More than youll ever kno.., p.1
More Than You'll Ever Know, page 1
Dedication
For my family. Los quiero mucho, mucho, mucho.
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Part I Cassie, 2017
Lore, 1983
Cassie, 2017
Lore, 1983
Cassie, 2017
Lore, 1983
Cassie, 2017
Part II Lore, 2017
Cassie, 2017
Lore, 1983
Cassie, 2017
Lore, 1983
Cassie, 2017
Lore, 2017
Cassie, 2017
Lore, 1983
Cassie, 2017
Lore, 1983–1984
Cassie, 2017
Lore, 1985
Cassie, 2017
Lore, 1985
Cassie, 2017
Lore, 1985
Cassie, 2017
Lore, 1985
Cassie, 2017
Lore, 2017
Cassie, 2017
Lore, 1985
Cassie, 2017
Part III Lore, 1985−1986
Cassie, 2017
Lore, 2017
Cassie, 2017
Lore, 1986
Cassie, 2017
Lore, 2017
Cassie, 2017
Lore, 2017
Cassie, 2017
Lore, 1986
Cassie, 2017
Lore, 1986
Cassie, 2017
Lore, 1986
Cassie, 2017
Lore, 2017
Cassie, 2017
Lore, 2017
Cassie, 2017
Lore, 2017
Cassie, 2017
Lore, 2017
Cassie, 2017
Lore, 2017
Cassie, 2017
Lore, 2017
Cassie, 2017
Lore, 2017
Cassie, 2017
Epilogue Lore, Now
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Copyright
About the Publisher
Part I
Cassie, 2017
By the time I read about Lore Rivera, my mother had been dead for a dozen years. Dead, but not gone. She was like my shadow, angling dark and long in the right light, inescapable and untouchable.
Everyone had loved my mother. She was a third-grade teacher who’d once told our class that history was written by those who had power and wanted to keep it. “So, when you read your textbooks, ask yourself who is telling the story—and what they have to gain by your believing it.” My classmates had looked at me then, awed by my mother’s educational subterfuge, and I’d smiled, proud she was mine, that I had come from her.
Every Friday night, she and I curled up together on the nubby tweed couch to watch Dateline. Sometimes our fingers brushed as we worked the matted tassels of our favorite blue blanket, and we giggled softly, as if catching each other in the act of something private. Then we’d wait for Stone Phillips, with his strong jaw and serious eyes, to reveal the endless ways one human being can harm another.
This was the midnineties in Enid, Oklahoma, still some time before my ninth birthday. My life was still ordinary. I hadn’t yet learned that ordinary could be precious. So I got my thrills from watching the Dateline camera pan over photos of smiling blond women riding bikes and cutting wedding cakes, oblivious to their own tragic ends. I couldn’t help but see myself in them, or see myself the way the camera might see me, a dead girl still living. I breathed in my mother’s scent of snuck cigarettes and chalk dust as she pulled me against her side, and maybe that was the pleasure that started it all—from that nubby tweed couch, I explored an otherworld of danger without ever leaving the safety of my mother’s warmth, thrilled in the closeness of the wolf’s breath against a home made of brick.
Except it turns out brick walls don’t matter when the wolf lives inside.
Later, once I stopped watching Dateline with my mother, once I stopped doing anything at all with her, I checked true crime books out of the Enid Public Library three or four at a time, slipping them into my backpack like contraband. I devoured In Cold Blood and Helter Skelter the way I imagined boys my age looked at porn, all that furtive grasping under covers. I was grasping for something, too. Some kind of dark knowledge, understanding. I slid my hands over their plastic covers, greased with fingerprints like mine. I read the other names on the borrowing cards—Jennifer, Nicole, Emily—and wondered if they, too, read about serial killers beneath the golden dome of their covers, grateful for something more frightening than their father’s voice bleeding through the walls.
In high school, my clandestine obsession with true crime crystallized into clear goals: First, and most important, leave Enid, Oklahoma. Go to college. Become a journalist. Write the kind of books I had consumed, and that had consumed me, for so many years. Books that looked at the ugliest parts of humanity and asked: How did it come to this?
The year Lore Rivera entered my life, I’d finally landed pieces in Vice and Texas Monthly, but my biggest coup as an aspiring true crime writer was a part-time blogging gig for H2O, a television network whose market research had made it pivot from low-budget romance movies to true crime. Women, it seemed, had tired of watching pretty white couples fall in love among ice-skating rinks and hay bales. Instead, they wanted to know how many times you’d have to stab someone with that ice-skating blade in order to kill them, and whether bodies in those small farming towns ever stayed buried. And their appetite was voracious—not only did they want the “full-time crime” the network provided; they wanted a blog that would round up “the most interesting murders on the internet.” No humdrum shooting would do. They wanted novelty. That’s where I came in.
For fifteen hours a week and thirteen dollars an hour, I scoured the Web for killings that would make a jaded audience stop and click. I read national and local newspapers, scrolled through true crime message boards and subreddits, burrowed my way through 4chan threads like a spelunker of human grime. I created a set of Google alerts—terms like “murder,” “dismemberment,” “kidnapping,” and “contract kill”—and every morning my inbox replenished like an hourglass overturned.
The best-performing murders were outlandishly gruesome with an element of either brilliance or ineptitude (the latter being far more typical). They also tended to have one thing in common: women ended up dead. Though only a quarter of all murder victims are women, when women are murdered, it’s almost always by a man, and when men kill women instead of other men, well, that’s when shit gets creative. Hacksaws and living burials and mysterious disappearances from tiny Cessnas. On a blog like ours, that’s what sold.
That Friday morning, my top post was about a Florida man who’d bashed in his ex’s head with a power tool after she’d caught him with another man. Then he’d partially dissolved her limbs in acid before chopping the rest into small enough pieces to fit into a five-gallon fishing bucket, which he’d taken to a swamp to feed to the alligators—except the gators were more enticed by the man’s living limbs. He’d been forced to call 911, too badly mauled to dispose of the bucket’s grisly contents before emergency responders arrived. Most of the comments were some gleeful form of Karma’s a bitch!
I often wondered about my audience, most of them women, at least according to the market research. How did they interpret their pleasure at scrolling through the posts I curated? Did the human brush fires reduce their own miseries to matchstick flickers? Did the violence provide them with a language for their private suffering?
I wanted to think there was some of that, because more and more I felt like a forager of other people’s tragedies, grinning as I presented them like trophies to an invisible bloodthirsty crowd. The woman in that fishing bucket—she’d been someone once. Maybe her baby teeth were still tucked away in a drawer somewhere, the way my mother had saved mine in that old felt jewelry pouch I’d found after she died.
It was hard to be proud of this kind of work.
I had one eye on the clock, counting down to when I needed to start packing for Fourth of July weekend with my fiancé’s family, when my email refreshed with a Google alert: “Her Secret Lives: How One Woman’s Double Marriage Led to the Murder of an Innocent Man.”
I was so accustomed to dead women that, for a moment, I thought I’d misread the headline. Then came the prick of curiosity, instant and sharp.
The story was from the Laredo Morning Times, a local newspaper for a city a few hours south of Austin, where I lived. I clicked on the link. My screen filled with the bold headline and two black-and-white family photos, divided by a dramatic stylized tear. In the first photo, captioned 1978, a man named Fabian Rivera and his wife, Dolores, held a pair of oversize scissors at some kind of ribbon-cutting event. Her curly black hair was feathered over each ear, earrings dangling to her jaw. She was laughing, her cheeks round, chin slightly tilted, as though she’d been about to look up at Fabian. She wore a harsh shoulder-padded skirt suit, and Fabian stared at the camera with a small twist of a smile at the corners of his lips and eyes. Beside them, two dark-haired boys, twins—captioned as Gabriel and Mateo Rivera—grinned, as if they were doing bunny ears behind their parents’ backs.
The other photo was taken in 1984. It was a studio portrait with a cheesy Christmas backdrop: glittering fist-size snowflakes suspended above the branches of a heavily ornamented pine. This time the same woman—Dolores—leaned into a different man, captioned as Andres Russo. He smiled broadly, his right arm around her shoulder. Dolores’s palm rested on the shoulder of a laughing teenage girl, who wore slouch socks and Dr. Martens with her plaid skirt. Beside her, a boy of eleven or twelve was wide-eyed behind dark-framed glasses.
Nothing in either photo suggested a crack in the couple’s intimacy—but then, my own parents had chopped onions and bell peppers side by side for fajita night right up until the very end. They’d held hands in the car, singing to the Eagles. On every anniversary, they retold the story of how they met: two nineteen-year-olds craving Baskin-Robbins on a rainy winter night. Fate.
The way things seemed meant nothing.
I took a sip of cold coffee and began to read.
Penelope Russo was 15 when she met Dolores Rivera, the woman who would become her stepmother—and change her life forever. It was December 1983, and they spent that first meeting decorating the Christmas tree in Penelope’s father Andres’s Mexico City apartment. The tree was small and artificial, because Penelope’s brother, Carlos, then 12, was allergic to the real ones. The whole endeavor took 20 minutes, and then they went to Churrería El Moro for hot chocolate and churros.
Even from the start, Penelope could understand her father’s infatuation with the new woman. Dolores was 33 years old, a successful international banker from Laredo who still had her job in the midst of the devastating peso devaluation. She was smart and magnetic, Penelope remembers, with sparkling brown eyes and a contagious laugh.
The memory, it is clear, comes at a painful price: to recall Dolores is to recall the pain of being deceived, the shock of trusting someone—loving someone—whose every word turned out to be a lie.
Already, my curiosity was mutating, growing limbs, sprouting new and reaching fingers. I imagined a part of my mother, left in me, quivering like a magnet sensing its opposite.
I had to know more.
The Laredo Morning Times didn’t have much of a presence on Twitter, but on Facebook, local readers tagged each other eagerly, whittling the degrees of separation between themselves and Dolores: someone’s aunt used to work with her; someone’s dad had asked her to go around in high school; wasn’t she the lady on that bank billboard on San Ber a few years back, the one close to the bridge? Pobrecitos los esposos, imagine! and Qué agüite, did they take away her kids? and No fkn way, that’s my neighbor! Always outside watering her jungle. About half the comments were in English, the other half in Spanglish or full Spanish, so that I had to open Google Translate to understand them.
Occasionally, obvious outsiders chimed in: a man with an American flag as a profile photo wondering whether Dolores was still fuckable, or a ruddy-cheeked white dude in a fisherman’s hat writing, Fucking Mexicans. Not one but two incels emerged from their semen-scented basements to say this was why women should be kept as sex slaves—it was the only way innocent men could protect themselves. To these comments, the women responded with variations on Go fuck yourself, pendejo, no one else will.
I wouldn’t exactly call it nuanced commentary.
When the front door creaked open, I was still sitting on the gray love seat that doubled as my office. “Shit,” I hissed, looking at the time. It was after four. My fiancé’s family farm was three and a half hours from Austin with no traffic—as if there was ever no traffic—and they were expecting us for dinner at eight. I hadn’t even started to pack.
“Hey, pretty lady,” Duke called, his initial grin fading when he took in my open laptop, my socked feet.
“Before you ask,” I said, meeting him at the door, “I’m not quite ready yet.” Duke was broad and sturdy, his skin silty with sweat, and he smelled like pit fire and honey when I kissed him.
Duke hated to be late. That was the thing about growing up on a dairy farm: if you don’t milk a cow or goat when you’re supposed to, she’ll wail and stomp in agony that you caused. So Duke had grown up doing what he was supposed to do when he was supposed to do it. I’d loved that at the beginning of our relationship, how he called and texted and came by exactly when he promised. But it didn’t leave a lot of room for error.
“Work,” I added, noticing the glimmer of irritation on his face.
“Oh.” Duke’s expression relaxed as he opened the fridge, making sure nothing would go bad while we were away. “The Antone’s retrospective? I’m excited about that one.”
Duke was highly supportive of my noncrime freelance work. To him my obsession was macabre, the way I could binge hour after hour of crime shows, from prestige documentaries to Forensic Files, depending on my mood; the stack of books on my nightstand with dark covers and long, bold lettering. The podcasts I listened to during my walks—once wandering eight miles around the lake because I had to hear just one more episode of Serial—and the message boards I returned to when I couldn’t sleep, my late-night tumble of rabbit holes. The folder on my desktop labeled “Interesting Crimes,” where I dropped articles and screenshots and early research. All of this in addition to working on the blog for fifteen hours a week.
But then, look where Duke came from. Parents who still held hands forty years later, who called on Sundays and sent dry-iced care packages of crème fraîche, goat milk yogurt, honey, and jams. Siblings constantly blowing up the group chat with photos and memes and personal news. Childhood memories of brushing horses’ flanks until they shone like water, and literally coming home when the dinner bell rang. Even after meeting his family, I’d sifted through his stories for hidden resentments, secret trauma, and found nothing. He was boyishly open, untainted. I loved this about him. But it meant he believed people were inherently good and didn’t like looking at evidence to the contrary. I never wanted to be surprised again, so I looked and looked until even my dreams were bloody.
“I filed the Antone’s piece last week,” I said. “No, I found this story about a woman—a mother—who was secretly married to two men at the same time back in the eighties. One of the husbands ended up murdering the other.”
Duke gave a half laugh, throwing out some ham on the verge of going slimy. “Sometimes I wonder what it would be like to get normal work updates from you.”
“Imagine how much effort it took to pull that off,” I continued, powering off my laptop. “And why, you know? What makes a woman, a mom, do something like that? Not that mothers always put their children first”—I should know—“or even that they should, but this is something else.”
“Yeah, it’s definitely weird. But, Cass—” Duke jangled his keys, a nervous tic he never noticed.
I glanced up, on alert. “Yeah?”
He crossed the room to where I crouched, pulling my charger from the wall. “We’ve hardly seen each other lately. Can we take a break from work this weekend? Maybe leave the laptop behind and make it, like, a murder-free zone?”
I laughed, though my grip tightened on my charger. It was easy for him to suggest leaving work behind—it wasn’t like he could smoke the brisket for his food truck at the farm. And if Sal called with a problem over the weekend, he’d obviously answer. The food truck was his business. Crime was mine. Sort of.
But he was right. For weeks we’d only been catching each other in moments: a twenty-minute dinner break at the food park; the occasional mindless movie on Netflix; half-asleep sex that almost felt like a dream in the morning.
“Okay.” I exhaled as I set the charger down, already feeling strangely limbless. “Sure. Family time. No murder. Promise.”
I-35 was, as expected, a parking lot. Duke bit back any accusations and asked me to text the group chat that they could start eating without us. In return, I resisted the near-constant urge to research Dolores Rivera on my phone. By the time the sky screamed with sunset, we were relaxed and holding hands, dreaming up honeymoon destinations—the food in Laos was supposed to be incredible, Duke said; I told him about an article I’d read about hiking glaciers in Iceland—drunk on possibility while ignoring every practicality, beginning with the fact that we had no money and hadn’t planned a damn thing for the wedding itself.
It was nearly nine when we reached the farm, 150 acres bordered by a four-rail white wooden fence, with a stone sign reading Murphy Family Farm, Est. 1985. Duke’s F-150 jolted and clanged on the rough gravel road as we passed the goat pen with its three-walled tin structure, where the goats slept on shelves at various heights like kids at summer camp. We passed the coop with three hundred laying hens and the cow pasture and stables and corral before finally approaching the shiny red milking barn and white metal store stocked with fresh milk and eggs, in-season vegetables, and the lavender soap and candles Duke’s mom, Caroline, made by hand. Just beyond was the farmhouse. Wraparound porch lit up bright, double swing and rocking chairs waiting for desultory after-dinner drinks. The wine went down easy here. And peacefully, too. I still wasn’t used to that.
