I am grateful to my family, especially my aunt Karen; cousins Nicholas, Roslyn, and Pili; my father and mother, William Allen and Susan Allen; and my former husband and stepson Robert von Hallberg and Isaac von Hallberg for taking the time to share their memories with me, even over the course of repeated interviews and follow-up conversations. In order to reconstruct events, I depended not merely on their memories and my own, but also on articles about Michael’s attempted carjacking in the Daily Breeze (Torrance, Calif.) and court records for Michael’s case and Bree’s later homicide and manslaughter case. Whereas most California court documents are available to the general public through the court archives, juvenile records are not. Despite the fact that he was treated as an adult, Michael’s case was filed as a “Youth Authority” or juvenile case. Consequently, I have not been able to secure the whole of his record and was able to secure those parts that I did acquire access to only via formal public records requests. I am unlikely to have succeeded in that effort without the valuable legal advice of Joshua Milon. It is worth noting that, in California, the court files of juvenile defendants who reached the age of eighteen but are now deceased are orphan files. No one has a legal right to them. The defendant, who is deceased, cannot access them, of course. Neither, though, can their parents if the deceased passed the age of eighteen before passing away. Such was the situation with Michael’s file. It was difficult, in the first instance, to find it, because it had been misfiled. Once I found the file, it was held up to me, through a glass partition, in its full thickness of several inches. The clerk then informed me that she would have to review it and remove anything marked confidential. After twenty minutes, she returned to me with a file with very little left in it. This is what led me down the path of making public record requests. I am extremely grateful for the material that I was able to secure, but I did not secure the whole of Michael’s file. There are other mysteries in it that I may never be able to untangle, for instance a letter that Michael wrote in 2001 from prison to the judge who sentenced him.