Twentynine Palms: A True Story of Murder, Marines, and the Mojave [Paperback]

Deanne Stillman (Author), Charles Bowden (Preface), T. Jefferson Parker (Foreword)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 2008

August 2, 1991, Twentynine Palms, California: a troubled Marine who has recently returned from the Gulf War savagely murders two young girls. One girl was about to turn sixteen, the other twenty-one.

Exquisitely and inexorably, Deanne Stillman uses this tragedy as a prism through which she explores not only the murders and the families involved but a rootless culture of fatherless families, shattered dreams, and relentless violence. In haunting, vivid prose, she creates a farreaching story of America itself, carrying us into the empty white heart of the Mojave, as we meet and come to know the modern nomads who turn to the West for salvation only to be devoured by its false promise.

--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

The image of a disconnected phone recurs throughout Stillman's tale of social and geographic isolation, military arrogance, sexual violence and death an apt symbol for the disconnections pervading the story. Unfortunately, the metaphor also extends to Stillman's narrative, which signals the plumbing of certain depths, but never makes the connections. The small California town of Twentynine Palms in the Mojave Desert, three hours east of Los Angeles, hosts the world's largest U.S. Marine Corps base. In 1991, it was the setting for the vicious murder of two local teenage girls by a troubled marine. Stillman's story primarily follows Debie McMaster, mother of one of the victims and no stranger to violence herself. Against the desert backdrop described with poetic and geologic detail Stillman examines military life and the surrounding subculture, focusing on jittery soldiers trolling for susceptible young women, themselves desperate for a way out. But exhaustive family histories and a fragmented structure undermine the story's inherent drama. Moreover, Stillman neither affords much insight into the killer's motivations, nor adequately explores the military atmosphere that allowed him to thrive. To her credit, she approaches the hand-to-mouth existence typical of Twentynine Palms with a certain aplomb, but too often the prose becomes crowded with the vernaculars of the subcultures it describes. Stillman, who first reported on this story for Los Angeles Magazine, also treads the fine journalistic line between fact and conjecture. She devotes considerable attention to the protagonists' inner workings and, though endnotes cite her sources, the reader is left wondering about her apparently extraordinary access to these people. (Apr.) Forecast: Despite its flaws, this has enthusiastic blurbs from Lucian Truscott and Ron Rosenbaum, and should find a ready audience in the Southwest, fed by author appearances in Los Angeles, San Diego and elsewhere in the region.
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Library Journal

Housing the largest marine base in the world and centered on the converging point of several Western fault lines in Joshua Tree National Park, Twentynine Palms is an eastern California town in the middle of the Mojave Desert. In her first book, Stillman gives notorious recognition to the little-known town, which was the site of a double rape/murder in 1991. Stillman was assigned to cover this story by Los Angeles magazine. She not only gives a detailed account of the horrible crime (whose resulting legal case was not settled until the late 1990s) but also reveals the haunting truth about impoverished and disenchanted lives within America's overlooked towns. Stillman frequented the place during the drawn-out trial, interviewing key players and reporting the conditions and astonishing lifestyles of the town residents from first-hand observations. Stillman also adds events that were happening throughout the nation during the trial, referring to Desert Storm, O.J. Simpson, and the Rodney King beating. Her straightforward and intriguing writing style exposes a troubled town stricken by violence and lost values, highlighted by a grisly crime. Highly recommended for all public libraries.DVanessa White, "Library Journal"
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 272 pages
• Publisher: Angel City Press (June 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1883318793
• ISBN-13: 978-1883318796
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 6.1 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (49 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,104,257 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars A good book, but a little too much poetic license taken, May 29, 2004

By A Customer

This review is from: Twentynine Palms: A True Story of Murder, Marines, and the Mojave (Paperback)

This book is an engrossing story and in many ways, a great portrait of an underportrayed and largely ignored segment of our American population - the people who work in our gas stations and bars, live in the run-down apartment complexes and cheap motels that dot the landscape, and all too often fall victim to violent crimes that are reported by local newspapers in lurid headlines, only to fade in the public's memory mere days afterward.

That being said, the book has some major flaws. My biggest problems with the book are:
- The author's prose gets a little too purply in places, and it almost seems like her imagination starts running away with her story. There's no way she could have known some of the things she talks about as fact, or even have heard those things from the friends of the deceased. In a fiction book based on actual events, that's fine; but this is presented as a nonfiction account, and it is not.
- The author makes some glaring errors, some of which have been pointed out in other reviews. One that comes to mind is when she talks about a local arcade as being a favorite hangout for Mandi and her friends, then later says the arcade didn't open until after Mandi was killed. An editor should have caught this, if not the author herself. In a work of nonfiction, when details like this are incorrect, you wonder what other details in the book are erroneous.
-Throughout the entire book, Stillman blames the Marine Corps for the deaths of Mandi Scott and Rosie Ortega, but in Mandi's case never places any of the blame where I believe it squarely lies - with Mandi's mother, who allowed her 15-year-old daughter to basically run wild. Mandi's mother Debi knew Rosie Ortega associated with Marines she considered dangerous, yet she thought nothing of letting her daughter spend the night at Rosie's apartment and run around with her friends seemingly unchecked. Stillman takes a pitying view towards Debi and her feelings of self-blame, but in my eyes Debi doesn't blame herself enough. There are predatory men everywhere, not just in Twentynine Palms, but that's why children have parents - to set limits and protect children from harm as best they can. In my view, Debi's children didn't have much chance of escaping a violent, marginal life, being raised by a woman who associated with felons, trafficked drugs, and was barely capable of taking care of herself, much less three children. Regardless of how horrible Debi's husbands beat her, she is the one who's responsible for the poor choices she made in life, although Stillman seems to want to blame the Marine Corps and the desert itself for the bad choices made by women in Mandi's family - there's very little support for personal responsibility of any kind in the book, unless Stillman is talking about the murderer's lack of remorse. It's telling that one of Mandi's friends, who wished to go find Mandi the night before the murders, was prevented from doing so by her mother and escaped harm. I don't mean to blame the victims, because Valentine Underwood, as the murderer, is the one to blame for these horrendous crimes, but if both Mandi and Rosie had been a little more careful about who they associated with, they might still be alive today.

As for the unflattering portraits of Victorville and Twentynine Palms, all I can say is that it's not surprising to me town residents would get upset about how their towns are portrayed, because Stillman definitely doesn't pull any punches when it comes to portraying how desolate and depressing the towns can be. Anyone who has ever lived in a small town knows how entrenched and blind to reality the so called "city fathers" and town boosters can be when it comes to their town. I am sure the towns portrayed in the book have their good qualities, and there are times when Stillman gets very condescending about the desert and its residents, as only someone from the outside can do. But I've been in too many towns like Victorville and Twentynine Palms to totally discount her descriptions.

All in all, the book is worth a read, although the way the narrative jumps around is annoying - I think people read stories about crime partially for the suspense element, and in this case you find out Underwood's sentence before the murders even happen. The book definitely could have been edited more competently, with a little less leeway given to Stillman's at times self-indulgent narrative. But the story is compelling and will stay with you long after you put the book down.

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Brilliant Paradigm through which to view Cyclical violence, May 10, 2001

By 

David Jenison "davidjenison" (New York, NY) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Twentynine Palms: A True Story of Murder, Marines, and the Mojave (Hardcover)

I thought 29 Palms was brilliant. The book uses a brutual double homocide near a military base as a paradigm through which to view the cyclical nature of violence against lower income females. The book definitely gave me insight into the type of aggression that all females can face, and how some seem almost predestined for violence no matter where they go. From a sociological point of view, I thought the book brilliantly stiched together the military base, the desert, and females' historical background to create this situation that continued to bubble up to the explosive and horrific conclusion. My hope is that this book will serve as a catalyst for males to rethink their treatment of females and for females to be empower to break the cycles that constantly strive to drag them down.

14 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Evocative and confrontational, May 16, 2001

By A Customer

This review is from: Twentynine Palms: A True Story of Murder, Marines, and the Mojave (Hardcover)

... Stillman uses the events in her narrative as a sociological lens to explore broader issues of marginality, power, and "family values" in American -- particularly western American -- culture. And she succeeds in doing this, brilliantly at times.

I lived in 29 Palms and neighboring towns in the Morongo Basin for six years, from 1983 to 1989, and I can tell you that the author does NOT do terrible injustice to the social environment she describes. No, all Marines are not violent sexual predators, nor are all townies speed freaks and low-lifes. But I have never encountered the kind of human desolation that I did in 29 Palms, never lived among as many lost souls filled with suspicion, apathy, aggression, rage, and bigotry. To me, the only shocking thing about the murders described in Stillman's book is that they don't happen every day in 29 Palms.

Still, one gets the sense that Stillman isn't telling us the whole story. Debi's ultimate role in her daughter's demise comes across as whitewashed (to say the least) and the author's indictment of military culture is somewhat one dimensional, doing too far in some respects, not far enough in others. But she evokes so much in her descriptions of place (some of which are quite beautiful), revealing a genuine insight for life in the desert, that I found myself lost in my own memories of the Mojave, both good and bad.