Bright Young Women

A few years later, the journalist Carl Wallace would publish his seminal true-crime bestseller and quote Sheriff Cruso as saying that Jill and Eileen were alive today only because The Defendant was so tired from killing Robbie and Denise. A series of national ineptitudes and a parsimonious attitude toward crimes against women created a kind of secret tunnel through which a college dropout with severe emotional disturbances moved with impunity for the better part of the seventies. Denise and all the others in Washington, Utah, and Colorado just so happened to be part of a particular victim pool, at a particular moment of comprehension in the field of criminal and social sciences, at a particular moment of media interest. Finally, “Utah [Colorado] had the death penalty, but Washington did not.