Devil House(75)

“Usually it’s Siraj they want to ask me about,” she says when I ask if she feels the case is truly cold. “I tell them I didn’t know him well, and I hope wherever he wound up, he stays there and they never find him, because I know he didn’t do it.”

I tell her that my examination of the evidence—the interviews, the crime scene photos, the ephemera I’ve collected—concurs with her claim: that there wasn’t any real case against Siraj; that the gaze of suspicion with which the community began to regard him, which grew so intense that his father moved the family to Menlo Park, was miscast.

“That doesn’t do him a lot of good now, wherever he is,” she says. “Can you imagine what it’s like to be the guy who ‘everyone knows’ killed two people so savagely that it made the paramedics puke? That was another thing everybody talked about, how people at the scene had to see a psychiatrist about it.” This, of course, is unverified lore of the sort that crimes like this produce voluminously, without aim or effort; some of it sticks, and that becomes the story for future generations.

I can’t imagine what it would be like to be that guy, I say, but it seems to have been hard enough on him and his family that they’ve placed themselves entirely beyond the reach of the radar. It’s my job to track people down and get their stories, but I’ve been unable to find the family after several years’ searching. I also wonder what it would be like to be the guilty party, knowing that the authorities and the public are all looking in the wrong direction.

“It probably wasn’t even somebody from town,” she says in response, in a tone that tells me she’s quite certain neither one of us will ever know the name of the person or persons who killed Evelyn Gates and Marc Buckler, and who never faced charges for the crime. “I think about that sometimes, about how anybody could have just pulled off the highway and done this and gotten back into their car, and no one would have ever known.

“It’s a scary thought,” she concludes, and then she looks over at a showpiece clock on her mantel, with, I think, an almost theatrical ability to convey her meaning without having to say it out loud.





SETH


“Welcome to the cage!” are the words that greet me when I enter Gym Rats, presently celebrating its fifth year in business by offering six-month memberships at half off. It’s located in a strip of modular buildings off the Golden State Highway in Fresno, abutted by an auto shop on one side and a place called Import/Export, Inc., on the other.

I remember Import/Export, Inc., because it’s the first thing Seth Healey, owner and sole proprietor of Gym Rats since its opening in the summer of 2002, asks me about when we meet. “Did you go into Import/Export, Inc.?” he says, visibly excited to hear my answer.

I say that I didn’t, that I saw the sign for the gym and followed it. He looks disappointed.

“A lot of people try the Import/Export door first, by accident,” he says. “But there’s never anybody in there. Five years I been here, there’s never anybody there. No idea. I’m always waiting for somebody to solve the mystery.”

He holds the door for me; inside, there are a handful of men pumping iron, jumping rope, or working heavy bags. There’s no music playing; just the sounds of bodies breathing and weights clanking.

“Most of these places are loud as hell, right?” says Healey, leading me toward his office at the back of the barn-sized room. “Can’t even think. So when I built the place and they tried to tell me I had to spend a bunch of money on speakers, all I could say was: ‘For what?’ You know. ‘For what?’ Not me, that’s for sure. I knew I wanted my own kind of place.”

He smiles when he speaks, a smile that seems to come from a deeper place than the smiles you sometimes see when you’ve only just met someone. But it only takes a minute or two in the company of Seth Healey to see that he’s different, and to begin understanding how he’s managed to survive all these years, braving setbacks and roadblocks that would make many of us want to throw in the towel.



* * *



WHEN I VISITED Angela West in Virginia, she made it clear that the murders at Devil House were only part of her story. She spoke with me in the hopes that her story might help people closer to the beginnings of their own tragedy-adjacent timelines feel freer to put the past behind them, to shape their own lives along trajectories of their own choosing. Our conversations touched on her work, her teaching, her travels—I tried to follow where she led, and to only take what she was willing to offer. Even after two mornings and one afternoon in her company, I had to supply several conclusions myself; like many who’ve brushed the edge of the spotlight, she’d learned the value of the carefully chosen word.

Seth Healey is cut from different cloth. No subject is off-limits; his long monologues are wide-ranging, but never incoherent, though you can see how inattentive people might think so. He knows why I’m here, and, if it’s not fair to say he’s excited about it, it’s only because a state of excitement is his default setting. Nor is this my personal observation; as soon as we take our seats on facing weight benches, he points it out to me.

“I can be pretty intense,” is how he puts it. “It used to be a lot heavier, and they had me on medication for it for half my life, but that wasn’t the answer for me, which is something I figured out for myself after I got into exercise. I could tell the medication was holding me back, so I talked to a doctor about it and he leveled me down and I learned that if I just never stopped pushing myself, I’d never feel out of control. That’s the thing when you’re like me. You get bored, you lose control, you do something stupid. But, like I say, I fixed all that for myself, and that’s why I’m here. But it’s not why you’re here. You’re here to talk about the gruesome murders in the sleepy suburban town of Milpitas, right?”