In the meantime, they continue the slow work of putting their lives back together. Missi has finally gotten to the point where she can make jokes about Derek with her daughters. Linda has started tentatively dating again, after more than a year. The other day, when she was out to dinner with a guy, she peeked in his wallet, just to make sure the name he told her matched the name on his ID.
Dorie, Derek’s last victim—for now, at least—recently submitted the police report and a file of articles about Alldred to her bank and credit card companies to clean up the financial mess he’d made. Citibank promptly reversed the $7,000 in fraudulent charges that he’d racked up on one of her cards, but Chase has refused to credit her for the $10,000 he spent on another. “They refused to refund me,” she told me, “because they said I knew the guy.” (When asked for comment, Chase said that Dorie had authorized Derek’s use of the card, and that she’d told a fraud supervisor that many of the transactions were valid.)
THIS PAST SUMMER, I MADE AN APPOINTMENT FOR A video visit with Derek at the Denton County Jail, in Texas. I had so many lingering questions: Who was on the other side of the line when Derek had those hourlong conversations with his “daughter” or his “admiral”? How had he finagled his university email address and ID card? Did he have a secret stash of money somewhere? And then there was the question I imagined was unanswerable, but that I needed to ask anyway: What did it feel like to be so skilled at faking love?
I sat in the visitation room, doodling in my notebook as the appointed time came and went. I’d resigned myself to the idea that nothing was going to happen when the screen suddenly illuminated, and I saw Derek Alldred’s angular face and blunt chin, familiar from all those mug shots. He was in an orange jumpsuit, and the camera caught him at an awkward overhead angle, like an unflattering selfie. I told him I was a journalist, and he seemed unfazed. “I was going to decline the visit, but the guard said, ‘Are you sure? It’s a pretty girl,’” he said, flashing me a smile. By the end of our conversation, Derek said he wanted to tell his side of the story to me and only me, and promised we would talk again soon. I hung up the phone feeling a particular kind of journalistic high, an I-got-my-story cockiness.
Over the next few months, I spoke with Derek several times. He was never quite ready to reveal anything of substance in the half-hour blocks of time that the prison video-phone system allotted us. He wanted to wait until a certain court date had passed, or he needed to consult his lawyer. “Two sides to every story,” he kept telling me. “Two sides.” He professed to want to be fully forthcoming with me, but our calls always seemed to get cut off at crucial moments; sometimes, he just never answered. At first, I chalked our communication difficulties up to the institutional roadblocks of prison communication, but they kept piling up.
It took me much longer than I’d like to admit to realize what I had felt that first day after I left the Denton County Jail and drove too fast past the hayfields of North Texas, singing along to Merle Haggard: that my future was sunny and full of promise, because I had met a man who was going to give me everything I wanted.
Originally published in the Atlantic, April 2018; Derek Alldred was given a 24-year prison sentence in August 2018.
Part II
Where Crime Meets Culture
Out Came the Girls
By Alex Mar
Here is an image, picked from the notebooks of an eleven-year-old girl in a suburb of Milwaukee, Wisconsin: a head portrait, in pencil, of a man in a dark suit and tie. His long neck is white, and so is his face—bald and whited out, with hollows where his eyes should be.
Here is another: an androgynous kid (a girl, like the artist?) in a sweatshirt and flared jeans leaping across the page. She has huge, glassy black eyes and dark, stringy hair; she reaches out with one hand and brandishes a dagger in the other. Filling the page around her, tiny rainbows and clouds and stars and hearts—all the signatures of the little girl the artist recently was—burst in a fireworks display.
There are cryptic messages, too: a page covered in “Xs”; another inscribed HE STILL SEES YOU. These notebooks are charged with the childlike paranoia of sleepovers after bingeing on horror movies, of Ouija boards and light as a feather, stiff as a board . . .
What is occult is synonymous with what is hidden, orphic, veiled—but girls are familiar with that realm. We have the instinct. Girls create their own occult language; it may be one of the first signs of adolescence. This is a language of fantasy, of the desire for things we can’t yet have (we’re too young), of forces we can’t control (loneliness, an unrequited crush, the actions of our family). This invention of a private language, both visual and verbal, shared with only a chosen few, gives shape to our first allegiances; it grants entry into a universe with its own rationale—the warped rationale of fairy tales. Its rules do not bleed over into the realm of the mundane, of parents and teachers and adult consequences.
But in May 2014, the occult universe of two young girls did spill over into the real. And within days of her twelfth birthday, all of Morgan Geyser’s drawings and scribblings—evidence of the world she had built with her new best friend—were confiscated. More than three years later, they are counted among the state’s exhibits in a case of first-degree intentional homicide.
ON A FRIDAY NIGHT IN LATE SPRING 2014, IN THE SMALL, drab city of Waukesha, Wisconsin, a trio of sixth-grade girls gets together to celebrate Morgan’s birthday. They skate for hours under the disco lights at the roller rink: tame, mousy-haired Bella Leutner; Anissa Weier, with her shaggy brown mop top; and Morgan, the “best friend” they have in common, with her moon of a face, big glasses, and long blond hair. They are three not-so-popular girls at Horning Middle School, a little more childish than the others, a little more obsessed with fantasy and video games and making up scary stories. Morgan casts herself as a creative weirdo, and she relates to her new friend Anissa on this level, through science fiction—Anissa, who has almost no other friends and who moved down the block after her parents’ recent divorce. When they get back to the birthday girl’s house, they greet the cats, play games on their tablets, then head to Morgan’s bedroom, where they finally fall asleep, all three together in a puppy pile in the twin-size loft bed.
In the morning, the girls make a game out of hurling clumps of Silly Putty up at the ceiling. They role-play for a while—as the android from Star Trek and a troll and a princess—then eat a breakfast of donuts and strawberries. Morgan gets her mother’s permission to walk to the small park nearby.
As they head to the playground, Bella in the lead, Morgan lifts her plaid jacket to show Anissa what she has tucked into her waistband: a steak knife from the kitchen. Anissa is not surprised; they have talked about this moment for months.
After some time on the swings, Anissa suggests they play hide-and-seek in the suburban woods at the park’s edge. There, just a few feet beyond the tree line, Morgan, on Anissa’s cue, stabs Bella in the chest.
Then she stabs her again and again and again—in her arms, in her leg, near her heart. By the time Morgan stops, she has stabbed her 19 times.
Bella, screaming, rises up—but she can’t walk straight. Anissa braces her by the arm (both of them are small), and she and Morgan lead her deeper into the trees, farther away from the trail. They order Bella to lie down on the ground; they claim they will go get help. Lying on the dirt and leaves, the back of her shirt growing damp with blood, slowly bleeding out in the woods, Bella is left to die.