Twentynine Palms
A True Story of Murder, Marines, and the Mojave
-
- $10.99
Publisher Description
August 2, 1991, Twentynine Palms, California: a troubled Marine who has recently returned from the Gulf War savagely murders two young girls. One girl was about to turn sixteen, the other twenty-one.
Exquisitely and inexorably, Deanne Stillman uses this tragedy as a prism through which she explores not only the murders and the families involved but a rootless culture of fatherless families, shattered dreams, and relentless violence. In haunting, vivid prose, she creates a far reaching story of America itself, carrying us into the empty white heart of the Mojave, as we meet and come to know the modern nomads who turn to the West for salvation only to be devoured by its false promise.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The image of a disconnected phone recurs throughout Stillman's tale of social and geographic isolation, military arrogance, sexual violence and death an apt symbol for the disconnections pervading the story. Unfortunately, the metaphor also extends to Stillman's narrative, which signals the plumbing of certain depths, but never makes the connections. The small California town of Twentynine Palms in the Mojave Desert, three hours east of Los Angeles, hosts the world's largest U.S. Marine Corps base. In 1991, it was the setting for the vicious murder of two local teenage girls by a troubled marine. Stillman's story primarily follows Debie McMaster, mother of one of the victims and no stranger to violence herself. Against the desert backdrop described with poetic and geologic detail Stillman examines military life and the surrounding subculture, focusing on jittery soldiers trolling for susceptible young women, themselves desperate for a way out. But exhaustive family histories and a fragmented structure undermine the story's inherent drama. Moreover, Stillman neither affords much insight into the killer's motivations, nor adequately explores the military atmosphere that allowed him to thrive. To her credit, she approaches the hand-to-mouth existence typical of Twentynine Palms with a certain aplomb, but too often the prose becomes crowded with the vernaculars of the subcultures it describes. Stillman, who first reported on this story for Los Angeles Magazine, also treads the fine journalistic line between fact and conjecture. She devotes considerable attention to the protagonists' inner workings and, though endnotes cite her sources, the reader is left wondering about her apparently extraordinary access to these people.
