Sarah Marshall
the demon lovers
“I am strangled!” cried the servant girl, though the only hands around her throat were her own. She shrieked and laughed and wept uncontrollably, spat at those who tried to restrain her, and said she feared for her life. At one moment she appeared terrified, and in the next seemed to possess some strange power: she looked her masters in the eye, and spoke to them as equals.
“This poor and miserable object,” was what Reverend Samuel Willard called the girl, in his account of her mysterious ailment. Her name was Elizabeth Knapp, and she was sixteen years old and a servant in Willard’s home when her symptoms began in the fall of 1671. “I myself observed oftentimes a strange change in her countenance,” Willard later wrote, “but could not suspect the true reason.”
Begin the story here. Or begin elsewhere, hundreds of years later and hundreds of miles away. After all, the characters remain the same. Begin in a church in the town of Niagara-on-the-Lake, on an idyllic June afternoon in 1991. The winter has been a harsh one, but now the world is warm and breathless, lush, in leaf. You don’t have to travel back to this day to take part in it. You can watch the videotape. Start with the pretty young bride escorted down the stairs by her beaming husband. Her gown, which cost $2,000 at a store on the American side of the falls, has been confected from layer upon layer of snow-white tulle. In the video, there are moments when she seems to disappear within it. The bride’s friends have noticed how thin she is getting, how much less there is of her these days. At the gown’s final fitting, her bridesmaids saw dark bruises on her sides. Later, detectives and reporters and millions of viewers will study the tape of the wedding, searching the bride’s face for signs of distress, and searching her body for cuts, for welts, for injuries, for a record of the kind of trauma that could excuse what she has already done, and what she will go on to do.
“When you came back,” a police officer will ask Karla Homolka about her honeymoon, “did you have lots of photographs to show people?”
“Photographs and video,” she answers.
“And were these staged?” he asks. “In that sense that he told you, ‘You’re going to look happy, as if you were having a great time,’ or…”
“He didn’t tell me that,” Karla says. “But I knew to smile for a photograph or a video camera.”
***
Girlhood comes with two kinds of instruction manuals: the books that tells you what your body will do, and the books that tell you what other people will do to your body. As a girl, I was obsessed with first one, then the other. I read a book about periods, then woke up to find that I had immediately, obligingly menstruated. I was thrilled. I had never known how to follow the rules, but my body did.
Things got more complicated when I found the second kind of manual. In the winter of 2002, when I was thirteen, two girls my age disappeared from a neighboring town. I say “disappeared” as if that word really means something. For many years, I thought it did. Now I think it doesn’t. But at thirteen, when I saw first Ashley Pond’s face on the nightly news, and then Miranda Gaddis’, I tried to imagine the reality that word conjured: once there was a girl, and now there is nothing. She walked into the night, and now she is gone: vanished (another nightly news favorite) into thin air.
This is the word we use when we do not know what really happened. But even when we know there must be some earthly culprit, we are still tempted to conjure a stranger from that world called “thin air,” a being made of the darkness that is fated to swallow up the light, and you, my girl—so beautiful, so young, so pure, so worthy of protection—are the light our world turns toward, so why should the world of thin air be any different?
***
The day after Elizabeth Knapp cried out “I am strangled!,” she was, Reverend Samuel Willard tells us, “in a strange frame.” That evening, she was “taken with a violent fit, whereupon the whole family was raised; and with much ado was she kept out of the fire from destroying herself.” In the following days, both her “fits” and her desire for self-destruction only worsened.
It was hard to keep secrets in Groton, Massachusetts, which was then a frontier outpost situated at the westernmost edge of Christendom. Elizabeth soon became a local attraction, a development Reverend Willard seemed untroubled by.
If anything, he may have welcomed it. Willard was determined to learn the cause of Elizabeth’s ailment, and, he wrote, it was only once “diverse [people]…pressed upon her to declare what might be the true and real occasion of [her] amazing fits” that she finally “broke forth into a large confession.” She told the people of Groton that “the Devil had oftentimes appeared to her, presenting the treaty of a covenant and proffering largely to her . . . such things as suited her youthful fancy, [like] money, silks, fine clothes, ease from labor, [and] to show her the whole world.”
***
There was an earthly culprit in Ashley Pond and Miranda Gaddis’ case, of course. There always is. His name was Ward Weaver, and his daughter was a friend of both Ashley’s and Miranda’s.
The summer before she disappeared, Ashley fled problems in her own home, and stayed with the Weavers for several months. In August, she accused Ward of attempting to rape her. Ashley confided in a teacher, who called Child Protective Services. The report either never made it to the police, or was disregarded.
“They didn’t believe her,” Ashley’s stepmother later said, “because this wasn’t the first man she had accused of sexual crimes.”
***
The Devil, Samuel Willard reported, didn’t just offer his finery to Elizabeth Knapp. He also “urged upon her constant temptations to murder her parents, her neighbors, our children, especially the youngest, tempting her to throw it into the fire, on the hearth, into the oven; . . . [and] to murder my self.”
Yet every violent urge Elizabeth confessed to was matched by a violent urge turned inward, and this, too, was apparently the Devil’s work. “He persuaded her to make away with herself,” Willard wrote, “and once she was going to drown herself in the well, for, looking into it, she saw such sights as allured her.”
***
The summer after Ashley and Miranda disappeared, Ward Weaver granted an interview to a local news station. To show that he had nothing to hide, he took the crew on a tour of his home, in the process walking over a concrete slab he had recently poured in his backyard. The following month, Ashley’s body was found underneath it. Afterwards, Ward Weaver continued to deny all wrongdoing.
“You know how deep she was?” he said in another interview. “We went all the way down to the water lines. But how she got underneath there, who knows.”
I remember the removal of the concrete slab and the search for Ashley’s remains being broadcast live. I remember watching it with my friend and her family, and though I’d like to say there was some great suspense—that we hoped, prayed, there would be nothing to find—I don’t remember feeling surprised when Ashley really was down there, and when Miranda’s remains were found in Ward Weaver’s garage. I was fourteen by then, and older than either Ashley or Miranda would ever be, but wasn’t I still too young to assume the story had to end this way?
It would be years before I learned the details: how Ashley fled her home and went to live with the Weavers. How she looked for safety and did not find it. How even when she told a teacher that a grown man had tried to rape her, nothing happened, and no one helped her.
You know how deep she was?
Only after Ashley died, it seemed, did she become worth searching for.
Only after no one could save her did she suddenly become worth saving.
***
In Reverend Willard’s account of his servant’s affliction—which is titled A Brief Account of a Strange and Unusual Providence of God Befallen to Elizabeth Knapp of Groton—there is little question as to whether Elizabeth is actually possessed by the Devil. To Willard, this seems a foregone conclusion. The question he is most concerned with, and the question he puts to Elizabeth again and again and again, is whether she asked for it.
***
When I was sixteen years old, my sophomore English class read Joyce Carol Oates’ “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” It’s a story as simple and resonant as a Supremes song: a girl glimpses a strange young man while she is out with her friends, and he shows up at her house while her parents are away, convincing her to walk out of her front door and into a life that will not be life for very long.
“The place where you came from ain’t there any more,” he tells her, near the end of the story, “and where you had in mind to go is cancelled out. This place you are now—inside your daddy’s house—is nothing but a cardboard box I can knock down any time. You know that and you always did know it,” he says, and she believes him.
Oates’ story was inspired by a real murderer she read about in Life magazine: a man known as the Pied Piper of Tucson, whose crimes scandalized the nation in 1966, but have since been forgotten. What remains is the hard core of reason Oates located within them: the kind of reasoning that would lead a girl out of her house and out of safety, and into the arms of a man who makes no secret of all he wants to do to her.
“Be nice to me,” Oates’ Pied Piper says, “be sweet like you can because what else is there for a girl like you but to be sweet and pretty and give in?”
***
The winter deepens, the snow falls, and Elizabeth’s torment worsens. “She barked like a dog and bleated like a calf,” Reverend Willard writes, “[and] she leaped and skipped about the house perforce, roaring and yelling extremely and fetching deadly sighs as if her heartstrings would have broken and looking with a frightful aspect, to the amazement and astonishment of all the beholders”—of which, by now, there are many.
Elizabeth’s possession is not just physical. She has seen things, things those gathered around her have not—things the Reverend himself has not witnessed, but which have been shown to a servant girl. She “declared that she had seen the devils in their hellish shapes,” Willard writes, “and more devils than anyone there ever saw men the world.”
Willard also tells us that Elizabeth’s “fits” began “whenever I came in her presence.” Yet despite her wailing and weeping and protestation, despite her pain, and despite her terror of both her visions of hell and of the strangulation she believes will abandon her there, Reverend Willard never ceases questioning her. He is determined to extract a confession. He knows what he wants to hear, and finally, she lets him hear it.
Elizabeth tells Reverend Willard that the Devil has been visiting her for five years, and that “after many assaults she had resolved to seal a covenant with Satan, thinking she had better do it than be thus followed by him.” One day, “she looked out at the window and saw the Devil . . . [and] suspecting his design she had thoughts to have gone away, yet at length resolved to tarry it out and hear what he had to say to her. When he came he demanded of her some of her blood, which she forthwith consented to, and with a knife cut her finger. He caught the blood in his hand and then told her she must write her name in his book. She answered she could not write; but he told her he would direct her hand . . . and she wrote her name with his help.”
***
Karla Homolka is seventeen years old when she meets Paul Bernardo in a Toronto Howard Johnson’s. She is a high school student who lives with her parents and two younger sisters in the blue-collar town of Saint Catharines. Paul is a twenty-three-year-old junior accountant who styles himself after the characters in Oliver Stone’s Wall Street. He also lives with his parents, and has little in the way of power or money, but is gifted at conjuring the illusion of both. He lives by Hollywood mantras (“No more Mr. Nice Guy,” “Money never sleeps”), maxes out his credit cards, chokes and humiliates his girlfriends during sex, and eventually commits a string of violent rapes that will leave the police flummoxed for years. But still, he wants more, and he finds it in Karla.
Later, Karla will say that the first few months of their relationship were perfect. If this is true, then maybe it’s because Karla was so good at making Paul feel like he was the man he wanted to be. After they start dating, she adores him, worships him, and does her best to be exactly what he wants, and nothing he doesn’t. The willful, brash, outrageous girl her friends know disappears. She loses weight, bleaches her hair to a Barbie doll shade of blond, and gives up her plans to go to University. If she’s unhappy about these changes, she doesn’t tell anyone. On her senior yearbook page, her “Wildest Dream” is “To marry Paul.”
“Hi honey,” she writes to him in the spring of 1988, six months after they start dating. “I just called you but nobody’s home, at least nobody answered. Where are you? Who are you with? What are you doing? These are the questions burning in my mind. I want to talk to you so badly (and much more than that, I want to see you). I ache to be with you . . . Guess what? My parents are going to a dance tomorrow night. They’ll be going for a long time. Want to come over and play? . . . Please say yes. Please. Please. Please. Please! I’m on my knees begging, begging in the way you love most. You know, there’s only one short week left for you to enjoy your cute little 17-year-old girlfriend! Better take advantage of it (and her) while you can.” That summer, Paul hits her for the first time. Immediately afterward, Karla says at Paul’s trial, he breaks down and begins crying, telling her he didn’t mean to do it. Karla forgives him. Soon, Paul hits her again, and again, and again.
Karla tells no one. Instead, she works at becoming a better girlfriend. One day, a high school classmate will notice a piece of paper labeled “Karla’s Self-Improvement List” in her friend’s room. It reads:
Never let anyone know our relationship is anything but perfect;
Don’t talk back to Paul;
Always smile when you’re with Paul;
Be a perfect girlfriend for Paul;
If Paul asks for a drink, bring him one quickly and happily;
Remember you’re stupid;
Remember you’re ugly;
Remember you’re fat;
I don’t know why I tell you these things because you never listen.
A year passes. The abuse worsens. Paul begins to beat Karla. He penetrates her with a wine bottle. He chokes her with a length of electrical cord. He holds a knife to her throat. Karla tells no one. Another year passes. And, in the summer of 1990, Paul begins pressuring Karla to “give” him her younger sister’s virginity. She didn’t save hers for him, Paul says, and so she owes him Tammy’s.
***
After one of his many rounds of questioning, Samuel Willard writes, Elizabeth Knapp confessed to him “that in those fits the Devil had assaulted her [in] many ways . . . [And] anon told her [that] her time was past and there was no hope unless she would serve him.”
***
In 1990, Karla has a full-time job in a veterinarian’s office. Her employers trust her: she’s conscientious, friendly, and mature, and she loves animals. She’s only twenty, but her boss can feel comfortable giving her the kinds of responsibilities they might normally reserve for someone much more experienced—and perhaps this is why no one seems to notice when Karla pockets a container of Halothane-Vet, an inhalation anesthetic used on animals undergoing surgery, and takes it home.
It is Christmas time, and Paul has been working on Karla since the summer, determined to make her give him her younger sister’s virginity. Karla’s sister, Tammy, is fifteen, and Paul makes no secret of his obsession with her. He stands beneath her window and watches her undress. He sneaks into her bedroom and masturbates beside her sleeping body. He cannot stop talking about her, will not stop talking about her. She is all he wants. She is all he will ever want. She is all he needs.
Just once, says Karla. Just once, says Paul. Just once, and it will be over.
Karla drugs Tammy. Tammy passes out. Paul rapes her.
Is this an act of unfathomable cruelty? Or is there a horrific brand of kindness—the trace of an act that once felt like kindness—in drugging your little sister so that at least she doesn’t have to know, doesn’t have to be awake, doesn’t have to have a cord wrapped around her neck or a knife held to her throat?
To drug your sister during her rape, to supervise her rape, can be an act of compassion if you believe her rape is inevitable. In the reality we live in, Tammy’s rape was not inevitable. But did Karla Homolka live in our reality by then?
And there is more, and worse, and no way to make reality—our reality, Karla’s reality—any less awful than it was. Paul rapes Tammy, then asks Karla to molest her sister—suck her breasts, stick her tongue into her vagina—while she is still unconscious. Karla does as she is told.
Paul catches it all on video, but the camera is off when Tammy vomits, chokes, and dies. Karla’s family writes Tammy’s death off as a random accident, and Paul, Karla later says, holds the evidence of what she has done against her. If she doesn’t help him, he will tell her family that she killed her sister.
The abuse continues. Paul makes Karla sleep on the floor by his bed, stabs her with a screwdriver, rips out handfuls of her hair, punches her, beats her with a belt, throws her down the stairs, shits on her, and strangles her. Captive in their relationship, Karla stands by as Paul abducts a fourteen-year-old girl named Leslie Mahaffy and holds her captive in their home. Paul rapes Leslie. Then he makes Karla sexually assault Leslie while he films them both. The camera is off when Leslie dies. At his trial, Karla will say that Paul strangled Leslie to death, but admits to helping him dispose of Leslie’s body, which he encases in concrete blocks and dumps into a lake. The pieces are found on Paul and Karla’s wedding day, as the bride walks down the stairs in her snow-white dress, escorted by her beaming young husband.
Rewind the tape. Watch it again.
***
After she confesses to writing her name in the Devil’s ledger, Elizabeth tells Reverend Willard that the Devil promised to give her, an illiterate servant girl, the powers of a witch. “One year she was to be faithful to his service,” Willard writes, “and then the other six he would serve her.”
Later, Elizabeth will take it all back, insisting that she agreed to nothing, and that the Devil has only taken possession of her because she resisted him so steadfastly. Yet some stories, once told, cannot be forgotten: not because they are true, but because we knew them by heart long before we heard this particular version. The girl tempts the Devil. She wills him to come to her, to share his dark power. When he stands beneath her window, she leaves her bright world behind, and walks with him.
***
When Leslie Mahaffy disappeared, the police didn’t pay much attention. They decided, despite her parents’ pleading, that she was a rebellious girl who had probably run away from home. But when a fifteen-year-old Catholic school student named Kristen French disappeared while walking home one afternoon in April 1992, the entire province took notice, and the police began a manhunt for her abductor. Whatever made a girl’s life matter, Kristen’s had it.
When Paul Bernardo went to trial for the murders of Kristen French and Leslie Mahaffy—after Karla Homolka left him, after a DNA sample he had given years before provided a surprise break in the Scarborough serial rape investigation, after the police began to wonder if their newly identified suspect might also be involved in what were by then called the “schoolgirl murders,” after investigators spoke with Karla Homolka, and after she told them what she and her husband had done—his private video library become a matter of national concern. Alongside footage of Paul and Karla’s family holidays and Hawaiian honeymoon, the videos contained film of the rapes and captivities of Leslie Mahaffy and Kristen French.
In debating whether or not to show these videos to the throng of spectators Paul Bernardo’s trial attracted, the court reached a strange compromise. The jurors and witnesses would see the portions of the videos submitted as evidence, but journalists and members of the public would only be able to hear them. Then, because recording devices were not allowed in the courtroom, reporters would walk back out into the bright outside world, and do their best to describe not what they had seen, but what they thought they might have, if they had been able to.
The most famous quote in the entire trial came from Karla Homolka, though the words were not her own. She described a moment in Kristen French’s tortuous captivity that was not on any of the tapes, and that took place after Paul told Kristen that he was ready to anally rape her again. Kristen, Karla said, would not budge. Paul threatened Kristen, who by then knew all too well what these threats would inevitably lead to. But, Karla said, Kristen didn’t care.
“Some things,” Kristen told him, “are worth dying for.”
This is the moment the public would remember, the moment that wrote the next day’s headlines. It is the one moment of grace that could be salvaged from a story of such profound sadism, such unspeakable loss.
There is kindness in the act of dwelling on that moment, and of using it to memorialize Kristen’s life. But there is danger in the act of dwelling on that moment to the exclusion of all others, and remembering Kristen French not as a girl, but as a martyr.
To remember Kristen as a girl would mean remembering what happened next: after Paul grew furious at her resistance, after he beat her, and after he told her that she could redeem herself by making a good video for him. After Kristen decided that the pain wasn’t worth it, and that accepting her role in Paul’s reality was better than enduring his abuse. After Paul turned the camera back on. After Paul told Kristen exactly what he wanted her to say, and Kristen said it.
“You’re the best, master,” Kristen tells him on the tape. “I’m your fifteen-year-old Holy Cross sex slave . . . I came here to make you happy.”
***
When Karla Homolka appears in true crime books today, it’s usually in a countdown of “the most evil women of all time,” or “the world’s deadliest couples.” When I meet people who have heard of Karla Homolka, I usually end up arguing with them about her. To anyone who even half-believes the way she has been depicted in the last twenty years, she is exhibit A in the Hare Psychopathy Checklist, a diagnostic tool used to identify those members of society who are, apparently, born bad.
In The Psychopath Test, journalist Jon Ronson shares an anecdote about Karla Homolka courtesy of Dr. Robert Hare himself. According to Hare, Karla displays much of his checklist’s criteria: shallow affect, lack of empathy, manipulative, pathological lying, lack of remorse or guilt.
“One of my old buds from the FBI was investigating [her],” Hare tells Ronson. “She and her husband had videotaped themselves torturing and raping and murdering these young women. The police were taking her through the house where they’d cut up the bodies, carved them up, and Karla was saying ‘My sister would like that rug . . . ’ They took her into the bathroom and Karla was saying, ‘Can I ask you something? I had a bottle of perfume here . . . ’ Totally disconnected. It was stunning.”
A friend who is reading Ronson’s book, and knows I have been trying to write about Karla Homolka for years now, shows this passage to me and waits for my response.
“I don’t think Karla was a psychopath,” I say.
“The book says she is.”
“But I don’t.”
“You’re disagreeing with an expert psychiatrist who invented the psychopathy checklist and has worked with psychopaths for decades and basically invented the field?”
“Yes,” I tell him. “I am.”
Maybe it takes a woman to see another woman clearly. Or maybe I have no idea what I’m talking about—but neither does Robert Hare, who is only repeating a secondhand story with thirdhand embellishments added for good measure. According to her testimony at Paul’s trial, Karla never murdered anyone. This unequivocal claim of innocence stands in stark contrast to the crimes she did freely admit to, often with a level of detail and candor that only served to harm her in the long run. She admitting to aiding in Paul’s kidnapping of Kristen French, to helping him keep both Kristen and Leslie captive, and to sexually assaulting Kristen, Leslie, and Tammy. She denied that she had committed murder. It’s hard to say that one crime is unequivocally worse than the others. It’s hard to imagine that a woman who has just confessed to raping her younger sister in compliance with her boyfriend’s wishes will be capable of holding anything else back.
There are no videotapes of any of the victims’ deaths. We cannot know for sure who was responsible for what. But even the credibility of the facts preserved on tape has a way of shifting. We believe Karla when Paul records her saying: “I loved it when you fucked my little sister. I loved it when you took her virginity.” But we don’t believe Kristen French when she tells Paul: “All the girls at my school want to fuck you, because you’re the most powerful man in the world, and the most sexy, and they’d never say anything to bother you because they’re not bitches, like I am.”
When I think about the lives that Karla helped her husband destroy, I think about what would have happened to these girls if they had been allowed to live just a little longer. If Kristen French could have bartered for time by helping Paul and Karla kidnap one of her schoolmates, would she have done it? Is it cruel to say that she could have?
It’s easy to wear the mantle of sainthood when you are purely a victim. In the face of overwhelming force, we are all virtuous: we have no choice but death. But what about the times when we do have choices? Would you fault Kristen French for harming someone else in the hopes that doing so would earn her survival?
I can’t tell you what Kristen French would have done. But I can tell you that, at fifteen, I would have given up my morals in a heartbeat. Beaten, broken, raped, and faced with the threat of death, I would have done whatever I had to do to stay alive, and I cannot fault anyone who does as much.
And this, of course, is where Karla Homolka’s story gets more complicated: because she could have left, and eventually did. Her parents lived just a few minutes away. She had friends. She had a job. There were people she could have told. She could have saved herself. She could have saved Kristen. She could have saved Leslie. She could have saved Tammy. She could have stopped it all. She didn’t.
It’s no surprise that the moment when the story gets complicated is also the moment when we do our best to simplify it. If Karla Homolka wasn’t a pure victim, then she has to be a villain. If she had a chance to stop Paul, and didn’t take it, then this can only mean that she was his enthusiastic collaborator. These were the options the public felt forced to choose between when Paul Bernardo went to trial. Overwhelmingly, they chose the latter. As the trial dragged on, and more and more details of Paul and Karla’s crimes came to light, people asked endlessly why Karla hadn’t stopped him. Hardly anyone seemed to wonder why Paul hadn’t stopped himself.
“What happened to Karla Homolka in the end?” Jon Ronson asks Dr. Robert Hare in The Psychopath Test.
“She’s out now,” Hare tells him. “They believed her little-girl act. Hair in braids. All sweet and lovely. Very convincing.”
Hare is certain, of course, that it was nothing but an act: a villain playing the role of a victim, and fooling us all. An idea he is unwilling to entertain—that few people are willing to entertain—is that there exists a no man’s land between victim and villain, that you can be both victimized and victimizer, and that being victimized can make you all the more likely turn around and victimize someone else.
And you do it because he will beat you if you don’t, and you smile while you do it because he will beat you if you don’t, and you don’t tell anyone what’s happening or try to leave him or try to stop him because if he beats you even when you do everything he says then what will he do to you if you disobey him?
You do it for reasons no one could fault, even though you are not living your life as if a reality exists outside of the home you share and the rules he sets, because it doesn’t, not really, not anymore. And when you come back to this house, with its white carpet and pink walls and stairs leading to the room where your husband strangled a teenage girl with a cord not so different from the one he used to strangle you, perhaps you can be forgiven for displaying a shallow affect, a lack of remorse or guilt. Perhaps the people who watch you walk through these rooms will be able to wonder whether you are existing only at the surface of thought, your memory conspiring to protect you from all you have done. Perhaps they can understand that you may be feeling a great deal more than you are willing, or able, to communicate. Perhaps they will not watch you, checklist in hand, and wait for inevitable confirmation that you are not really a human being like they are, and certainly not like the good, kind, innocent girls they know.
And since we have not gone where you have gone, we cannot guess what it is like to live in that no man’s land, and we cannot know whether there comes a moment when you cease to act solely out of fear, and begin to feel something else. You train your video camera on the girl your rapist rapes. You watch him hurt her. He asks you if she is smiling. You tell him that she isn’t. She isn’t doing her job, the job you know how to do. He hits her. He makes her smile. And all the while you keep holding the camera, keep looking through the lens.
I don’t know what you think as you watch this scene. But I think it might be something like this: If I can hurt her, I am not the one being hurt. If she is a thing, then I am a person. If this is what power is then I finally have it. If the only choices are raped and rapist, abused and abuser, victim and victimizer, then I am making the only choice I can.
***
Karla Homolka served the entirety of her twelve-year prison sentence, one widely referred to as a “sweetheart deal” once the details of her crimes reached the public. She was released in 2005, and concerned citizens who are positive that she is a psychopath—that she can, and will, and must kill again—still do their best to track her every movement online. She gave one television interview after her release, and the broadcast revealed a face that was by then very different from the one so many viewers knew so well. The face they knew—“the face of evil,” in the words of one of the hundreds of spectators who flocked to the courtroom to watch her testify—was a girl’s face. But it was so easy to forget this, until you saw that face transformed into a woman’s.
Reverend Willard never reached a satisfactory answer about the cause of Elizabeth Knapp’s possession, though at one point, he tells us, “her father and another neighbor were called,” and the Devil immediately turned on them, “calling them rogues.” Willard includes the story almost as an afterthought, but it stands out as the only moment in his account in which Elizabeth interacts with her family.
Does a father, a neighbor, become the Devil who follows and assaults Elizabeth Knapp? If the violence Elizabeth claimed to experience did not reflect the literal truth, then it can still serve as a distorted reflection of something real, something lingering, something we cannot dismiss as hoax or fantasy? What can you do when you are abused or traumatized in a way that is illegible to the world you live in? Do you soldier on, uncared for? Do you ignore your experience in favor of the logic of your times? Or do you rewrite your story, create a villain the world cannot ignore, and make your pain visible to everyone around you, even those who believe you were asking for it?
You know how deep she was?
After recanting her confession of a covenant with the Devil, Elizabeth Knapp continued to deny the covenant whenever Reverend Samuel Willard questioned her. But she did not deny that the Devil had followed her, assaulted her, and tried to get her to write her name in his book, and she “declared that though the Devil had power of her body she hoped he should not of her soul.”
There were other confessions, however, that Elizabeth did not recant, including her “attempts to murder herself and others.” Whether this desire came from the Devil or from Elizabeth herself is a question Willard does not answer. Based on his writing—which is the only way we can ever know her—it was also a question Elizabeth never dared pose.
***
“If you were ever murdered, I would want your killer to be executed,” my mother told me one night, when I was visiting my family for the holidays. I was, by then, well into my twenties, and quickly aging out of what I think of as the victim years: a period when you are not more likely to be snatched into thin air, but when your disappearance would be worthy of a headline.
“I thought you were against the death penalty,” I said. “I was,” my mother answered. “I am.”
“Then how can you say that?”
“It would be different,” she told me, “if it were you.”
“How could you want the death penalty for me if you know I’m against it?”
“But it wouldn’t be about you,” she said.
And I thought, of course. It never really was. Because if I were to die, to vanish, to give in—because what else is there for a girl like you but to be sweet and pretty and give in—then I would be extravagantly mourned and forgotten in the very same moment. There is no safety in a love like that. And the real you, the complicated you, the you that wants and hungers and hurts and hates, is no more protected than she was in life.
There is a gentle trick of the imagination that allows us to identify, always, with the role of victim. Not only that, but we can imagine that “victim” is the worst role we or our loved ones could ever occupy. “If you were ever murdered,” my mother says—and how could she not have this fear, when I grew up twinned with so many lost girls—but never “if you committed murder.”
If there is one thing my fascination with these stories has taught me, it’s that life is a game of If, if, if. If the social isolation I experienced in eighth grade was relieved by the appearance of a boy whose fear and distrust of others was a mirror to my own. If that boyfriend dreamed of depopulated landscapes, empty hallways at school. If he wanted to see his name in the papers, if he could get his hands on a semi-automatic weapon, if he believed our love was too pure for this world, and that I deserved my name in the papers too—I could have believed that. I look at the things I believed when I was thirteen years old, the things I was willing to accept about need and sex and love and death, and think, I could have believed that.
Or say the boyfriend comes later. I fell in love for the first time when I was eighteen years old to Karla Homolka’s seventeen, with a boy who did nothing worse than lead me on, and I was irradiated with desire for him. I felt like I had drunk a poison that was both killing me and making me feel more alive than I ever had before. I knew we would never be together, knew I was wasting my time, even knew, deep down, that he wasn’t that special. But I would have done anything for him, and the moments when the bright seams of my devotion appeared between us seemed to terrify him, and rightly so. I cannot imagine what I would have done, if only he had asked. He didn’t ask. That, and not some indestructible moral compass at the center of my eighteen-year-old self, was what saved me from doing something stupid, something regrettable, even something unspeakable: he didn’t ask.
The If isn’t always a boy, of course. The If can be almost anything: depression. PTSD. A history of abuse. A combination of factors that are not visible at a glance, that no one can point to and say there, that, that’s why, but that come together in a way that makes you believe your only choices are victim or victimizer. Having power over someone else means you aren’t at the very bottom, that you may never have control over your own life, but can at least control someone else’s. If the only power you have ever experienced is the world’s cruel power over your girl-body, then any cruel power you wield over a girl means you are one of the powerful ones, because this is what the powerful ones do.
Sarah Marshall’s writings on gender, crime, and scandal have appeared in The Believer, The New Republic, and The Week.