Murder in Marin County

After it was done, Chuck walked past Marlene into the Olives' living room, his yellow sport shirt splattered with blood. He slumped down onto the new cloth-covered couch and stared into the fireplace. Either the stereo, tuned perpetually to the progressive rock of radio station KTIM, was barely audible or the shots had temporarily deafened him. He was still high from the drugs he had taken that first summer morning of 1975, and now he felt dizzy and sick to his stomach as well. He hardly took notice when Marlene came over, curled up next to him and began to run her hand through his silky chestnut hair--his best feature, she thought--and nuzzle his neck. "It's going to be all right now, Chuck," she said soothingly. "Everything will be OK. They can't interfere anymore."

She got up to get him a can of beer from the refrigerator and searched her pocketbook for a couple of Darvon capsules. He swallowed the tranquilizers absent-mindedly and guzzled the rest of the beer. Marlene was now sitting on the carpet in front of him with her head on his lap, stilling the nervous bounce of his knee and saying all the things he had dreamed she would say since they had met nine months ago--that she loved him and there would be no other guys for her from now on, that no one would ever take her away from him again and they could even get married if he still wanted to. Then she left the room.

Marlene had been away a few minutes when Chuck began to feel uneasy again and went to look for her. He found her in her room, toying with some cream-colored plastic beads on the bed. There were seven of them. They were round and flat, each with a different black letter repeated on both sides and a hole punched through the middle for a missing string. She had taken them out of a tiny plastic box and was trying to form a word with them: E-R-T-I-D-G-J.

Abruptly, Marlene scrambled the letters and started over again: J-E-T-I-G-R-D.

"What're those?" Chuck asked.

"My baby bracelet from the hospital I was born in," Marlene said. "My daddy said it had my real mother's name on it, and when I turned 21, I could find out what it was."

Although Marlene had talked often, almost obsessively, about the fact that she had been adopted at birth by the Olives, that was the first Chuck had heard about a hospital I.D. bracelet. When he attempted to add another letter at the end of the row, Marlene quickly mixed up the order again, grabbing the beads as though they were jacks on a sidewalk. With her back half turned to him, she began rearranging them. Chuck wasn't sure whether the slight tremble to her shoulders and the sharp bursts of air through her nostrils meant she was laughing or sobbing.

R-I-D-G-E-T-J.

Marlene tried several more combinations before she gave up, banging her fist on the bed and scattering the beads, only to search them out one by one and carefully place them in the plastic container. "Now I'll never find out who I am," she said. But to Chuck, watching this curious performance, it seemed as though she didn't really want a name to emerge.

Afterward, Marlene began unbuttoning his shirt and lifting the black tank top underneath. Chuck's body, just coming down from the acid high, responded to her prompting almost automatically. Never much for sexual preliminaries, she moved on top of him quickly. And when they were finished, she lay beside him, whispering welcome endearments into his car. After a time, Chuck reached for a cigarette and Marlene searched for the turquoise kimono her mother had given her not long ago.

It wasn't easy to find amid the clutter of her room: glittery, sequined clothing and pairs of six-inch-high platform shoes strewed over the floor along with boxes of her personal papers, mostly letters from friends she'd left behind when she moved to California; rough sketches of the latest fashions, inspired by the women's magazines she collected; and page after page of hurriedly scribbled poems that would eventually be copied into her loose-leaf poetry books. A self-confessed pack rat, Marlene never threw anything away--or even put it away, her mother had constantly complained. On the head-board and the wall behind her bed and on the night table beside it were several peacock feathers in a glass vase, a bowl filled with marijuana seeds, half a dozen bottles of prescription drugs, posters with soft-focus scenes and romantic inscriptions. There were also some wooden lamas hand-carved by Indian craftsmen from the Andes--the only reminder that Marlene had spent almost all but the past two of her 16 years in Ecuador.

When she found the robe on the floor, her favorite cat, the mischievous black-coated Rascal, was using it as a pillow. "My God, the cats!" she said in a sudden panic. "I don't want the cats to get in there, Chuck. Move him inside." Across the narrow hallway, Chuck, dressed in his undershorts, grabbed Marlene's father under the arms and dragged him farther into the small bedroom, so that his legs no longer blocked the doorway. Jim Olive was, even in death, a pleasant-looking, compulsively neat man who appeared to be a decade younger than his 59 years. He wore his favorite weekend outfit: dark slacks and a belted khaki safari jacket with deep front pockets. His thick auburn hair, with only the slightest trace of gray at the temples, was combed straight back, and his faint grimace might have come from biting into a wedge of lemon instead of from four quick bullets fired point-blank into his chest.

"Get his wallet and keys and everything else out of his pockets," Marlene ordered. Chuck took some change and a key ring from one of Olive's front pants pockets, Rolaids and chewing gum from the other. The outside pockets of the safari jacket yielded a small date book, which he handed to Marlene; she glanced at it just long enough to notice that the only appointment her father had scheduled for the following week was a routine dental checkup on Tuesday afternoon, three days away. Still searching for a wallet, Chuck turned the body over onto its stomach, a maneuver that required some effort, for Olive had been a thickset man.

In the meantime, Marlene had found her mother's black-patent-leather purse on the desk between the bed and the windows and had dumped it out onto the faded green shag rug that carpeted the whole house, even the bathrooms. Naomi Olive, who had rarely gone out by herself in recent months, had relied on her husband for her immediate cash needs, but Marlene picked out some store credit cards and a plastic-coated I.D. card that the state of California issues to nondrivers for check-cashing purposes. Moving quickly, she went down the hallway to the master bedroom, which her father had occupied alone, though Naomi, as if to apologize for insisting on separate sleeping quarters, had kept most of her clothes and jewelry there. Marlene found her parents' joint checkbook on top of the double dresser and threw it onto the growing pile of their belongings. Next, she unhooked a small gold watch from her mother's wrist and turned her attention to the plain gold wedding band and diamond engagement ring lodged on her left hand, which hung limply from the bed. Marlene struggled to remove the rings, for Naomi had grown thick-limbed and arthritic since the time, 31 years earlier, when the rings had first been placed on her finger, two weeks apart. With a wrench that almost sent her sprawling backward, Marlene finally pulled them off. "They never should have been married," she muttered to herself, "and now they're not."

A bloodstained claw hammer with a red wooden handle lay on the carpet near the head of the bed. Marlene took it to the kitchen sink, rinsed it off and left it there among the unwashed dishes. She came back with some dish towels, sponges and two spray bottles of detergent. "Help me get the room cleaned up," she said.

There were bloodstains all over the mustard-colored walls, especially the one behind Naomi's head. In addition, spots of blood could be seen on most of the furniture. Without talking much, Chuck carried the furniture and accessories into the living room, where Marlene wiped them clean. First to be removed were the objects that stood on the mahogany night table beside the bed--a cloth-shaded lamp, a clock radio, an empty teacup, a plate holding a section of an apple, an ashtray overflowing with Naomi's cigarette stubs and some copies of her favorite magazine, the Ladies' Home Journal.

All that time, neither Chuck nor Marlene could look directly at the center of the carnage. Naomi was lying on her back with her head twisted toward the door. (continued on page 130)Marin County(continued from page 124) She was partially covered with a light blanket. Her metal-frame glasses lay broken and askew on her face. Blood soaked the roots of her graying hair and ran down her cheeks in rivulets onto the pillow and sheets, eventually to collect in a small pool beside the bed. Her forehead had been struck repeatedly above the left eye with a hammer, leaving massive contusions surrounding a gaping hole the size of a golf ball in her skull.

Chuck pulled the bed out from the wall. The wall itself looked as though someone had flicked a paintbrush at it. The thick, elongated tracks of blood immediately above the head of the bed became smaller and more widely spaced higher up, with a few red specks reaching to the ceiling. An oil painting of Marlene as a child that hung directly above the bed was similarly spotted with blood.

The portrait, perhaps Jim's proudest possession, had been presented to him on the occasion of the Olives' 25th wedding anniversary by colleagues at the Gulf Oil Company in Ecuador, over which, at the time, he had presided. It had been painted by a local artist from a photograph of Marlene that had lain, until its mysterious disappearance one day, under the glass top of Jim's desk--a picture of an extraordinarily pretty and carefree young girl with light-brown hair combed into bangs, widely spaced bright-green eyes, a freckled nose, a suggestion of dimples and an even row of sparkling teeth.

The unbridled hostility Marlene felt for her mother burst forth again as she wiped the streaks of blood off the portrait. "Curse that bitch!" she said aloud. "Getting her blood all over my picture!"

Finally, Marlene stuffed her parents' checkbook and credit cards into her purse and gave the cash from her father's wallet to Chuck, who generally took care of money matters. The two of them then pulled the light summer blanket over Naomi's head. "That's the last time I'll have to look at her," Marlene announced with what Chuck would later call a mocking grin.

They had not discussed a plan for disposing of the bodies, though it was clear that nothing could be done until after dark. Chuck felt strange inside the house, somehow fearful that Jim would find him there and carry out his angry threats to shoot him on sight. In the house, he had to fight even more desperately to block the violence of the afternoon from his mind, but the dreaded images would reappear, as he later told a psychologist, "like a slide show in my mind."

Although an hour remained before the start of the movie they planned to see, Chuck and Marlene left the house quickly. They spent the next half hour driving the Olives' Vega aimlessly around the town of Terra Linda, through the streets around Hibiscus Way, most of them also named after flowers, to the somewhat posher section of Marinwood, whose street names ended in "-stone," and out the Lucas Valley Road past the point where the developments ended and the dairy farms began, then back across the freeway to the desolate marsh fill where the 101 Drive-In was located.

During the movie--a violent futuristic fantasy called Death Race 2000--Chuck could not keep his mind in check. Images from the afternoon pressed on his consciousness with increasing persistence. The awful gurgling of Naomi, choking on her own blood. And then Jim coming home in the middle of it. Jim screaming, "Oh, my God, Naomi! Oh, my God!" and turning to catch sight of Chuck. "I'm going to get you, you bastard!" The glint of a kitchen knife. The four quick shots that had sent the older man spinning to the floor.

By the halfway point of the movie, it was impossible for Chuck and Marlene to continue to avoid the problem at hand. Marlene first broached the subject of what they were going to do. They discussed the possibility of making it look as if the Olives had been killed by robbers, a cover-up that had been dramatized on a recent Kojak episode the two had seen. But Chuck realized that they had already gone too far in cleaning up Naomi's bedroom to make the plan work. "What about pushing their car over a cliff near Stinson Beach?" he suggested, taking his cue from a scene in the movie they were now scarcely watching. But Marlene didn't want to give up the Vega, and, besides, she had recently lost a favorite piece of jewelry, a turquoise-studded silver ring, and thought she might have dropped it somewhere in the car. On the screen, a multiple collision set off a racing car's gas tank and consumed the driver in a blazing furnace of heat.

"Do you keep any gasoline at home?" Marlene suddenly asked. Chuck said there were only a couple of empty gas cans lying around the side yard for "emergency use."

"We're going to get rid of everything once and for all."

"Where?" Chuck asked.

"I'll tell you later. Just go get the gas cans when this is over."

The lights were already out at Chuck's house when he and Marlene pulled up a few doors away. "It's me," Chuck called out in a loud whisper, just to make sure that the family dog, a notoriously bad watchdog in any case, wouldn't set off a racket at an unfamiliar noise. Carrying a flashlight that Marlene had found in the Vega's glove compartment, he sneaked around to the overhang along the side of the house and took a battered red two-and-a-half-gallon gas can with a piece of cloth jammed into the spout. Then he drove to the all-night Shell station just off the downtown-San Rafael-freeway exit and put a gallon of premium (Chuck always bought premium, even when he was near broke) into the gas can, paying for it, as a sign said he must at that hour of the night, with exact change.

On the drive back to Terra Linda, Marlene said, "When we get to my house, we're going to wrap the bodies up and load them in the car."

"Where are we taking them?" Chuck asked.

"A special place," Marlene said. "Out by China Camp."

"Right then and there," Chuck would later tell the police, "I knew it was gonna be involving her witchcraft."

Turning onto Hibiscus Way, Chuck drove past the Olives' driveway and backed the car up as close as possible to the door that led from the garage directly into the dining L and living room.

"Take your clothes off so we don't get bloodstains on them," Marlene, beginning to unbutton hers, instructed Chuck. Chuck obediently stripped, leaving his clothes in a pile in the hallway, and opened the door to Naomi's bedroom. He was not more than a half step inside when the smell of flesh that was already beginning to rot hit him like a physical blow, an odor made all the stronger by the heat trapped within the small closed room for ten hours. Slamming the door shut, he gasped for breath to keep himself from vomiting.

"Christ, it stinks in there," he said. "We better do something about that." Marlene quickly fetched two spray cans of room freshener from the hall closet and handed one to Chuck. They both held their breath and emptied the entire contents of the two cans into the room. Then they loaded the two bodies, wrapped in bedding, into the Vega's hatchback, covered them with Naomi's mattress and headed for China Camp. It was shortly after midnight.

Chuck had been going to China Camp with his friends for years to ride motorbikes, practice target shooting or just (continued on page 204)Marin County(continued from page 130) plain party. They generally drove through the woods along a dirt fire road to a clearing known as the fire pit, which is actually a three-foot-high concrete cistern that once stored rain water for a long-abandoned dairy farm. Now, as Chuck turned onto the dirt fire road and headed for the woods a few hundred yards away, he could see that the spring rains, aided by the weekend motorcyclists, had left deep ruts in the road, and he made a quick decision to drive through the tall grass that bordered it. But the dew-laden grass made the wheels spin, and he moved back onto the road, thinking that if he proceeded carefully and cut across the ruts at an angle, he could avoid getting stuck. The strategy seemed to work until, just as he was nearing the broad incline that led into the woods, he felt a sharp jolt that he knew instantly "spelled big trouble."

Chuck had done enough four-wheeling in worse terrain not to panic right away. He asked Marlene to help him unload the car to reduce its weight and make the jack under the spare tire accessible. Grunting from the strain, they hid the bodies behind a clump of tall grass. "Scout around here," Chuck said. "Find some branches and rocks." For once, he was giving the orders. He jacked the car up and stuck as much of the debris as possible under the rear wheels before setting them down. The wheels still spun wildly, sending out two streams of pulverized debris.

"Motherfucker. Motherfucker!" Chuck cursed. He was beside himself by now, sure that at any moment a police patrol car would drive by and find them stuck in a ditch with two bodies half-hidden in the grass not ten yards away. He took out a flashlight and looked under the car. One of the back wheels was not even touching the ground. He found some two-by-fours and used them to jack the car up even higher, then worked the mattress under the right rear wheel, which had dug itself deepest into the ditch. "Floor it," he yelled to Marlene and grunted as he pushed from behind. The car shot forward with a metal-clanging lurch. Marlene kept an anxious vigil as Chuck got back in and drove a couple of hundred yards into the forest, turned a sharp left across a dry creek bed and pulled up near a large log that lay a few feet from the fire pit. Chuck turned the car around to face the road and left the headlights on.

They pulled Naomi's stiff blanket-swathed body out first but had trouble lifting it over the concrete rim of the fire pit. Instead, they dragged it up against the log and placed Jim's body beside his wife's. Chuck poured gasoline onto the figures and directed Marlene to help him find some wood. There was no shortage of fallen branches around the fire pit, and by the time they had finished scouting the immediate vicinity--Marlene walking in front of the headlights, Chuck taking a flashlight in the opposite direction--the stack of wood on top of the bodies was waist-high. They tossed Naomi's bloodied bedding on top of the pile and Chuck emptied the gas can. He remembered an arsonist's trick he had seen in an old movie that would give them a few minutes to escape before the fire blazed up. Putting the unlighted end of the cigarette he had been smoking inside a pack of matches, he closed the cover and tossed it on top of the woodpile. "Come on, let's move!" he yelled. Chuck drove out of the forest at top speed, skimming over the ruts.

•

In nearly every way, Chuck Riley's upbringing made him a representative product of his environment. Like much of central Marin's adult population, his parents had gone there in the Fifties from distant parts of the country, lured by the temperate climate and the economic opportunity of postwar California. And as was true for many of their neighbors, the original impetus for the move had been the military--not, in their case, a wartime leave or a temporary stationing in San Francisco but Joanne Riley's assignment, in 1954, to the military hospital at Hamilton Air Force Base, eight miles north of San Rafael.

Although he would soon develop a severe weight problem, Chuck started life a normal-sized child, with brown hair that his mother kept closely shorn and large brown eyes that were always laughing. Oscar Riley's home movies show him perpetually clowning for the camera, decked out with toy six-shooters sticking out of ridiculously low-slung twin holsters. In one scene, Chuck and his younger brother, Kerry, are playing on a back-yard seesaw (Joanne's hand can be glimpsed weighting down Kerry's side for balance). In another, Oscar's favorite, a six-year-old Chuck is seen, lunch box in hand and name tag fastened to his shirt, walking to his first day of school with a look of studied confidence on his face.

Like most fat boys, Chuck suffered constant humiliation with generally good cheer. Joanne had to buy him extra-large men's pants by the time he reached his early teens, then cut a foot or more off the legs--either that or shop at special "big boy" clothing stores. Chuck was forced to take his own bathing trunks to gym class when all the other kids were issued theirs. Indeed, gym class presented a never-ending series of humiliations, especially during junior-lifesaving classes or when basketball teams were divided into "shirts" and "skins." Sometimes, Chuck, who weighed more than 300 pounds when he entered high school, would simply refuse to participate.

Oscar and Joanne tried to bribe Chuck into slimming down with a standing offer of one dollar for every pound he lost and five for each inch he took off his waistline. The Rileys' family doctor tried to put Chuck on a strict 1000-calorie diet and, when he failed to stick to it, prescribed Dexedrine for weight loss. Chuck did take off weight for a while, but then he continued using the pills for the increased energy and sense of self-confidence they provided. At first, one of the heart-shaped tablets would keep him wired for the whole day; then he needed two or three. Soon, he was swallowing a fistful at a time and was often staying up for several days without any sleep. Besides the strain such a regimen placed on his body, he found himself running out for postmidnight snacks at San Rafael's late-night Jack in the Box (where, rumor maliciously insisted, he had a charge account) and, thus, putting back the weight he had lost. It seemed a hopeless situation. Some of Chuck's friends had formed a rock band; he enjoyed serving as their unofficial manager (which mostly meant that he got to carry the drums and set up the electronic equipment when they played at parties) and, in general, became interested in rock music. Two of his favorite songs were He Ain't Heavy, He's My Brother and No One Knows What the Fat Man Feels. Chuck knew.

Fat Man was, in fact, one of the nicknames the kids gave him, along with Large Charles (often abbreviated to L.C.) and Boulder. A friend transformed the last into Rocko and the nickname stuck, partly because Chuck himself encouraged its use: It could be taken to indicate a certain hard-boiled toughness (exactly the derivation that the district attorney would later encourage the jury to accept) rather than soft-bellied bulk. In fact, all of Chuck's contemporaries agree with Oscar's assessment that his son "didn't have a mean bone in his body." Generally, he was eager to please and generous to a fault, a fat kid nearly desperate to win the acceptance and the approval that his thinner peers could afford to take for granted. He was, from the time his personality coalesced, a follower perpetually searching for someone to lead him--or just to like him.

Chuck was known as a prodigious beer drinker who could down a couple of six-packs and still "maintain." But he did not begin smoking marijuana until he was 16, long after all the kids he hung around with had become regular users. That was partly a result of Oscar Riley's extreme paranoia about any kind of drug--what Chuck later called his father's "Jack Webb scare" about kids' jumping off buildings or painting themselves red and walking into traffic.

What had started Chuck smoking pot was the realization that he was already a heavy user of speed, in the form of the large Dexedrine tablets that the kids called elephant pills. It was also, of course, an act of rebellion against his father. Following another after-dinner argument, in which Oscar threatened permanent grounding of Chuck's car (a neighbor had complained to the Rileys about their son's hell-bent driving around the otherwise peaceful residential area), Chuck accepted some friends' dare to share the joint they were passing around. He did not jump off a building or walk into traffic, though he vowed afterward that while he might accept marijuana when it was offered to him, he would never buy it. A few weeks later, he had bought his first one-ounce bag: he was soon smoking daily. Within a few months, he had taken his first acid trip, snorted cocaine, even sampled the white-powder animal tranquilizer the kids called angel dust: soon, he was actively selling. As a friend said later, "Chuck didn't just smoke weed, he smoked lots of weed. That was just Chuck--always overamping. He overamped on cars, he overamped on drugs and when Marlene showed up, he overamped on her."

•

Aside from its privileged status, Marlene's upbringing in Quito, Ecuador, could not have been further removed from the free-swinging ways of Marin County teenagers. Ecuador is a tradition-ridden Catholic society in which boys and girls rarely meet outside the watchful presence of a chaperon. Besides, Naomi Olive's growing paranoia about being in a land whose language she never really learned made her more than normally protective of Marlene. There were frequent arguments between the two of them, fueled by Naomi's drinking and by Marlene's awareness that her reclusive, often distraught mother was different from the mothers of her friends.

Since she could hardly confide in her mother, Marlene revealed her inner thoughts in poems that from the beginning were remarkably mature and sure-handed. She also developed an unusually close relationship with her father, spending most of her free time with him and even attending Gulf Oil Company functions at which wives, not daughters, were the rule. In 1973, when Jim lost his job and decided to move his family to California, he and Marlene talked openly about her fears of moving back to the United States--but neither was prepared for the reality of adjusting to what had, ironically, become a foreign country for both of them.

On her first day of school in Terra Linda, Marlene, wearing a pleated skirt and a round-collared blouse, felt horribly conspicuous among the girls in the unisex school "uniform" of tight jeans and T-shirts. When she finally found her way to class, she had no idea what was going on and felt that the kids were making fun of her for looking straight and talking funny and even for her name (when her English teacher read the roll, a boy in the back of the room stage-whispered "Olive Oyl" to a flurry of half-suppressed titters). After the final bell, Marlene ran home.

For the next few days, she wandered from class to class in a daze, "memorizing the floor tiles" so she wouldn't have to look around. Her classmates seemed un-approachable. She knew what was happening when a group of them stood in a tight circle, passing around a makeshift cigarette. But she could not at first understand why some of them--the hard-core "pillheads," it turned out--teetered through the corridors on rubber legs and sat through classes with eyes that looked like one-way mirrors. She longed for the weekend to arrive, but when it did, she stayed alone in her room.

Soon. Marlene had designed a speeded-up acculturation program for herself that allowed her, as she put it in one of her poems, "to crash the party / Going 90 in a five-mile zone." (The next line reads, "It started getting scary when I tried to be alone.") First and foremost, her musical tastes, formed in Ecuador, were hopelessly outmoded--no small matter in a teenage world in which rock 'n' roll was the common ground, the universal sound track of social intercourse. Marlene was still stuck in the bubble-gum music of Donny Osmond and David Cassidy--idols of prepubescence her friends had long since outgrown. Moreover, they were not even listening to the few rock bands with which Marlene was familiar--mainly, the Beatles and The Rolling Stones.

By the early Seventies, the rock-music scene had splintered into several opposing directions, and the one Marlene's friends favored was an earsplitting, pile-driving music that a critic had dubbed heavy metal. It was the bad boy of the rock world, a mutant monster of its none-too-tame predecessors, not merely loud but deafening, not merely sexually suggestive but blatantly sadomasochistic, almost atavistic in its disregard of aesthetic niceties in favor of a primal scream. At home, Marlene studied the records and the tapes of those groups as if they were hieroglyphs to be decoded--which, in a way, they were. She copied whole songs into her notebooks and began the practice of heading her letters and poems with scraps of lyrics from them. They were the secret passwords into her new world.

Under the influence of one of her newfound pop idols, David Bowie, Marlene began to transform herself into what she called a glitter chick. Some of the change was simply a matter of dressing like the natives did: she could not be expected to go around in the saddle shoes and the cutely embroidered, round-collared blouses she had brought with her from Ecuador and had worn on that first mortifying day in school. But Naomi fought even minor changes, refusing for months to let Marlene buy a pair of denims and consenting, finally, not to the "bright blue jeans" referred to in her favorite Bowie song, Lady Stardust, but to a pair of white jeans that didn't look like jeans at all. With Jim's connivance, Marlene finally got her blue jeans and halter tops and high platform shoes, though each time they brought home a purchase, Naomi's standard response would be, "That's so gaudy. Why do you need to show off like that?"

But it was Marlene's make-up that really bothered Jim, who had always been so quick to compliment his daughter on her good looks. She took to wearing enough mascara to make her look like a football player on a rainy Sunday afternoon, often mixing alternating bands of eye-shadow shades. "You're so pretty," Jim would gently chide his daughter. "I don't know why you wear all that makeup."

But Marlene didn't feel very pretty, "I was lonely and frustrated and insecure as Marlene Olive," she says. "But when I was Lady Stardust, I didn't think about that other person. It put me in a different world--all sparkles and happiness. It made me feel good."

It made Naomi feel terrible. The battles about Marlene's make-up and dress taxed all of Jim's efforts to negotiate some sort of domestic truce between his wife and his daughter. Often, Naomi would insist that Marlene remove most of her make-up before she could leave the house. And once, when Marlene appeared in the living room in her full Lady Stardust regalia for a rock concert in San Francisco, Naomi, her daughter remembers, "had a cow." Marlene was wearing a low-cut black dress with iridescent red, green and blue threads running through it, and her long fake nails looked like a color-TV test pattern. She had silver glitter in her hair and on her eyelashes and wore a rhinestone teardrop stuck with nail adhesive an inch from the corner of one eye. The uproar that ensued when Naomi told Marlene she could not go out of the house until she "looked decent" was more than normally abusive, with mother and daughter cursing each other and Marlene finally spitting at Naomi in a fit of rage before storming off to the concert.

By the time school ended and summer vacation began, Marlene and Naomi's arguments had become more frequent and bitter than ever--a continual domestic conflagration that flared up at unexpected moments, like the dry-season wild fires that ravaged the Marin hillsides. Usually, at some point, Naomi would lunge for Marlene, who, being by far the quicker of the two, would run into the bathroom they shared, lock the doors (one leading to Marlene's room, the other to the hallway) and wait for Jim to come home. The bathroom had a wall heater near the floor, which made it comfortable even on cold days. It became Marlene's favorite hiding place. Separated by locked doors, the women would give full vent to their resentment and anger, growing more and more hysterical, until Naomi began screaming at the top of her voice and banging on the door, while Marlene, seated on the floor next to the heater, bit her arm until she drew blood or hit her head against the tile wall in a tantrum. Just picturing Naomi's face in anger--her mouth and eyebrows seeming to move up and down in lock step--made Marlene furious.

"You're not even my mother!" she would yell out at some point.

"Thank God for that!" Naomi invariably screamed back. "She's probably some gutter tramp, some two-bit whore--"

Naomi must have known better--must have known that Marlene's real mother wasn't a whore--but she also knew that word would always get a quick and furious reaction out of the girl.

"Don't you go callin' my mom a whore, bitch!"

By the time Jim came home. Marlene and Naomi would be suffering from battle fatigue, the one curled up in front of the bathroom heater, the other lying on her bed. He would listen to each one's self-justifying complaints, but he represented the problem far more than he did the solution.

Marlene and Naomi viewed each other more as rivals for his affection than as mother and daughter. When Naomi angrily accused Marlene, as she often did, of wanting to "split up the family" or "take my home away from me," it was clear that her perpetual fear of losing her husband had now focused almost entirely on her daughter. And, in a sense, Naomi's fears were not entirely unjustified. Marlene and Jim had always enjoyed a rapport that went beyond the typical father-daughter relationship precisely to the extent that Naomi had long since abdicated her social role. That continued to be true even during the time that Marlene and Jim were fast losing their special closeness. Many of Jim's Terra Linda acquaintances had never met Naomi, whereas Marlene was a familiar figure even at social functions, such as Rotary dances and Tip Club "mystery trips," that were normally reserved for husbands and wives. "Here's my other girlfriend," Jim would say with a wink by way of introducing Marlene, even though he was always careful to explain that Naomi couldn't come because she didn't feel "up to par."

Despite Marlene's protestations about her "pure" love for Jim, as time went on, her feelings became much more ambivalent than she was willing to admit to herself. She was angry with him for spending less time with her than he had been able to do in Ecuador and for his weakness in dealing with a deteriorating domestic situation. As she began to get herself into more serious trouble. Jim was always the one who doled out the fitful punishments she received--the restrictions and curfews that he could never quite make stick. His loyalty to Naomi--even, in his own way, his love for her--further angered Marlene. In regard to his wife, he was, Marlene wrote in a poem, "living in a land that was," a place from which Marlene felt excluded.

During her second summer in Terra Linda. Marlene began to smoke marijuana with her friends. She had become tired of repeating the lame excuse about being allergic to it and, besides, she felt that as long as she was getting high on the sedatives the family doctor had prescribed for an ulcer she had developed shortly after moving to the United States, she might as well not buck the social pressure to try pot. When none of the dope-crazed scenarios she had played out for so long in her imagination occurred--indeed, the first few times, nothing occurred--Marlene became a regular user. Still, marijuana never replaced the free-floating, softly cushioned feeling she got on downers--a feeling, she wrote, that resembled "gliding down some childhood river on an inner tube."

Besides drugs, Marlene's other new preoccupation that summer was the occult. Of course, in a teenage subculture in which one's sign was often better known than one's name, the laws of the occult were as axiomatic as the laws of geometry--and far more intensely studied. All of the kids in Marlene's new circle of friends could reel off a dozen rock songs with demonological allusions, The Rolling Stones' Sympathy for the Devil being only the most famous.

But Marlene's first essays into the world of the occult were not very promising. For one thing, she found that she didn't have most of the specialized equipment many of the ceremonies mentioned in her books required--the witch's regalia of censers, pentacles, wands, white-handled knives and lengths of knotted rope. And when she finally collected them, the results were disappointing.

In the patchy grass of the Olives' back yard, she drew a circle outside a pentagon with Jim's old Army-officer's sword and placed a Bible in the center of it--a sure-fire method of putting a curse on the hapless person who picked up the book, according to one of her occult sources. But as far as Marlene could tell. Naomi did not go out back for the next few days or even so much as peer through the drawn living-room curtains. Following instructions in another book, Marlene would close her eyes, concentrate and begin to doodle on her sketch pad in an attempt to produce automatic writing, but the results were always gibberish. Nor were her attempts to summon forth spirits with the aid of the Ouija board she had purchased in Northgate Mall any more successful, no matter how carefully she followed the incantations in an accompanying instruction booklet.

There were, however, a few hopeful signs. One of Marlene's occult books indicated that the way to recognize a true witch was by a special mark on her breast; sure enough, she had a mark of a kind--a tiny blood spot on her right breast. A witch, it was also suggested, had a particularly penetrating glance that riveted people's attention, and Marlene had, indeed, noticed since coming to Marin County that people seemed to look her straight in the eyes and listen attentively, as though they were expecting some kind of message to come out. (It was not until much later that she realized that such intense eye contact, in the very capital of consciousness raising, might have had a cultural rather than a supernatural explanation.) She also thought back on the number of times she had predicted the outcome of events or had been able to read people's faces correctly--that kind of psychological insight, the books agreed, was another sure sign of a witch.

•

The day he met Marlene, Chuck, as was his custom since dropping out of high school at the end of his junior year, had gone over to the school around "brunch period"--the midmorning break, when everyone would be outside--to see friends and "take care of business." Although to an outsider's eye the nearly 2000-member student body of Terra Linda High School appeared as relentlessly white and middle class as the surrounding community, it was, in fact, as caste-ridden and turf-conscious as any inner-city gang. The "jocks" hung out in the central courtyard of the sprawling two-story brick building, the "greasers" in the parking lot and the "heads" on the front lawn--no doubt so they could monitor the movements of the Terra Linda police patrol cars along the street.

Most of Chuck's good friends had graduated, which is why he had lost interest in his classes. But the social scene was still important to him. He gravitated toward the front lawn, where some kids were standing around one of the frail wire-braced trees that had such trouble taking root, though the marijuana seeds that had been surreptitiously planted around them flowered luxuriantly. The focus of the group's attention seemed even frailer than the tree that supported her--a girl sitting cross-legged on the ground, her downcast face hidden from the onlookers by the curtain of her long hair. Several boys were dancing around the tree, trying to catch her attention with arm-waving gestures and taunting remarks.

Chuck soon found out that the girl was on her first acid trip and it was quite clearly turning into a bad one, in no way helped by the callous initiation ritual she was forced to undergo. Whether it was the fetal position she had assumed on the grass, the demure lace-bordered blouse she was wearing that day or simply the fact that it was her first acid trip, Chuck was struck by "a kind of innocence" in Marlene Olive. He got the others to back away and then, kneeling beside Marlene, reassured her that everything would turn out all right, that he would stay with her. He handed her a marijuana joint to "level her out," but she refused the offer, as she did his attempts to find out her name or strike up a conversation.

For the rest of the day, Chuck walked around "on cloud nine," thinking that Marlene was "the most beautiful girl in the world." He tried to find out all he could about her from friends at school, but aside from her name, he learned only that she had spent most of her life abroad and was considered shy and a little weird. The next day, he went back to the schoolyard at the same hour to seek her out. It was the first time he had ever actually asked a girl for a date (though he had been out many times with his friends and their girls), and he was in a fine sweat about the matter, having rehearsed his lines all morning.

He found Marlene sitting in a circle of friends on the front lawn and offered them some grass--his usual calling card. After joking about her condition the day before, Chuck asked her if she would go to the drive-in with him the next night. Marlene hesitated. She liked the fact that Chuck seemed popular, and now that a goatee and a mustache masked his baby face, he looked older than his age and certainly older than her classmates, most of whom she found embarrassingly silly. On the other hand, even though Chuck had begun to diet seriously during the summer, he still weighed more than 250 pounds, a fact that the loose-fitting kung-fu jacket he wore failed to hide. Marlene said that she would like to go to the movies Friday night but she had invited her friend Nancy Dillon [the names of Chuck's and Marlene's friends have been changed; all others are actual names] to sleep over at her house. Maybe some other night. But Chuck, who was not about to be spurned so easily after he had worked himself up to such a fever pitch, quickly offered to find Nancy a date, too. When Marlene reluctantly agreed, Chuck arranged to pick them up after dinner the next night and went bounding off toward home to see whether or not his friend Bill Owen, who lived down the block, would be willing to do him a big favor--two, in fact, for he needed Bill not only to take out Nancy but to provide transportation, his own car having recently had another of its well-deserved mechanical breakdowns.

After he had recovered from his initial disbelief that his friend had actually gotten a date. Bill agreed to double with him the following night, especially since Chuck said he would pay for the entire evening. At the appointed hour, the two of them pulled up to the house on Hibiscus Way in Owen's Dodge van, and Chuck, who had spent hours selecting his clothes and brushing down his cowlick, rang the bell. He heard Marlene yell for her mother to answer it while she finished dressing. After introductions, Naomi led Chuck to the dining-room table and continued clearing away the dinner dishes. Since it was "just about the only time I'd met parents because I was taking out their daughter," Chuck responded nervously to her probing questions about his age, employment and interest in Marlene. A few minutes later, Jim came out of his office down the hall to meet Chuck and continue the interrogation. Where were they going? How were they getting there? Did Chuck happen to know the phone number at the 101 Drive-In, in case they needed to reach Marlene? (No, he said, but if the Olives called the box office, someone would make an announcement over the car speakers.) What time could he have Marlene back? (Any time Mr. Olive wanted. Chuck suggested politely, realizing that "you have to be careful about these things if you want to stay in good with parents.") Jim told Chuck to try to have Marlene back by 11 at the latest. Chuck nodded, though the curfew seemed a little early for a Friday night. But then, the Olives, who were a good ten years older than his own and his friends' parents, seemed more anxious about their daughter's whereabouts than most Terra Linda parents would be.

In San Rafael, the two couples stopped at a liquor store known to be fairly relaxed about checking I.D.s for proof of age, and Chuck went in to buy a bottle of tequila and some orange juice. Marlene turned down the tequila when it was offered to her at the drive-in, as she did Chuck's clumsy attempts to put his arm around her, but she accepted the joints he kept rolling and passing around the van all evening. By the time the double feature was over, Marlene recalls, she had "moved over to the edge of the back seat as Chuck kept inching toward me."

Chuck was hopelessly infatuated with Marlene from the start. Just how infatuated was apparent to his best friend, Mike Howard, the following week when he saw Chuck, who normally never left home without a guaranteed ride in both directions, cheerfully pedaling his bicycle to Marlene's house in the rain. It was even more apparent to Marlene after Chuck left a note for her that read, in its entirety, "I'm happy happy happy happy. In love love love love. Do with me what you will."

Chuck began to drop by the high school whenever he thought Marlene would be out on the lawn. Often he would take her flowers, a public demonstration of affection that embarrassed Marlene no end. With his car operating again, he offered her rides after school, plied her with free dope and gave her a pair of silver earrings, the first of a series of expensive gifts he would buy her in the coming months. It was all to little avail. In public, Marlene avoided Chuck as much as she could, embarrassed by the way "he'd just stand around looking lovesick at me." But she did encourage him, as she encouraged everyone, to call her at home. She felt popular and accepted when the phone rang often, deeply depressed when it didn't.

Since Chuck sensed that the one side of him that clearly appealed to Marlene's imagination was his drug dealing, he began to spin grandiose and largely apocryphal tales about his South American cocaine connections, his rock-'n'-roll clients and the big-money transactions, involving what he described as "mountains of snow," that were just about to "come down." He told her that he used the nickname Rocko to guarantee his anonymity in dealing drugs and showed her the small mahogany-handled .22-caliber pistol he kept in the glove compartment "in case anyone starts pushing me around."

To make himself more desirable in Marlene's eyes, Chuck also embarked on an intensive self-improvement campaign. He bought a Spanish-language primer and began memorizing words and phrases to toss out in the course of his telephone conversations with her. He studied up on glitter-rock music, particularly David Bowie's albums, and bought a few popular paperbacks on witchcraft and the occult. Knowing that Marlene wrote poetry, he began addressing poems to her. As might be expected from someone whose worst subject in an aborted high school career had been English, most of them were doggerel, but a few were amazingly good--the ones he copied from an old poetry anthology Oscar owned or from the liner notes of rock records. For the sake of authenticity, Chuck would change all the women's names to Marlene and insert references to people and events she would recognize.

He also began to be aware of clothes for the first time and bought some slacks and bold-patterned sport shirts to replace his usual uniform of work shirts and ballooning overalls. But his chief self-improvement program was weight reduction. Marlene provided him with the motivation to diet successfully for the first time in his life, and over the next several months, he managed to lose more than 60 pounds, reducing his waistline from 44 inches to 36. He quit smoking, gave up beer and sometimes, with the help of prescription diet pills and frequent inhalations of cocaine--also an appetite suppressant--went all day without eating. Just about every other week, Chuck would make a ceremony of putting a new notch in his belt an inch from the last, and several times during that period, he would buy--or steal--a whole new wardrobe. When his weight finally stabilized around 200 pounds, Chuck was lighter than he had been when he entered high school. He was still somewhat pudgy, but for the first time since his early childhood, he could no longer be described as a fat boy.

When Chuck asked Marlene to be his "old lady," two weeks after they had met, she refused, saying that she didn't want to be tied down and wasn't "together enough" for a steady boyfriend. Occasionally, she would allow him to take her to a rock concert at Winterland or at the Cow Palace in San Francisco. But, for the most part, Chuck got to see Marlene only in the company of the group of students who had begun meeting regularly on the Terra Linda High School front lawn that fall to smoke his dope and trade pills. They were probably the first generation of Terra Linda students who not only attended high school but actually graduated from it dead stoned.

Until she had fallen in with the group, Marlene had been fairly diligent about schoolwork, and her grades had been good, but she began skipping classes with the others. She signed absence excuses with Jim's signature, which she had learned to imitate with a check forger's precision by filling up page after page in her school notebooks. Most of the group were at least a year or two older than Marlene, which was one reason she made up an odd story about not knowing her real age. (Chuck, for one, had thought Marlene was 17 until her 16th birthday in January.) They were also much more advanced sexually. That fall would be remembered by the group as "the days of the great feast." There were experiments in group sex that began one day during a collective acid trip, when someone suggested that Wesson oil rubbed on the skin glows iridescently in black light. A quick shopping expedition was undertaken, after which those present stripped and began pouring bottles of the oil over one another. When word got out, Wesson oil parties became a regularly scheduled event, though neither Chuck nor Marlene, who were both extremely self-conscious about displaying their bodies, participated in them. Chuck was still a virgin at 19, and Marlene, though she had slept with a few boys, was relatively selective in her choice of mates, compared with her girlfriends' permissive ways. But, as she did in other areas of teenage manners and mores, Marlene quickly went from relative sexual inexperience to overindulgence, so that in a short time she would develop a reputation not so much for being overly permissive as for being kinky. As a line in a poem she wrote around that time put it, "The light said red but I saw green."

What was true about sex was even more true about drugs--her "chemicals of mirth." But it was in the realm of the occult that Marlene's imagination really began to work overtime. While a table-raising session that someone organized ended disappointingly, Marlene's belief in her occult powers was strengthened by her success in reading people's fortunes with the aid of tarot cards. When she laid out her own tarot cards, the one that seemed to come up most often was the High Priestess--a robed figure, seated between two fluted columns, who symbolized spiritual enlightenment. She began to carry the card in her pocketbook and to tell friends that she was the High Priestess or, sometimes, the High Priestess of the Satanic Church.

•

It seems clear that Marlene's first thoughts about killing her parents were a similar kind of play acting--what psychologists call projected fantasy. The first time she mentioned killing her parents in public, Chuck recalls, was during a gripe session at their friend Steve Donnelly's house: "We were bitching about things we didn't like--school, being hassled by the police, our parents' laying down all these rules. Marlene began talking about how much she hated her parents. She said, 'I wish they were dead. I wish someone would kill them.' 'I know what you mean,' I said. 'My parents are a real drag, too.' "

At first, none of her friends made much of a distinction between that kind of remark and what Chuck would later call "normal teenage talk about wishing your folks would drop dead." Nor was anyone especially alarmed when Marlene first speculated aloud about how she would kill her parents. Around that time, she mentioned to a girlfriend that it would be easy to poison the soup she was sometimes called upon to heat up for Naomi at lunchtime. "I could lace it with 50 tabs of acid and watch her space to death," Marlene said.

A series of new sore points--Marlene's deteriorating schoolwork, the number of hours she spent on the telephone, her "fast" friends--added an unaccustomed dynamic to the Olives' family life. No longer was the tension solely between Naomi and Marlene, with Jim playing his usual mediating role. To be sure, Naomi and Marlene fought as bitterly as ever. More than once, in fact, their arguments had gone beyond shouting matches to physical abuse. One routine argument escalated to such a pitch of fury that Naomi hurled a hot iron she was using at Marlene across the room. It glanced off her wrist, leaving a red welt and, eventually, a scar that became a vivid symbol of Marlene's hatred of her mother.

Now Jim and Marlene began to argue frequently as well. She still tended to see her father's disciplinary actions as his way of "kissing my mom's toes" and felt jealous that he paid so much attention to Naomi. "It's either me or her," Marlene yelled on one occasion. "Take your pick."

Partly because of those family arguments, Marlene drew closer to Chuck, who had been faithfully biding his time while she dated other boys. She finally slept with him the day his mother was scheduled to undergo a hysterectomy. After Joanne Riley left for the hospital, the teenagers went to listen to records in Chuck's room. "She started to undress and I just sat there and stared at her," Chuck recalls. "She unbuttoned my shirt and told me to get in bed with her. I said, 'All right.' I was enthralled. I never thought it would happen. And so we had sex for a short time and I climaxed really fast and then I almost blacked out when I got out; I just couldn't believe it. Then, a few minutes later, we had sex again for about 45 minutes to an hour. Afterward, she said that she wanted sex in her own time and in her own way. That she would come to me; I wasn't to try to take her."

Chuck was the first boy Marlene had gone out with who was less experienced sexually than she was, and from the beginning, sex with him had been a means of control and, sometimes, of humiliation. She delighted in arousing him while he was driving and helpless to return her advances, several times doing so in the presence of girlfriends. But primarily, Chuck provided Marlene with a blank canvas on which to create sexual fantasies.

More inconvenient for Chuck was Marlene's insistence on what he called telephone sex. In general, the telephone became a kind of umbilical cord connecting Chuck to Marlene, a way for her to keep him in tow and to exact a certain revenge on her parents for limiting her outgoing calls. Having ignored him for months, she now wanted him to check in with her frequently throughout the day to tell her what he was doing. Chuck generally called from a public telephone outside a nearby 7-Eleven store, using rolls of dimes he kept in his glove compartment for that purpose and wrapping himself in a sleeping bag to ward off the cold. During those hours-long early-morning conversations, Marlene enjoyed a captive audience for her fantasies about her future as a rock star, an actress or a high-class callgirl. She would also give full vent to her hatred of Naomi, recounting their latest argument in minute, if often misleading, detail. She talked about her plans to find her real mother and her speculations about the woman's identity. And at some point in the conversation, she would bring up the game of telephone sex, asking Chuck to pretend that he was making love to her and give a detailed, graphically explicit account of his actions.

It was during one of those telephone conversations that Marlene first elicited Chuck's help in killing her mother. If she and Chuck could come up with enough money by pulling off a big coke deal, she mused, maybe she could hire someone to do the job.

"Either I'm gonna do her in or myself," Marlene said after relating her latest argument with Naomi. "You must know someone who'd do it to help us out."

"Maybe I do," Chuck said casually. "Let me think about it."

"Think now," Marlene suddenly challenged him. "What about one of your connections?"

"Well," Chuck said, wriggling on the hook, "if anyone can do it, or at least know someone who would, it's Fred Griffin. He's a really big-time dealer with a lot of underworld contacts in the city."

"Talk to him," Marlene insisted.

In reality, Fred, the older brother of Chuck's friend Gary Griffin, was a car painter living in San Francisco who had, several years back, provided the boys with some marijuana when they started dealing. "It wasn't exactly that I picked a name out of the air," Chuck said later. "He was a real person, so if she checked up on me, she couldn't say I was lying. I figured that after she blew off some steam about her mom, the matter would drop."

Around that time, Chuck and Marlene embarked on a whirlwind spree that would end only after they had amassed thousands of dollars' worth of stolen merchandise of every description--dozens of blouses, pants, dresses, shoes, purses and bottles of perfume and bath oil from Marin's best department stores and trendiest boutiques. Chuck agreed to participate to "win Marlene's appreciation," though at first, she took most of the initiative. Marlene would hide large items inside a tear in the lining of Chuck's leather jacket or in a cloth "booster bag" that she pinned to the inside of her own rabbitskin coat. Soon, they became an expert team, one of them distracting the salesclerk while the other shoplifted. Mounds of stolen merchandise piled up in the trunk and on the back seat of Chuck's car. After every theft, Marlene would carefully remove and save the price tags and enter the value of the items in a notebook. Only occasionally would Chuck take something for himself.

Other members of their group knew that Chuck and Marlene were shoplifting (in fact, Marlene gave her girlfriends much of the stolen merchandise) and warned them to stop before they got caught. Chuck's old friends, in particular, saw his latest activity as one of a series of worrisome changes in his behavior--a result, they all assumed, of Marlene's influence over him. To some extent, even Chuck recognized what was happening to him. "Every time I heard that Marshall Tucker line 'Can't you see what that woman she's been doin' to me,' I'd get a nervous twinge." Marlene was Chuck's "most expensive habit," and he increased his drug dealing "to support her in style." ("I don't want you to stop dealing," Marlene had recently written to him in one of her "farewell" letters. "I want to be able to hear you're going higher in the business. I want to hear you went to Kezar Stadium and sold dope to Pink Floyd."

Like Chuck, Marlene linked their relationship to a favorite pop song--The Electric Light Orchestra's Evil Woman. She noticed that she could get Chuck to do practically anything for her simply by staring him down, and her power over him worried her. ("Chuck's always thinking of me," Marlene wrote in her diary. "His friends notice and, in a way, despise me for it. I have heard people say that I have him so tied to my pinkie that he has no other life.") But on the few occasions when he defied her, she could show a quick and nasty temper. Once, friends were astonished to see Marlene suddenly become angry and bite Chuck through the sleeve of his leather jacket hard enough to draw blood. Later, Chuck admitted that Marlene had bitten him before in anger. Then he took off his shirt to show something even more astonishing. One day after he and Marlene had made love, Chuck explained, she had insisted on carving her initials into his shoulder with the kitchen knife she carried in her purse. And by then, the three neatly executed inch-high letters, M.L.O., had turned from raw welts into permanent scars.

The result of Chuck's growing estrangement from his parents and friends over Marlene was that he spent almost all of his time with her. Their sexual relationship had become intensely sadomasochistic. A poem Marlene wrote at that time, titled Gonna Crush Him Under My Feet, commanded her unnamed lover to "Crawl across the room / beg for more / let me hear you beg for more." She and Chuck would take a sack of whips, ropes, knives, guns and other paraphernalia to a cabin they knew about. Marlene would always insist that Chuck dress for the occasion as what she called the master of the whores--shirtless, wearing only black-leather pants and a suede ski mask he had borrowed from a friend at Marlene's encouragement. (She promptly dubbed it the "executioner's hood.") Then, using all the articles they had brought with them, they would act out Marlene's rape fantasies.

On one such afternoon, Chuck recalls, "We took a gun and some knives and lengths of rope up to the cabin. I held the gun on her--it wasn't loaded, but I told her it was--and tied her wrists up against the banister on the side of the cabin, and when I stepped back, she kicked me backward. . . . I sat down on her legs and tied them up. I took a knife and cut all of her clothes off--her shirt, button by button, then her bra and panties. Then I held the knife to her throat and fucked her. Afterward, I cut her loose and she jumped up and grabbed the knife and started to come at me. But one of her legs was still tied, and she tripped and I grabbed her and knocked the knife out of her hand and pushed her back onto the floor. She kicked me and called me a bastard and a punk and said, Who did I think I was? and spit in my face.

"After a while, I started using the gun to masturbate her. Tell me it's loaded,' she would say. 'Pull back the hammer.' She would become really turned on. I didn't like it at first, but I gave up trying to stop her."

If sex was one way that Marlene, in her words, "got some power over Chuck," witchcraft was another. She gave Chuck a helix-shaped Egyptian bracelet and told him she had cast a spell on it that would allow her to communicate with him over distances. Afterward, whenever Chuck felt a tingling or a pinching sensation on his wrist, he called Marlene; more often than not, she said she had been trying to get in touch with him.

Marlene continued to experiment with tarot and other fortunetelling cards, sometimes coming up with readings that her friends thought were astonishingly accurate. Toward the end of March, she laid out Chuck's tarot and told him that there "was some kind of trouble coming that will make things hard for us. You will go to the tower."

Chuck and Marlene were arrested on March 26 at the Emporium, a large department store in Northgate Mall, where they had begun their shoplifting sprees three weeks earlier. Chuck was photographed (the picture shows him dressed in a black-leather vest, with long hair and love beads, and did him little good as a character reference when the prosecution introduced it during his trial), fingerprinted and sent to the Marin County jail, charged with grand larceny. Marlene was taken to the Marin County juvenile hall and charged with violating section 602 of the California juvenile code, which covers any adult criminal act, without fine distinctions--anything, that is, from the most minor misdemeanor to murder.

After Marlene's detention hearing, juvenile-hall probation officer Nancy Boggs made a special point of asking her superior to reassign the Olive case to a colleague. "I felt that I was loaded up with crazy families and couldn't do the situation justice," she recalls. "There's going to be more trouble with this one," she told juvenile-services director Dave Rogers. "Marlene is angry at her parents--legitimately so. She has a disturbed mother, an ineffective father unable to make decisions, a boyfriend her parents disapprove of strongly. She's acting out. It's a classic blowup situation."

It did not seem so close to exploding when Marlene arrived home. She remembers being "so scared that I asked permission to open the refrigerator door." She began attending classes regularly and going home after school to do homework. She signed up for an adult-education course titled The Psychology of Crisis, thinking "it could help me learn to deal with what was happening."

In the same spirit, Marlene wrote Chuck a brief note hinting that she wanted to break up with him. "Don't bother with my fantasies and trying to please me," the note cautioned Chuck. "They are a sickness I have that is out of this world. They are carried too far. Growing up for me is hard to do. Poetry, music, acting and singing are only farfetched dreams of a neurotic girl, nothing important, nothing to share."

Over the telephone, Marlene confirmed Chuck's worst fears about breaking up, telling him that her parents insisted that they never see each other again. She reported her father's threat to shoot him if he showed up at the house and Jim's further warning that if necessary, he would get a court order forbidding the couple to see each other.

Chuck moped around the house for a few days in a despondent mood and then decided to go over to the Olives' house, hoping that by then, Jim had "cooled down enough" so that he could both apologize and explain that he wasn't entirely to blame for getting Marlene into trouble. He never got the words out of his mouth. As soon as Jim heard the approaching sound of Chuck's unmffled Buick, he went outside to meet him. "Don't bother to come over here ever again!" he yelled, his index finger gesturing accusingly and his face florid with rage. "And don't call Marlene. If I ever so much as hear of your being with Marlene, I'll make sure you regret it." Jim turned around and stomped inside. Chuck stared at the front door for a few minutes after it had been slammed shut, wondering if he should try again, and then left. He never saw Jim Olive again until the moment before he shot him to death.

The next day, Chuck made a halfhearted suicide attempt. He had tried to talk with Marlene outside school and she had rebuffed him. Then he filled a medicine bottle with a variety of depressants--Benadryls, Darvons and Valiums. That evening, he called Marlene. During the conversation, he took out pill after pill, announcing what he was doing before swallowing each one. By the time Chuck hung up, he had swallowed several dozen pills and could barely stagger out to his car and drive to a far corner of the Civic Center parking lot. When he woke up, it was still dark. It was not until he saw a newspaper the next morning that he realized he had missed a full day.

Whatever the imbalance in Marlene's relationship with Chuck, she had come to depend on his affection and emotional support, especially during trying times at home. Her promise not to see him--like the other resolutions she had made in juvenile hall--faded as soon as she put the experience behind her and the Olives' family life returned to normal. Unfortunately, normal meant the quick collapse of any improvement in her relationship with Naomi. Two weeks after Marlene had returned home, she and her mother had a violent argument.

Like all of Marlene and Naomi's fights, that one started with a comically minor irritation and soon burst out of control, each participant expertly fanning the other's fury. It began in the early evening, when Marlene was helping her mother prepare dinner. Naomi, who had been sipping Scotch all afternoon and was feeling the effects, became irritated at the way Marlene was fixing the salad. "How many times do I have to tell you to cut the celery on a bias?" she snapped. "You do that on purpose to annoy me."

As usual, Marlene was taken aback by her mother's sudden change of mood and, reacting with a familiar taunt, jumped to attention, gave her mother a Nazi salute and said, "Heil Hitler!" From there, the two women struck all the black notes of their long-standing discord.

"You look like a tramp!" Naomi yelled. "Can't you ever wear a brassiere?"

"Well, I guess if my mom was one, I'm one," Marlene answered.

"Your so-called mom gave you away; that's how much she cared. I'm your mother, and don't you forget it."

"The hell you are."

"Sometimes, I wish I wasn't. We were better off without you. All you ever do is tear this family apart."

"All you ever do is drink. You're a real space case. How come you keep moving your eyebrows up and down, crazy lady?"

"You watch your tongue. Wait till your father hears about this."

"You can't even make him a proper wife."

"What kind of a daughter do you suppose you are?"

"Bitch! Crazy lady! One day, they're gonna cart you off in a strait jacket."

At that point, Marlene began biting her own right forearm in rage. But this time, the deflection of her hatred onto her own person wasn't enough, and she picked up the knife she had been using to cut vegetables and flung it at Naomi. It bounced off the kitchen cabinet behind her mother. "If they don't take you away," she yelled, "I'll kill you myself!"

When Jim came home, he found Marlene behind the locked bathroom doors and Naomi exhausted on her bed. When Naomi told him about the incident, he was properly horrified--his "fisherman's wives" were becoming lethal. Instead of playing his usual mediator's role, he sided squarely with Naomi. After discussing the matter with his wife--a fact that angered his daughter more than the punishment itself--Jim decided to dock Marlene from seeing any of her friends for two weeks.

But even Jim could not have known how desperate the situation had already become. In her poetry and in letters to friends that she never mailed, Marlene was now regularly recording her fear of being overcome by fantasies of murdering her parents. In a poem titled Space-Age Sacrifice, she wrote that no matter what she set her mind to, "All that arises is / Murder. A sort of revenge." And in May, two weeks after Marlene had thrown the kitchen knife at her mother in a rage, she calmly and deliberately tried to make her fantasy real.

The intervening period had been one of almost unrelieved hostility between mother and daughter, arguments whose specific origins vanished into the woodwork like layers of furniture polish. But the Saturday morning when Marlene tried for the first time to poison her mother had been relatively quiet. Jim was out on his rounds, Naomi was resting in bed and Marlene was in her own room across the hall, watching cartoons on television. In recent months, she had wondered aloud to friends what it would take for Naomi to "space to death" on LSD or "nod out permanently" on downers, and that morning, when her mother asked for lunch, she decided to find out. She prepared coffee, cream-of-mushroom soup and a salad with bottled dressing, and then she emptied a dozen Darvon and Dalmane capsules into the food and drink, which easily camouflaged the white powder. She took the tray of food to Naomi and went back to her own room. A few minutes later, Naomi called out, "There's something wrong with this salad, Marlene. It tastes bitter." And a few seconds after that: "The soup tastes funny, too. Maybe there's something wrong with my taste buds." Naomi drank the sweetened coffee, but the effect was merely to prolong her habitual afternoon nap.

However farfetched and inept, perhaps deliberately so, the poisoning attempt erased the already razor-thin line between Marlene's fantasy life and reality. Around that time, she began to talk almost daily about killing her parents, often in a disconcertingly casual manner. Her poetry and other writings in those weeks reflect an intense inner debate, fear alternating with hope from one page to the next. "I'm trying to fight my way out of dreams I thought were reality," she warned herself, recognizing, as she put it in one poem, that she "may self-pretend / until the end." Finally, the whole torturous debate became so painful that she backed away from further reflection:Maybe, just maybe, I would beBetter off not knowingCertain things about me.

At the end of the first week in June, Mary Sigler, Marlene's new probation officer, was getting ready for a two-week vacation in Hawaii. She was a precise, attractive woman with closely cropped blonde hair and the case-hardened air of a "juvy" veteran. She wrote the Olives, along with the parents of half a dozen other new charges, an introductory letter explaining that if a problem arose while she was away, they could contact her office. When she turned over the files of her new cases to her superior before leaving, she clipped a note to Marlene's that read, "This one could blow up while I'm gone."

And it was true that with the end of the school term, a new urgency had entered Marlene's relationship with her parents. After speaking with her high school advisor about his daughter's truancy and failing grades, Jim decided that his only recourse was to send Marlene to boarding school in the fall, and he wrote letters of inquiry to several institutions around the country that had been recommended to him. Since Marlene had no intention of starting over again in an unfamiliar environment, Jim's decision further alienated her from her father. As for Marlene and her mother, they hardly ever talked those days; they either hurled abuse at each other, as likely as not accompanied by shoves and slaps, or passed each other in stony silence

Faced with so much hostility at home, Marlene drew closer than ever to Chuck.

In letters and notes, she expressed her abiding love for him and, for the first time, her intention to marry him and raise a family. She talked about their future together "after I'm free of a certain disease." At times, she would draw Chuck into the plot, implying that they could get married while she was still a minor only if her parents were killed ("I hope you'll wait till I'm 17 to marry me or kill my parents"). Some of those letters, never mailed, were later found by the police in Marlene's bedroom: others were confiscated from the Riley house. Before her trial, when Marlene's lawyer asked her to read and comment on the evidence the police held against her, she wrote on several of the letters, both mailed and unmailed, "Fantasy note."

Chuck, of course, had no way of knowing.

When she was displeased with him, Marlene would threaten to break off the relationship, often using the difficulty of escaping from her parents' constant vigilance as an excuse. If Chuck balked at buying her something she wanted or at stealing it, she threatened to "turn tricks"--or simply to turn to another, more compliant boyfriend.

From an occasional topic of conversation after arguments at home, the murder of her parents had by then become Marlene's constant obsession. Hardly a day passed when she failed to describe some new way she had dreamed up to commit the crime. One plan had the killer robbing the house or beating up and raping Marlene in order to obscure the motive. Another, even more bizarre notion, which Marlene had mentioned to several friends besides Chuck, called for placing a bomb in the trunk of the family car timed to explode when her parents were out on a shopping expedition. There was a still crazier idea of using another car to force the Vega to crash down the steep cliffs below the perilously twisting coastal highway. And, of course, there were the old stand-by plots to poison or shoot her parents or kill them in one or another well-timed "accident," such as a house fire or a hit-and-run driving incident.

It was impossible for Chuck to know just how seriously to take those schemes, for whenever he decided that Marlene was "just blowing off steam," she would convince him anew that she was, in fact, deadly serious. Recently, after she found out that Chuck had given away his gun, she had grown very upset and had told him to get it back or buy a new one.

A week before the school term ended, Marlene's report card arrived in the mail, confirming her high school advisor's assessment of her scholastic performance. At that point, Jim told Marlene about his decision to send her to boarding school in the fall. "No way, Father dear," she said. "I'd rather die."

"They're sending me away," Marlene announced to Chuck that evening when he picked her up at their usual meeting place at the far end of the walkway between Hibiscus Way and Las Gallinas Avenue. "You better do something fast or we're finished. If you can't find someone else, you do it, Chuck. Do it yourself." She nuzzled up to him in the car and spoke in the little-girl, singsong voice she had always used so successfully with her father when she wanted something. "Please, Chuck. Pretty please."

Until then, Marlene had not involved Chuck as a participant in her plans to kill her parents, and he was, as he later said, "shocked but not surprised" that she would. She had been exhorting him almost every day to help her "do something about the disease," saying that otherwise, her parents would make it increasingly difficult, if not impossible, for the two to see each other. It was the one threat Chuck could not abide.

On Wednesday, three days before the murders, Marlene told Chuck that her father had compiled a list of all her friends who used drugs and was about to turn it in to the San Rafael police. Chuck, of course, was prominently mentioned.

On Thursday, Marlene and Naomi got into one of their worst rows ever. In the late morning, two of Marlene's friends, Ed Tucker and Glenn Erlinger, stopped by to pick up some shirts that she had promised to tie-dye for them. Marlene told Chuck that they would drop her off at his house but instead accepted their invitation to "toke up" with them. The three drove- down the Lucas Valley Road until they came to a secluded creek bed, a favorite place for Terra Linda teenagers to smoke marijuana and drink wine, which was exactly what they proceeded to do. On the way back, they were all feeling, according to Marlene, "pretty wasted." They dropped Glenn off at home and drove on to Hibiscus Way, where Marlene invited Ed inside.

The Olives had recently turned part of the garage into a makeshift den, replete with their old living-room furniture, a radio and an extension of the house phone. Marlene showed Ed into the garage and then went to her room to change into her "bikini jeans"--a pair of very short cutoffs that particularly infuriated Naomi--and a tank top. She turned on the radio. She and Ed were petting and disrobing each other when a telephone call from Chuck interrupted them. He wanted to know why Marlene hadn't come over to his house hours earlier, as she had intended, and even though she said she'd be there soon, the male voice he could hear giggling in the background indicated otherwise.

Marlene and Ed were making love on the couch when Naomi, drawn by the sudden silence, walked in and caught them in the act. She reeled back as if struck in the chest. "How dare you!" she screamed. "How dare you do that in my house! Wait until your father hears about this."

Ed was hopping around the garage, trying to get his pants on. "It's OK, lady," he said, trying to calm Naomi. "I'm leaving now. Excuse me, I'm sorry." Then he ran past her and out the front door.

Naomi screamed at Marlene for a half hour, calling her a tramp and a whore and indicating that "the apple doesn't fall far from the tree--the rotten apple." At one point, she ran to get a dictionary and said, "You're promiscuous, Marlene. Do you know what that means? Look it up. P-R-O-M-I-S-C-U-O-U-S." Marlene did not, in fact, know the meaning of the word, and Naomi insisted that she read the dictionary definition aloud. At that point, Marlene broke down in tears. She begged Naomi not to tell her father about the incident.

For the rest of the afternoon, Naomi stayed in her room and Marlene sat on the living-room couch, reading stacks of fashion magazines and hoping someone would call her. Jim came home around six. He had been at the office all day, and Naomi must have reached him there, for it was clear from his angry look that he knew what had happened in the garage. Marlene became furious at the thought of Naomi's betrayal, and she stormed into her room, yelling, "You bitch! You fucking bitch! You lied to me! I should kill you for this!"

Jim's reaction to the episode was, typically, anger followed by conciliation. At first, he told Marlene that Naomi was right; she was behaving shamefully. He forbade her to go out with boys "until further notice," and when Chuck called a short time later to find out what was going on, Jim took the phone away from her and said, without knowing who it was, "Marlene is not available now. Please don't call back." But later on that same evening, he softened considerably.

Friday afternoon, one of her girlfriends picked Marlene up while Chuck waited a block away, and the three of them drove to the Civic Center lagoon. Marlene joked about the incident with Ed, which hurt Chuck, though he decided to "play along and not make a scene." But she also talked about running away to stay with friends in Oregon or Florida before her parents sent her off to boarding school. When she was alone with Chuck for a few minutes, she became unusually affectionate. "I love you so much," she told him. "I'll never forget that no one's ever stuck by me like you have." Chuck felt that there was something oddly final about her words. But for once, at least, she hadn't mentioned killing her parents.

When Marlene walked home to meet her ten P.M. curfew, Jim and Naomi were sitting in the living room, waiting for her with faces even longer than usual. "Jody Swafford's father called" was all Jim had to say for Marlene to know that she was in big trouble. She hardly knew Jody, who lived near the Air Force base in Novato and attended a different high school, but she had spoken with her many times recently, usually attempting to disguise her voice.

What had happened was that a month or so earlier, Jody had heard through a mutual friend that Marlene could get her an ounce of Panama Red. Marlene had agreed and Jody had met her at Northgate Mall to give her $40 for the marijuana. Marlene had told her to wait a half hour and she would return with the lid. It would not have been the first time that Chuck had sold her pot at cost and allowed her to keep the profit. But because she was not likely to run into Jody again, Marlene had decided simply to hold on to the money. Jody had called her many times over the next several weeks and had reached either Naomi, who always sounded angry, or "Marlene's younger sister," who promised to pass along the message as soon as Marlene returned home. Finally, Jody had decided to swallow her pride rather than lose the money, and she had told her father about the incident. Air Force Colonel Martin Swafford agreed to contact Marlene's father to try to get the money back. He had called the Olive house in the early evening and explained the situation as best he could to Naomi.

By the time Marlene returned home, Jim and Naomi had been anxiously waiting for three hours to talk with her. Backed into a corner, Marlene admitted having kept the money, but whatever hope Jim might have taken from her candor was offset by her explanation. "I didn't even know the broad," she said, "Besides, it was only pot. It could've been heroin."

For once, Jim's own anger kept Naomi quiet. "I'm at the end of my rope with you, Marlene," he said in carefully measured tones. "Like it or not, next fall, you're going away to boarding school. This summer, I don't want you to associate with any of your friends. In fact, you won't go out of the house for any reason unless you have my express permission. I've a mind to let you stew in juvenile hall for the summer--you and the rest of your no-good friends."

As Marlene had earlier arranged, Chuck called her from a telephone booth before going home that night. Sobbing, she told him what had happened. "I'm completely grounded--no telephone, no seeing friends, no going out, no nothing. He says he's going to turn us all in. That's it for us, Chuck."

Chuck arose early Saturday morning with his usual wake-up snort of cocaine. Because Marlene was restricted to her house and he had nothing to do but "kick back" all day, he also swallowed half a tab of windowpane acid. It was a bright, clear morning, unseasonably warm for the first day of summer.

Chuck called Marlene, more to allay his apprehension over their last conversation than to make any plans to see her. He could not have chosen a worse moment. Marlene and Naomi had both awakened early, and the temporary lull of the night before was soon shattered. Jim had left the house to run some errands but would return shortly. Naomi began drinking even before breakfast. Marlene was watching the Saturday-morning cartoons on television that preceded her favorite Creature Features show. She was dressed in jeans and a skimpy T-shirt and had gone to a utility drawer in the kitchen for a hammer--a red-handled, claw-necked tool meant for heavy work--to fix a leather strap that had come loose on her wooden platforms, the very scrape of which on the linoleum floors was enough to spark Naomi's fury. With all the commotion of the night before, the sink still held the dirty dinner dishes that Marlene was supposed to have washed.

Afterward, Marlene was never exactly certain what had prompted their latest--and last--argument. Perhaps it was just the concurrence of the dirty dishes and the platform shoes--to her mother, the symbol of Marlene's "whorish ways." Perhaps it was Naomi's gnawing awareness that Colonel Swafford's call meant that Marlene was still "broadcasting family problems." Certainly, their argument was fueled by Naomi's drinking and Marlene's disgust with it.

Marlene remembers that her mother insisted that she do the dishes when she came into the kitchen for some orange juice. "I'm watching television," Marlene said. "I'll do them later." She walked back to her own room.

"It'll only take a few minutes," Naomi, trailing her, insisted. "You can watch television after."

"You don't do anything around the house but drink and stumble around and mumble to yourself," Marlene shot back.

"So why should I?"

"At least I'm not a dope pusher, like some people I know," Naomi answered.

According to Marlene, the two women kept "hassling each other." After hearing her mother allude again to her promiscuity, Marlene started shaking her rear end. Whatever her mother said, Marlene answered "Shut up" to try to block it out.

"You stop parading around like a--"

"Shut up."

"You're nothing but--"

"Shut up."

"Latin swine."

"Shut up."

"Gutter tramp."

"Shut up."

"Your mother was--"

"Don't talk about my mom. She's a million times better than you."

Marlene put her hands over her ears and half-chanted, "Shutupshutupshutupshutup. . . ." She stared at Naomi, who continued to berate her soundlessly, her eyebrows and wrinkled forehead moving in perfect synchrony with her overlip-sticked mouth. Marlene could hear only odd snatches of her mother's monolog, but she knew it was about the "Norfolk whore" who had gotten "knocked up" and "gave you away."

Naomi's last remark, according to Marlene, "blew it completely." At that point, Marlene kicked Naomi, who pushed her daughter against the wall.

"I hate you!" Marlene shouted.

"I hate you, too!" Naomi screamed back.

"Bitch!"

"Shut your damn foul mouth!"

Chuck's call scarcely interrupted the argument, since Marlene repeatedly threw the receiver down to hurl insults back at her mother. It was when Naomi left the dining area that Marlene, as she would later admit, "opened my big mouth one time too many. Everything exploded. Everything that was building up inside me for years."

"Get your gun," she told Chuck. "We've got to kill that bitch today."

Chuck Riley was sentenced to death for the murder of Jim and Naomi Olive and spent a year and a half on San Quentin's death row before the Supreme Court temporarily overturned California's capital-punishment law. Since his guards assessed him in their final report as "a good, conforming individual who programs well," he was reassigned to the California Men's Colony, a medium-security prison at San Luis Obispo, where he is now serving out a life sentence and is in charge of running the prisoners' self-help psychological program.

Marlene was also convicted of murdering her parents. But because she was a minor at the time of the crime, she was sent to the Ventura School in Southern California, where she spent three years. Shortly before she was scheduled to be released, she escaped from a Los Angeles halfway house, flew to Manhattan and became a high-priced prostitute in an East Side brothel.

"'Take your clothes off so we don't get bloodstains on them,' Marlene said, unbuttoning hers. . . ."

"He was sure that at any moment a police patrol car would drive by and find them with two bodies. . . ."