaks who dressed in rags and walked barefoot through the Haight. Their bodies and minds had been rotted out by the very drugs that were going to set them free. Yeah, this will be a weird investigation, Klotz sighed.

Jodi, a friend of the victim, lived upstairs in the tiny cone-shaped attic tower of the Queen Anne Victorian. When Jodi learned of Keryn’s murder, she collapsed into a chair in the landlord’s apartment in a state of total shock. She was unable to tell Klotz anything except that Keryn Barnes had been a beautiful free spirit who drifted up and down the Haight. She suggested that detectives telephone Randy and Marcia, a couple who had been close friends of Keryn’s.

Inspector Klotz telephoned the couple and a few minutes later Randy Jacobson and Marcia Moscow hurried up the crowded steps of the apartment and introduced themselves. Dressed in a flowing, pastel-colored hippie skirt, the woman looked as if she had just stepped off the cover of Rolling Stone Magazine. Marcia exhibited the innocent mind of a ten-year-old and her longhaired boyfriend Randy was so stoned that you could drive a truck between his ears. They lived in an apartment at 1200 Haight Street and told detectives that Keryn had stayed with them for a while before moving into the Shrader Street apartment.

Marcia and her boyfriend were stunned by the news of Keryn’s death, but indicated to Klotz that the victim had spent the last few weeks with a strange couple named Suzan and Michael. They couldn’t remember the couple’s last name because they were transients, traveling up and down the California Coast selling purple-budded sinsemilla marijuana from Humboldt County. Suzan and Michael claimed to be Muslims, and whenever the couple stayed at Marcia’s apartment, the stringy-haired woman spent half her time in the closet talking to ALLAH or meditating in the bathtub with her husband Michael. They didn’t believe in drivers’ licenses, Social Security cards or even electricity, but often argued that witches should be put to death on religious grounds. Marcia told Klotz that one night she was sitting in her apartment when Suzan started laughing and dancing around the room like a witch doctor. As everyone watched in horror, Suzan called Marcia a Hindu Bitch and poured apple juice over her head. Yes, Suzan and Michael were strange, violent, unpredictable, and everybody, including the victim’s friends Lillian and Sibyl, tried to talk Keryn out of living with them. Suzan retaliated by accusing them of witchcraft.

But Lillian’s a nurse, Marcia said, looking at Klotz, and Sibyl’s a good witch. She’s into astrology, tarot cards and Meister Crowley that’s all. And she’s perceptive when it comes to signs. Sometimes she gets emotionally upset and starts crying. Yelling, you know? But she’s gotten better. She and Keryn used to be real close, but then Sibyl got pregnant and they had this argument.... Marcia’s voice trailed off, and she tucked her hands into her lap as if she were afraid she was revealing too much.

Klotz expressed an interest in talking to this Sibyl person. He asked if she have a serious argument with the victim. How could he get in touch with her? Klotz wrote down all the details. Then he and his partner interviewed some of the victim’s friends who had gathered in the street below. But as people stepped forward to tell their tales, the story became more bizarre. Klotz listened to their weird tales, but he had to be careful; it was difficult to know what was reality and what was fantasy. The drugs they were taking had affected these people, and their connections were not exactly logical.

When they completed their interviews, Klotz and his partner Inspector Bailey returned to the Homicide Unit at the Hall of Justice on Bryant Street and, like a piece of unwanted luggage, Keryn’s body followed for identification and autopsy. The house painter returned their call but claimed he wasn’t close enough to the victim to formally identify the body. That honor, he said, should go to Nyna Crawford, the victim’s best friend. But Klotz couldn’t get in touch with Nyna, and in the end it was a freckled, ruddy-faced young man named Greg Brewster who came down to the morgue to identify the body. When the formal identification was complete, Klotz telephoned the victim’s mother. But he was lucky. Someone else had already called and given her the grim news.

TWO

PREMONITIONS

Atlanta, Georgia

March 8, 1981

It was Saturday night and when the telephone rang, Dorothy Baker ran to answer it, thinking it was Karen herself on the line. Though Karen always called on a Saturday, Mrs. Baker hadn’t heard from her daughter for almost a month - not since Karen’s birthday February 14. But when Dorothy picked up the phone and heard Nina’s voice, DAMN, SHE KNEW IT WAS TROUBLE, like a nightmarish premonition come true. She had always feared her daughter’s life would come to a tragic end, and now this punk rocker friend of her daughter’s was telling her that the hellhole San Francisco had sucked her daughter to the grave just as she knew it would. San Francisco was nothing but a cesspool peppered with weirdos, drugsters, and queers. God knows Karen was never the same after she moved to that city.

Dorothy thought back to the events of her daughter’s life, delineating each of the events that led Karen to San Francisco. Karen was always so DAMN HEADSTRONG. Born a minute before midnight February 13, 1956, and raised on a farm in Jonesboro, Georgia, sixteen miles outside Atlanta, Karen was always the psychic odd ball in the family. Even when she was a child, Karen had dreams and premonitions and the damn things always seemed to come true. Karen’s predictions scared her schoolmates so much that they finally told her to keep her thoughts to herself. And when she was seventeen, Burt Reynolds and his film crew came to Atlanta and hired her daughter as an extra in the movie Smokey and the Bandit. That set the bug in her ear. On her eighteenth birthday Karen sold her Mustang and she and her girlfriend Debbie hopped a Greyhound bus for Hollywood. Dorothy remembered that day: she had Karen’s birthday cake and presents spread out on the table waiting for her, but Karen never came home. Instead she wrote a letter and handed it to the bus driver to mail. I’m going to Hollywood to become a BIG STAR, she wrote. Karen and Debbie tried it for a couple of months and when things didn’t work out in Hollywood, they drifted north to Santa Barbara where Karen got a job as a housekeeper at Jane Fonda’s Ranch in the Santa Ynez Mountains. Karen was just fine in Santa Barbara. She was taking acting lessons, and could have married a wealthy jeweler who was crazy about her. But she wasn’t interested in money. Instead, a roommate talked her into visiting San Francisco. OH BOY, it was downhill from there. In San Francisco her daughter fell in with a crowd of dope dealers, punk rockers, drifters and no-goods. It was one thing after another. She changed her name from Karen to Keryn and dropped out of acting school. Then she hitchhiked across Nevada with a truck driver who fell asleep at the wheel and careened off the highway in the desert outside Elko. When the truck hit the ditch, Karen was thrown clear of the cab, but the hot exhaust pipe came down on her back, breaking her pelvis bone. It was a horrible mess, and it took them a long time to get her out of that ravine. They shipped Karen back to Jonesboro, and after she recuperated Dorothy took her to a lawyer to sue the truck driver whose negligence had nearly killed her. Karen could have asked for a million dollars, but Karen said she didn’t want to bother with it and complained that hassling with a lawsuit only made her headaches worse. In the end they settled out of court for a paltry ten grand.

The farm outside Atlanta was Hicksville in Karen’s eyes, and Dorothy couldn’t talk Karen out of returning to San Francisco again after she recuperated from her truck accident. There was just something about that city that attracted her and soon her daughter was into the same old routine, sending Dorothy a string of addresses. Around Christmas Eve, 1980 her daughter called from somewhere in the Haight and sounded as if she was high on drugs and three-sheets-short mentally. Dorothy could hear all these crazy people screaming in the background and during the conversation someone ripped the phone out of Karen’s hand and started screaming. When she got her daughter on the phone again, she told Karen that if she was going to talk crazy she needn’t bother calling, and she slammed the receiver down.

Three weeks later Karen called and apologized, saying that she was going to get her act together. She had found her own place, and made a point of giving Dorothy the names of the people she was moving in with:

How unusual, Dorothy thought, for her daughter to be so specific about her roommates.

Is there something wrong with them? she asked.

No, they’re very religious, Momma, Karen told her.

Watch out for religious people like that, Dorothy warned.

Oh, Momma, you always think the worst of my friends, she complained. They’re not like that. They’re good, quiet people.

Just watch out, she warned her daughter again.

When she hung up, Mrs. Baker felt as if her daughter was finally coming down to reality. But she wasn’t. Apparently the Carsons were a part of that weird crew of people Karen was hanging out with and Dorothy Baker was surprised that the detective in San Francisco didn’t seem to know anything about them.

The last time she spoke with her daughter was on February 14th; the day Karen celebrated her birthday. She didn’t know where Karen was calling from, but it sounded as if she was calling from a payphone in back of some store. Dorothy wished her daughter a happy birthday, but sensed in Karen’s frightened voice that something was wrong.

Momma, I have this feeling I won’t ever live to see thirty, her daughter cried.

What do you mean? Mrs. Baker asked. Even as a child Karen was hung up on death. In fact, she was so preoccupied with death that sometimes you got the feeling she was looking forward to it. But this time she seemed obsessed and frightened by its approach.

I just have a funny feeling, and when I have feelings like this, they usually come true.

If you feel that bad, honey, just you come home to Atlanta.

I’ll be home in June, she said, but I won’t promise you I’ll stay. Just give me another month or two.

Then her daughter grew morbid again. I don’t think I’ll ever make it out of here. I’m not going to live much longer anyway.

What do you mean? she asked.

I just have this funny feeling.

Where are you calling from? she demanded.

I’m in the back of a restaurant. Don’t worry. They can’t find me back here.

WHO can’t find you?

But Karen didn’t answer. She started talking about something else and hung up. After Dorothy said goodbye to her daughter she started thinking: why would Karen say something like that? Whom was she hiding from? Her daughter’s remarks frightened her all the more because she knew Karen was psychic. Call it Second Sight or supernatural powers, but her daughter had it, and Mrs. Baker was still haunted by Karen’s remarks to her best friend when they put her on the plane for San Francisco the last time:

I’ll never come back to Georgia alive, she told Debbie. When I do, it’ll be in a box.

Yeah, 1980-1981 was a hell of a year, Dorothy thought. First her husband died and she buried him on August 1. And now a detective from San Francisco had telephoned to make arrangements about Karen’s body. Mrs. Baker wished she had never put her daughter on that plane for San Francisco. In her opinion San Francisco was a diseased, sleazy piss-hole that destroyed her little girl whose only dream was to be an actress. Now there was nothing left of Karen or her dreams. Even the book of poetry Karen was writing had disappeared, stolen by her grave-robbing friends or those crazy religious fanatics she was living with. Dorothy told Klotz about the last phone call she received from Karen, but to her surprise Klotz didn’t know the last name of Karen’s roommates.

SUZAN AND MICHAEL CARSON, Dorothy told the inspector again.

But catching the murderers wasn’t going to bring her daughter back, and Dorothy Baker certainly wasn’t going to step one foot in that hellhole San Francisco to claim her baby. Instead, the family would make arrangements to ship Karen’s remains back to Atlanta.

Yes, her daughter was coming home to Georgia - IN A BOX - just as Karen had predicted.

THREE

THE GEORGIA PEACH

San Francisco, California

March 9, 1981

Greg Brewster remembered the last time he saw Keryn she was walking down the Haight dressed in rags with a dead, almost vacant, glazed look on her face. That’s funny, he thought, he’d never seen Keryn so gloomy. Greg called to her and asked: Keryn, how’ya doin’? and expected her to come up to him with a big hug as she usually did and talk about her latest obsession in life. But Keryn didn’t say anything, and Greg was quite surprised.

What’s going on? Aren’t you talking to old friends any more? Greg joked.

Keryn turned and looked at him with vacant eyes.

A Muslim woman does not speak to anyone but her husband, she said coldly.

She continued walking down the Haight as if in a trance.

OK, whatever, Greg sighed.

Keryn, who always made a habit of visiting her friends along the Haight, suddenly dropped out of the picture after she moved in with this strange couple named Suzan and Michael. But Greg figured it was just another phase that Keryn was going through and he forgot all about the incident. But a week later Marcia telephoned, crying hysterically:

Keryn’s dead. She’s been murdered.

What happened? he screamed. Marcia cried that Keryn had been found stabbed in her new apartment and that a detective named Carl Klotz wanted to speak with anyone who knew about Suzan and Michael. Greg paced the apartment waiting for the detective’s call, but finally threw on a jacket and went down to Shrader Street to see what he could do. The coroner had already removed Keryn’s body, but the police needed someone to identify the corpse.

The job of identifying the body should go to Nyna, Keryn’s best friend. But when he telephoned Nyna and broke the news to her, Nyna totally flipped out, and Greg ended up with the unpleasant chore of viewing Keryn’s body at the San Francisco County morgue. When she was alive, Keryn was a Georgia Peach with big brown eyes, strawberry blond hair and she had an aura of energy that was almost childlike in its purity. She could change her lifestyle on a dime, and yet even when she became a punker and shaved her hair into a bright orange mohawk, Keryn retained her wonder and innocence. But nothing remained of Keryn’s spirit in the corpse that Greg went down to identify. Her face was so bruised and swollen that he didn’t recognize it at first. Her gentle, loving spirit had flown off somewhere, leaving behind a hunk of dead meat on a stainless steel slab. Greg, a Born-Again Christian from Fairbanks, Alaska, knew that Keryn was in Heaven and that no matter how unpleasant and hideous, Keryn’s murder was a part of God’s Plan.

After Greg had identified Keryn’s body, Inspector Klotz asked him about this couple named Suzan and Michael, who were reportedly living with Keryn at the time of her murder. Greg didn’t know much about them. Greg, like the rest of Keryn’s friends, didn’t even know Suzan and Michael’s last name, but promised Klotz that he would ask around and get back to him on Monday with more details.

Greg certainly didn’t want to make any unfounded accusations, but as he walked out of the police headquarters on Bryant Street, he remembered the first time he met Suzan and Michael at the apartment he shared with his girlfriend Katie Hudson. He had spent twenty-three of his thirty-two years in Fairbanks, Alaska, and the Alaskan Frontier was filled with people who liked to push things to the edge. But when Keryn brought Suzan and Michael into their apartment, his first reaction was: THESE ARE VERY STRANGE PEOPLE. His girlfriend took one look at them and retreated into the kitchen. After an hour Greg went into the room to see what was wrong and found Katie practically bouncing off the walls.

I can’t be in the same room with that woman! Katie screamed. Suzan EMBODIED EVIL, Katie hissed. SHE COULD FEEL IT. She wanted to scratch the bitch’s eyes out and smash that stupid smirk on her face. These people were ugly. Vile. It felt like the Devil himself was in the front room, and she refused to come out of the kitchen until they were gone.

At the time Greg thought Katie was overreacting. True, Suzan and Michael were strange people, but Greg was the sort of person who loved everyone. He believed in Jesus and was willing to give people the benefit of the doubt. At the time there was no reason to think ill of them. They were, in fact, quite interesting and well read. Michael had just written a book, which he called THE WAY, that he was trying to get published. Greg looked at the manuscript: it was an autobiographical tale about the couple’s travels through Europe and their life as dope smugglers along the California - Arizona dope circuit. It told of their religious experiences and nothing in the book or in their personalities warned Greg they might murder his friend Keryn Barnes three months later.

There wasn’t a word about Keryn’s death in the San Francisco Chronicle/Examiner the next morning - just your routine Sunday news features and human-interest stories. Nobody in the so-called establishment seemed to care that this little girl had been murdered, but amongst Keryn’s street friends her death was an event. On Sunday forty or fifty of Keryn’s grief-stricken friends gathered at the Conservatory of Flowers in Golden Gate Park for a silent vigil. It was a real hippie event. Glitter Dave was there, sprinkling bits of glitter over the guests. Sky walked around carrying a huge bowl of burning incense. Lillian attended the memorial with Waterfall, a musician whose nickname reflected his happy, relaxed personality. And Nyna showed up with her old man Jim, a high priest in the Church of Satan. Everyone gathered into a huge circle and held hands. Jugs of cheap red wine and joints were passed around the circle until everyone was stoned out of their mind and then, one-by-one, the participants stood up and talked about Keryn.

Suzan and Michael, the people who had been so close to Keryn during her last few weeks, were conspicuously absent. Their absence prompted rumors and soon everyone was trading stories about Keryn’s utter captivity by the couple and her mindless obedience to their radical Muslim beliefs. A few people defended Suzan and Michael, reminding folks that they had the best dope in the Haight and were willing to share as long as you gave them a roof over their heads. Not everyone was convinced Suzan and Michael had committed the murder. Johdi, who lived in the attic apartment on Shrader Street, claimed she had been raped in the middle of the night by a man living in the upstairs apartment, and soon the crowd at Keryn’s memorial speculated that maybe Suzan and Michael were just a couple of confused, innocent hippies the cops were trying to frame for a murder they didn’t commit. NO. These were not confused, innocent hippies, Katie objected. It wasn’t a coincidence that Suzan and Michael weren’t at Keryn’s memorial.

At sunset, the smell of burned sage drifted lazily through Golden Gate Park and people felt as if they had