narrative began to assume a particularly interesting framework. If it was the fabrication her brother believed it to be, it was brilliantly done.
“I tied him up with part of the clothesline I have in the garage for drying rugs and things I don’t want to put in the dryer,” her story went on. “I still wasn’t really sure he was dead, but even if he was I wanted him tied up. Somehow I knew I had to get rid of the body right away or I’d die. Don’t ask me how I knew that, or where the thought came from. I just knew that.”
Crandall’s story went on to describe her various approaches to removing the body. Getting it into the kitchen would be no problem, but cutting it up seemed too disgusting. Besides, the garbage disposal could not be employed out of fear that its excessive use at that hour would attract the attention of neighbors, or that “something would get stuck” and require a repairman.
Deck Decker had been a sportsman prior to his death at fifty-three from a massive heart attack two years before his widow’s encounter with a stranger in her garage. He maintained the rented locker near Borrego Springs for game he killed and stored for home use. At the time of his death the locker was only partially stocked. Muffin Crandall said she kept up the rental fees and made regular trips to the locker, both using the game left by her husband and restocking the space with bulk-buy bargains and gifts of fish and meat from her husband’s friends. She said she was used to making trips to the locker, and the idea of freezing the body “just seemed natural.”
Long before sunrise on that night five years in the past, she had trussed the body in a fetal position, gotten it into a trash bag, and transported it to the Roadrunner cold storage facility. Muffin said she may have spoken to friends on the phone the next day, but she didn’t remember. She said that no one was present at Roadrunner when she used the freezer’s hand cart to stash the new package behind boxes containing eighty pounds of chicken wings she’d purchased for a civic theater fund-raising picnic. She said the only thing she remembers from that time is terror, but after leaving the freezer, “it was as if none of it had really happened.”
“When I’d try to think about it, think about taking that bag out and getting rid of it someplace, the fear would come back,” she said. “It would just fill me up like black, cold ink in a bottle. My hands would shake and I’d want to throw up. I couldn’t even walk, it would be so bad. So I just kept paying rent on the locker and going out there with stuff, taking stuff out to use. I knew someday I’d have to do something, but I just couldn’t think about it.”
Diminishing the rest of Dan’s material, I opened a new file. “Crandall, Muffin—Initial Profile,” I centered in fourteen-point type. Then I typed a list of factors which seemed, even at this point, potentially significant:
1) Subject a fifty-six-year-old widow at time of the assault, uses her own surname rather than her husband’s.
2) Subject apparently living alone at time of assault, but maintains frozen food locker for bulk quantities of food. Why?
3) Subject does not mention children, friends, or family other than her deceased husband. Odd. Women typically refer to social cohorts in all narratives.
4) Subject displays a thorough comprehension of archetypal primate female fear in her narrative, leaving out no element but rape. Nowhere does she admit to fearing rape, only murder. This deletion from the usual fear profile is significant.
5) What was weight and physical condition of subject five years ago? Now?
6) What is estimated weight and physical condition of victim at time of assault?
7) Subject presents as self-sufficient and capable, yet permits herself to be called “Muffin.” Check origin of this nickname.
8) Subject mentions that bulk chicken wings in her locker were for a civic theater fund-raiser. What civic theater? How was she connected to it? Who else was connected to it? Does it still exist?
9) Subject’s deceased husband, Deck. Who was he, what did he do, what was the marriage like, and how did she cope with his death? Children of this marriage? Previous marriages?
10) What was/is her source of income? Education? Avocations?
After printing the list I took a cool bath, washed the woody, acorn-brown growth I call hair, and phoned for a haircut appointment near the prison at eight. My best gray linen suit with its long, straight skirt would make me look like an Edwardian nun, but that was okay. What wasn’t okay was that the only matching shoes I could find were the same black kid pumps I’d worn to my mother’s funeral twenty-two years in the past. Good shoes will last a lifetime if you take care of them, especially if you only wear them while in disguise. I wondered if Muffin Crandall would buy the act I was about to stage for her.
Chapter Three
As prisons go, Las Colinas is not unpleasant, at least from the outside. There are no coils of razor wire, no guard towers. There are no kennels of baying hounds waiting to track some hard-eyed woman in unflattering horizontal stripes through thickets and ravines. There are no thickets and ravines. Las Colinas is smack in the middle of a suburban San Diego community called Santee. The town is home to feed stores and barbecue restaurants where country and western bands play on weekends. And while my professional interests had skirted the field of penology, it wasn’t difficult to draw a few conclusions about the prison from what I already knew.
Women are fond of enclosed spaces. A by-now-infamous study suggested that while boys are prone to build towers with toy blocks, girls build elaborate enclosures, giving special attention to the decoration and security of entrances. Indeed, a classic Renaissance motif symbolizing the Mother of God was a walled garden. And Las Colinas, while scarcely meeting the aesthetic requirements of the term “garden,” looked to me less like a prison than a typical Southern California elementary school. Several single-story buildings, painted an institutional tan, clustered about a chain-linked central open area in which I could see a couple of picnic tables.
The few truly dangerous women confined here would be in some special, high-security area, I guessed. But the preponderance of the women prisoners could be safely contained with minimal provisions for security. They would display here the same impoverished identities that had led them to the prostitution, drug dealing, or accessory status to a boyfriend’s crime that had captured the attention of the police in the first place.
A very small statistical minority, the female criminal takes up less than five percent of the nation’s cell space and almost none of its razor wire. With certain exceptions such as the rare sociopath and those with untreated psychiatric problems, women offenders are not difficult to control. Even as children female humans easily comprehend the larger social consequences of theft, battery, and murder, and as adults rarely engage in these activities. Those who do, know themselves to be compromised in a much more devastating sense than their male counterparts. The fall is different, farther, and has broken them long before they wind up in prison. As I completed my “Visitor’s Request to See Prisoner” card I contemplated methodologies for learning the truth about the sequence of events that had landed Muffin Crandall in this sad and sterile place. Even then I suspected that the task might be over my head.
“Sit in there at phone ten,” a blonde woman directed from the prison reception area. She wore a badge saying “Corrections Trainee,” and was tucking a stray tail of her tan shirt into olive green wool-blend slacks that made me think of Boy Scout uniforms. I noticed that she carried a walkie-talkie but no sidearm, and looked as if she’d just arrived from a Junior League recruiting tea. That aura of cheerful wealth and privilege.
It seemed odd that she’d seek employment as a prison
