It was late July 1981, and finally the pieces were being put together, a grim realisation was setting in that a serial killer was on the loose.
My adolescence was in a shambles that would make Holden Caufield feel better about himself. My parents had divorced and I had moved from Tsawwassen to Richmond, and was by now living with my Dad. Tsawwassen was the kind of place where a Canadian Brady Bunch might have been filmed, a little beach suburb of Vancouver, an idyllic and tree lined end of the road.
Richmond, at the time, was known for its malls and ditches. I was fifteen and I was the new guy in a strange school and I hated everything. As often as I could I would take the thirty minute bus ride to retreat my former home, where I had friends, I could get in to parties and be a fringe player with the cool delinquents and escape the isolation and quiet desperation of my new life.
One day, the Vancouver Sun printed a picture of all the missing kids. The police were finally admitting that a serial killer was on the loose. I looked at the pictures and wondered what was going on, but I didn't feel at all threatened. I skimmed over the faces, unaware.
One night that summer, I was waiting for one of the last buses back to my new and meagre reality. I think it was Tom Vanderwater, or maybe Jim Rogers, but someone was with me. Behind and below the bus stop was a mall, a sort of sunken affair a few feet down.
A man pulled up in a vehicle in the silent and empty parking lot of the mall. The suburban streets were desolate. The man asks us where the Guildford Mall is. Now, the Guildford Mall is way out of my world, somewhere east in Surrey or Coquitlam or some other place I never go to. We give him general directions. Then he asks where we are going. My friend is going home, and I'm going through the tunnel and home to Richmond.
He then offers to give me a lift, if I show him where The Guildford Town Centre is, which is at least an hour out of the way, and why does a guy want to go to a mall at midnight? All of this is academic 'cos I'm not getting in that car, no way no how. This shit is creepy and my momma didn't raise no fools, or did she?
It took a long, long, long time for me to understand that there could be any possible connection between this creep in the car and his bizarre request and Clifford Robert Olson, but the truth is that a number of the bodies were found just beyond the other end of the Massey Tunnel, within days of this encounter. At that time the tunnel was the gateway from Tsawwassen to anywhere.
I'll let you draw your own conclusions, I know I've drawn mine.
In another ironic twist this property in Richmond was owned by the father of a guy I knew from Tsawwassen, Eugene Knodler.
In the strange and hostile adolescent world of a new school the few friendly faces stand out. I had carved out a few friendships, and Darren was one of them. As we sat in the woods, no doubt passing a joint around, he suddenly turned to me and said "Hey, did you hear?!".
"Hear what", I asked?
"About Judy, that guy killed her"
"Judy?, Judy who?"
"Judy Kozma, you know her".
And indeed I did. I would not dare insult her real friends by saying I hung out with her, but in that most friendless year of my tenth grade Judy had stood out. She was a girl who didn't treat me like a piece of garbage at school, and that was a rare thing in those dark days. Thats why I remembered her, and why I still do.
And that is the way it was for me in my own little Summer Of Sam.
http://www.goyestoeverything.com
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