Endnotes

 

 

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1. Of course, in truth, it’s Satan who, historically and quite deliberately, looks a little like a Jew. Return to Reading

 

2. There’ve been a lot of racist bands, part of a fertile white supremacist youth culture. Matthew probably knew RaHoWa, the band. He quotes a Nine Inch Nails song and Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand in a letter sent from prison. On the same page he writes, “RaHowA [sic]/its [sic] a battle cry/RaHowA/its do or die/RaHowA/our spirit shall never die/RaHowA/its a saintly cry!” That sounds like the misremembered lyrics of RaHoWa’s song “RaHoWa” from their 1995 album Cult of the Holy War: “Rahowa!/It’s our battle cry. You’re trembling in fear/cause of this look in my eyes, Rahowa!/It’s the white man’s call,/ You can chase me to the end of the earth,/but I shall never fall, never fall . . .” Return to Reading

 

3. It seems the Columbine massacre was meant to take place on April 19th, not on the 20th, either to spare a student who was supposed be absent that day or to commemorate or rival the burning of the Branch Davidian compound on that day in 1993 and the Oklahoma City bombing, also on the 19th, in 1995. The idea of wearing trench coats may have come from a fantasy scene in The Basketball Diaries (1995) in which Leonardo DiCaprio wears a trench coat and shoots classmates. The point is that widespread speculation about Columbine could have had eerie resonance for Matthew, who’d begun his “war” on the day of the massacre, who was commemorating Hitler’s birthday, and who had likely been impressed by The Matrix. Return to Reading

 

4. According to Darrell, it’s more complicated than I realize. “It all depends on which side it is on and even on the color. On the left side it means ‘in memory’ of someone who has died and is always done in black ink either lined or filled in. On the right side it means that you have killed someone. It can be lined or filled in black. When it is red and black-lined it means that it is ‘wet’ and that you have killed in the name [of], or for, your gang.” Darrell’s teardrop is on the right side, red, black-lined—wet. Return to Reading

 

5. Benjamin Matthew Williams used similar terminology when spinning the yarn about the racist cell he’d supposedly hooked up with at Cal Expo. They demanded he “prove himself” through violent action. Return to Reading

 

6. The Ardmore Sheriff Department’s chief investigator in the case, Rick Batt, says Qualls wasn’t involved and knew neither Fite nor Stevens. A juvenile whom Brad did know boasted about taking a video of Fite’s body and may have helped dump it in a stream. Supposedly, Brad destroyed the video to protect the juvenile whom he called “a dumb kid.” That was how Brad found out about this little-publicized murder and ended up being questioned about it. Return to Reading

 

7. Of major US cities, Baltimore has a higher percentage of African Americans than any but Detroit and New Orleans. Return to Reading

 

8. The name was borrowed from Mondamin, the Indian corn god in Longfellow’s “Song of Hiawatha,” whom Hiawatha wrestles to death in a strange foreshadowing of Scooby’s own death: “And before him breathless, lifeless,/Lay the youth, with hair disheveled,/Plumage torn, and garments tattered,/Dead he lay there in the sunset.” Return to Reading

 

9. I owe those quotations and much of Vitale’s story to John Dickie’s history, Cosa Nostra (Palgrave McMillan, 2004). The translations are mine. Return to Reading

 

10. An important detail: though it’s not widely known, a sixteen-year-old in New York is a minor sexually but not criminally. Katehis was treated as an adult from start to finish. Return to Reading

 

11. Katehis’s XTube account was set up on December 16, 2006, and he hadn’t signed in for a year before the murder, so he was actually only fifteen in the video. Return to Reading