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A Killing Fever

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One dark night, two girls, two killers, and one desolate bridge. And as time passes, the players all rearrange themselves in the wake turbulence of an enormous tragedy ... which plays out its next act, on another night many years later, on the same desolate bridge when the survivor returns to face her demons. The facts are known, the memories still a little too vivid, the sense of justice a little murky.

Ah, but that's all a long time ago. Now, all we have are stories. The girls were my friends in the small town where we grew up. Thirty years later, I went home to write about the crime on Fremont Canyon Bridge ... and the endless ripples it caused in my hometown, and my heart. I told the story the best I could, relying on a lifetime in newspapering, and the whispers from deep down inside.

But someone else was telling the same story, at almost exactly the same moment. The result was a display of the fascinating mystery of art, vision and perspective.

My book is "FALL: The Rape and Murder of Innocence in a Small Town," a true crime/memoir about real people in a real tragedy. But for moments of introspection and a harrowing glimpse inside a killer's rotten mind, "FALL" is a narrative nonfiction in the mold of Truman Capote's "In Cold Blood," at least, according to reviewers.

But when poet Robert Cooperman told the same story -- a story he heard from a friend in my old hometown -- he elevated it to a different plane, imbuing it with an otherworldly quality. Indeed, he took the story to a completely new world, the 19th century Colorado Rockies, and he transmogrified the real victims and killers into imaginary ones whose lives, histories, dreams, tragedies and betrayals could be more powerfully dissected for the reader.

The former English professor at the University of Georgia and Bowling Green wrote "A Killing Fever." This collection of related poems explores the abduction of sisters Mercy and Merry Goodwin, who are dragged by miscreants to a sheer cliff and thrown off by their assailants. One lives and one dies. The endless ripples go on for years, until the survivor returns to that precipice to face her demons.

Cooperman captures the cant and voice of 19th century poetics marvelously, but more fascinating is his telling of the story with which I have lived for more than 30 years -- and told myself in "FALL." I have long marveled at a reader's intuition about messages in my own books, how they can see some gem I never saw, or never intended. Here Cooperman, a storyteller, has taken a painfully true story and turned it into a beautiful work of fiction that captures the essence of tragedy as well as the truth can.