I. 14 yr old Stephanie French, vanished walking home from her Berkeley junior high school. Her customary shortcut. Next seen several hundred miles from Berkeley, buried in a shallow grave in California's most northern mountains.
II. "I have to know about this" she said when I found her hiding under the covers of her bed in Malibu, stunned, disbelieving, flashlight in hand.
III. She was showing me the photographs Margaret Bourke-White did for Life of the ovens at Buchenwald.
IV. That was what she had to know.
Or ask the child who would not allow herself to fall asleep during most of 1946 because she feared the fate of 6 yr old Suzanne Degnan. Kidnapped from her bed in Chicago, dissected in a sink, and disposed of in pieces in the sewers of the far north side.
Or ask the child who 9 yrs later followed the search for 14 yr old Stephanie French.
V. Since the events surrounding the disappearances of both SD & SF occurred in circulation areas served by aggressive Hearst papers, both cases were extensively and luridly covered.
The lesson taught by the coverage was clear: childhood is by definition perilous.
To be a child is to be small, weak, inexperienced, the dead bottom of the food chain. Every child knows this, or did.
Knowing this is why children call Camarillo.
Knowing this is why children call Twentieth Century-Fox.
Joan Didion Blue Nights (2011)
