This weekend Byliner has unlocked, for Dish readers, Rachel Corbett’s A Killing in Iowa, her memoir of a murder-suicide in the small Midwestern town where she grew up, committed by a man who lived with her and her mother when she was a girl. Near the start of Corbett’s search for what really happened, she describes the police arriving at the scene of the crime:
The doors were locked at 913, and the cops couldn’t see any movement on the main floor. The basement windows had been covered with blocks of Styrofoam. They knocked down the front door. The house was quiet; the kitchen looked undisturbed.
They checked the attic. It had been stripped down to the rafters and was stocked with grow lights and humidifiers. There were hundreds of potted psychedelic mushroom spores, thousands of marijuana seeds, and petri dishes and growing manuals.
When they descended into the basement, they entered a scene that would stay with police chief Jeff Tilson, as he said, “all my life.” All blood and hair and water. A woman, later identified as twenty-eight-year-old Crystal Hawkins, was floating naked in a rosy pool on the waterbed. A bullet had passed through her skull and punctured the mattress. She was so bloated from lying in the water that they could tell she’d been dead for hours.
A Doberman pinscher lay in the flood at the foot of the bed, also dead from a bullet wound.
The gunman, identified as Crystal’s twenty-seven-year-old boyfriend, Scott Johnson, was in the closet. Crumpled up, torn open. A vintage .44 Magnum was on the floor next to him. The cause of death was a single bullet wound to the head.
Chief Tilson told the neighbors not to worry. “Get some sleep,” he said. “It’s an open-and-shut case.”
To find out why it wasn’t, read the rest here.
The Dish 