In a rural town in southern New Hampshire, four young men, on a pre-dawn joyride, brutally murdered a young mother and seriously injured her eleven-year-old daughter. The boys—17, 18 and 19 years-old—planned their crime, set out that night with the express purpose of killing innocent people. The driver carried a machete; another boy brought along a four-inch foldable knife. When the teens broke in, their victims, selected at random, lay asleep in their beds.
Mont Vernon, New Hampshire, is, by all accounts, a quintessential New England town—a Rockwellian village of rolling hills and fields bounded by stone walls, a tiny community, two thousand strong, where neighbors know one another by name and look out for each other. Kimberly Cates’ ranch-style house, buffered by hemlocks and pines, sits at the end of a dirt driveway, separated from the town center by a five-minute walk through the woods.
According to her friends, Kim worried about the isolation, the thick forest that at night, without benefit of streetlamps, shrouded her home in darkness. The isolation that stoked fear in Kim Cates’ heart whispered opportunity to her killers. Isolation, apparently part and parcel of rural American life—life in the twenty-first century, I’d say—was sliced and diced by bloggers responding to the story. Isolation, boredom, disconnection from the outside world—all of this may have played to their darker tendencies, pushed these boys over the deep end, one blogger speculated, as if real life were a Stephen King novel, where isolation leads inevitably to unspeakable acts of violence and rage.
These seemingly normal, middle class teens—only the leader had a rap sheet—reportedly stood “expressionless,” as they listened to the charges at their arraignment. In the photographs of the four boys accompanying the report, intense, angry eyes look defiantly out of haunting, expressionless faces.
My daughter and I stare at the photos, trying to make sense of this senseless story. The partially formed narrative, like that of so many others—the Craigslist Killer, the Yale lab technician, the Dartmouth murderers—drops us into this one horrific moment, providing no context, no definitive beginning, no tangible middle, only this terrifying, unimaginably horrific end. Unintentional voyeurs, we stand outside, looking in. In our humanity, driven to make meaning of life, we wonder aloud.
“Look at them,” my daughter says. “They’re skinheads. No wonder.”
The boys’ heads are, indeed, shaved; one news report alluded to swastikas. Maybe deranged, neo-Nazi beliefs separated these kids from their gentler peers. Or maybe, isolated, bored, they whiled away hours playing violent video games. On his Facebook profile, one of the boys wrote that, before heading out that night, they’d watched Dexter, a TV show featuring a sympathetic serial killer. Maybe an addiction to TV, video games, YouTube, the Net severed their ties with reality, broke the necessary connection between the fantasy world and real life, where real people suffer and bleed. Maybe Neo-Nazi prejudices fueled their rage, maybe hatred drove them to kill.
Or maybe the shaved heads meant something else; maybe, in some twisted way, their buzzed hair was not a sign of their isolation at all. Maybe for these deluded young men, their buzz-cut hair identified them as a part of a group, their shaved heads a symbol of belonging, giving them a sense of connection—a feeling, however crazy, of hope.
Looking at the pictures, my daughter is scared. The boys remind her of kids she’d known in high school, the bad-ass boys she or her sisters might have dated, hoping to nurture and change. The pictures scare me, too. The young men look far too familiar.
They look too much like us.
