Like the narrator of this book, I relied on various pockets of the Internet to acquire information about death and about the dead. I avoided academic and “expert” sources as much as possible; I wanted my information to be coming from sites, mainstream or obscure, that anyone curious about death could access. However, this is a work of fiction: while some of the facts have been reported accurately, many others, in particular pertaining to the lives and deaths of the characters, have been freely distorted.
I am indebted to the following sources: Carmelo Amalfi’s “End in Sight” on Fremantle Herald Interactive, 2013; Susan Atkins’s “Story of Two Nights of Murder” on Cielodrive.com, 1969; Vincent Bugliosi and Curt Gentry’s Helter Skelter, 1974; Katherine Butler’s “Five Weird Things That Happen after You Die” on Mother Nature Network, 2013; “California Screaming: An Interview with Brendan Mullen” on 3 AM Magazine, 2002; Chris Campion’s “Darby Crash: Saint Anger” on Dazed, 2014; Vincee Chavarria’s “Venice: Community Mourns Murdered Mother to Be” on the Argonaut, 2009; CrimeNet’s entry on Catherine and David Birnie in their “Serial Killer Crime Index,” 2012; “Death Valley National Park Geology” on Oh, Ranger!, n.d.; “Devils in the Desert: Charles Manson’s Preferred Hellmouth,” as posted by Jeff on weirdthings.com, 2009; various dictionaries, including The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, Dictionary.com, the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, the Online Etymology Dictionary, the Oxford Dictionary of Current English, and Wordnik; Dignity Memorial’s “Glossary of Funeral Terms,” n.d.; DimensionsInfo’s “Grave Dimensions,” 2012; Robert Draper’s “Called to the Holy Mountain: The Monks of Mount Athos,” which appeared in National Geographic Magazine in 2009; Dying Scene’s “10 Things You Probably Didn’t Know about Darby Crash,” 2014, posted by Cyco Loco; Egyphile’s lyrical response to the question “What does a dead body smell like?” on Yahoo!Answers, 2008; Robert Faturechi and Richard Winton’s “Suspect in Venice Slaying Had Been Held by Culver City Police Days Earlier” in the Los Angeles Times, 2010; Robert Faturechi and Andrew Blankstein’s “Venice Landlord Describes Attack on Victim of Rape-Slaying” in the Los Angeles Times, 2009; Funeralplan.com’s “Burial Vaults and Grave Liners—A Consumer’s Guide,” 2001–3; Adam Gorightly’s “Charles Manson and the Underground Stream” on The Konformist, 2001; my question “How long does it take for a human body to decompose,” answered precisely on FunTrivia, 2008, Quora, 2016, and Yahoo!Answers, 2007; Esther Ingliss-Arkell’s “10 Bodily Functions That Continue after Death” on io9, 2011; information on graves at Holy Cross Cemetery on Find a Grave Memorial, n.d., and Seeing Stars, 2016; the “HolyCrossMortuary” pages on Catholicmortuaries.com; the IMDb biography for Bela Lugosi; Victoria Laurie’s “When Erin Chose to Die” in the Australian, 2008; the Lazarus Data Recovery site; Memorialpages’ “Facts: What Happens to a Body after Death,” 2005; the Murderpedia entry for David John Birnie, n.d., especially Paul B. Kidd’s “The Birnies: Australia’s House of Horrors,” where I found Bill Powers’s account of the Birnies’ trial for the Perth Daily News; “Ocular Melanoma” on the “USC Roski Eye Institute” page on Keckmedicine, US National Library of Medicine, We Are Macmillan Cancer Support; the Oxfordshire Bereavement Guide; Psychobabble’s “20 Things You May Not Have Known about Bela Lugosi,” 2010; Krista Schwimmer’s “Keeping Vigil for Eun Kang” in the Free Venice Beachhead, 2011; John Soennichsen’s Live! From Death Valley: Dispatches from America’s Low Point, 2005; Bill Stern’s “Painting the Town” in the Los Angeles Times, 1997; Franny Syufy’s “Guide to Cat’s Eyes” on about.com, 2016; TodayIFoundOut.com’s “The Difference between a Coffin and a Casket,” 2011; David Urbinato’s “London’s Historic ‘Pea-Soupers’” in the EPA journal, 1994; US Funerals Online’s “Guide to Choosing a Grave Marker or Headstone,” 2016; Weird California’s “Deep into the Valley of Death We Go,” as posted on Weird U.S., n.d.; Elizabeth Wetsch’s entry on David and Catherine Birnie on crimezzz. net, 1995–2005; “When a dead person is getting embalmed do they makes noises?” on Yahoo!Answers, 2010; “Why do babies cry at the time of birth?” answered thoroughly by posts on Quora, 2015; Sara Wolf’s obituary for Jill Yip in the LA Weekly, 2001.
I am particularly grateful to the writers of the local news stories in the California Briefing section of the Los Angeles Times, as well as longer pieces in the California section—namely, Hector Becerra, Andrew Blankstein, Ari Bloomekatz, Martha Groves, Carl Hall, Victoria Kim, Seema Mehta, H. G. Rezas, Carla Rivera, Susannah Rosenblatt, Garrett Therolf, and Richard Winton.
Wikipedia was of course an invaluable source of information on everything death-related, from birth certificates to decomposition, from Philip Nitschke to Tetralogy of Fallot.
There were times I strayed from the Internet. The World Book Encyclopedia, 1957 edition, volumes C, D, F, I, and W, was essential to this book, along with The 1972 World Book Yearbook, covering the events of 1971.
The 1952 Revised Standard Version of the Holy Bible was a crucial reference point, as was the Shambhala classics edition of The Tibetan Book of the Dead.
Finally, I broke my rule once to refer to an academic source, namely Aino Passonen’s magnificent article “The Hourglass Figure in Manzoni’s I Promessi Sposi [The Betrothed]: Multiplicities in Flux, Spatial Form, and the Milanese Bread Riots of 1628,” which appeared posthumously in Mobs: An Interdisciplinary Inquiry, edited by Nancy van Deusen and Leonard Michael Koff, 2011.