Illustration by Lily Padula for BuzzFeed
Mrs. K can't remember what it was specifically that made her suspicious. Maybe how the eggs were splattered on the Jeep, or maybe her daughter's disposition. "I was starting to think, There's something wrong here," she says once she finally allows me to turn on a tape recorder. She doesn't want me to do this story and two nights ago tried to talk her daughter out of cooperating. Her daughter is a teacher now, and the reality is that having all this, all the hateful words — the fabricated ones and the real ones that followed — dredged back up could harm them both. I assure her I won't be using either of their names.
It's been 15 years, probably, since I've seen Mrs. K, and she looks the same, but slimmer. Her hair is still long and golden. We sit in her living room, almost knee to knee. A vase of fresh-cut daffodils stands on the coffee table. If I'm going to tear open these old wounds, she wants me to at least have the right information, so an hour into my visit, she stands up, walks to a cabinet behind me, and takes out two white binders. Inside these are just about every email she ever sent to the school and the police and others; a calendar she'd made documenting every act of vandalism, death threat, and venomous anti-gay slur; newspaper clippings; the fliers. And then the court petition, probation documents. She insists she hasn't opened the binders since she made them. "I have every piece of correspondence from my divorce," she explains. "I have my tax records for the last 10 years. This is how I roll."
Soon after the Jeep was egged, she did confront her daughter — we can call her Mary — at the Cheesecake Factory, but was convinced to back off. Those were hard years. She'd gone back to work and separated from her husband as her older daughter had gone off to college back East. There were tuition bills, bitter fights, a restraining order, an ever-waning trickle of alimony. She was working six days a week at some points. She remembers one night even taking work she had to do out to the car, watching the house through the night, trying to catch whoever was attacking Mary. And Mary, who'd always been independent, was drifting from her. "I had absolutely no control over her whatsoever," she says.
"I remember the people that were sympathetic — like this note," she says, holding up a greeting card from PTA representatives, still in its envelope, opening it with care. "'Dear Tam Student and Family, we're writing to offer friendship, support,'" her voice breaks, "'and solidarity with your family during this tremendously difficult time.' I'm telling you this meant so much to me. They'll never know." She shakes her head and wipes tears from her cheeks.
"So many people had expressed sympathy and now those same people were angry, too, that she had fooled them and did I know. I got that question a lot: Did I know?" Though they'd already planned to move out of Mill Valley before the truth came out, the timing was certainly serendipitous. "I literally could not go to the grocery store," she says.
She tells me emphatically about how Mary met all the conditions of her probation, how she immediately enrolled in community college, and from there, state school; from there, her teaching program. How good her grades were. Their relationship has healed.
"I do think she feels she needs to be an upstanding citizen now, that she needs to be the person that she was always capable of being. She is going to be that role model, that mentor, that leader of young people who are struggling, because she's been there."
Illustration by Lily Padula for BuzzFeed
Tamalpais High School is over 100 years old, which is really old for California. Its white stucco buildings are arranged on a steep green hill, and a clock tower stands at its center, fringed by sycamores, overlooking the intersection of Miller Avenue and Camino Alto in Mill Valley. It serves about 1,100 students from the southernmost chunk of Marin County, which borders San Francisco via the Golden Gate Bridge. The county and Mill Valley specifically are white and affluent and very liberal: Its median home price is more than $1 million and fewer than 1 in 8 are registered Republicans. Its redwood-shaded canyons are home to many helicopter parents and Priuses and some celebrities — film producers, actors, rockers of ‘60s and ‘70s repute. The weather is almost without exception pleasant. Days often begin shrouded in fog, but by midday it usually burns off, revealing the mountain, for which the school is named, rising 2,500 feet above, green skirts laid out around it. Locals mostly call the mountain, and the school, Tam.
It was characteristically pleasant the Monday morning of Nov. 1, 2004, when Vice Principal Candace Curtis was alerted on her walkie-talkie that she needed to go down to Ruby Scott Gym, to the girls' locker room. Curtis, a petite woman with a mess of brown hair, had been working in the schools for over two decades, first as a teacher, and for the last dozen or so as an administrator. In the cement-floored, low-lit locker room, a custodian pointed out what he'd found. It had been done with a ballpoint pen, evidently. The three letters were blocky and strange but what they said was clear: "FAG."
Ms. Curtis determined that the locker belonged to Mary, who was a senior and active on several sports teams. Ms. Curtis didn't know whether she was in fact a lesbian, though, like many, wouldn't have been surprised if she were. She was heavyset. Her light brown hair was buzzed into a crew cut and she dressed in more masculine clothes — collared shirts, plain T-shirts, baggy jeans. When Ms. Curtis called Mary to the office and explained what had happened, her reaction was hard to parse, but she accepted an offer to go home early. She asked only that Ms. Curtis not tell her mother why. The locker was repainted.
A few days later, her mother did find out, and that Sunday wrote Ms. Curtis a pointed email. Her daughter, she explained, had been under a lot of stress as of late, so much so that just two weeks before she'd asked the school counselor for a psychiatrist referral. She could not believe that Ms. Curtis wouldn't have alerted her of this obviously troubling incident. Ms. Curtis hardly had time to reply before the second graffiti was discovered, on Monday. This time it was on the door of the girl's white Jeep. Again those same odd, blocky letters, only larger: "DIE FAGGOT."
A week later, on Nov. 14, a note was found on her windshield, one that'd been typed up large enough to fill the piece of paper. "YOU CAN RUN BUT YOU CAN'T HIDE," it read, "WE KNOW WHERE YOU LIVE. WHEN WE'RE DONE WITH YOU YOU WILL BURN IN HELL." The next day, the gym locker again, "RUN FAG RUN," as well as urine. This, Curtis and others presumed, was probably the work of a man, and yet how did a man not only go into the girls' locker room without being noticed, she wondered, but know which was the correct locker? The administration, her counselors, and now the police, asked Mary again and again who might be behind these attacks, whether she could recall anyone bullying or stalking her. She said she had no idea. She said she couldn't recall being victimized on account of her sexuality before.
Soon Mary confided in her small group of friends about what was happening. They were horrified. One of her best friends, Nina Hirten, recalls: "I identify as bisexual and I know plenty of other kids when I was there identified themselves as not straight. Maybe it's going to be me [next]. Who's going to write on my car?" But then it became clear whomever it was was targeting Mary: "That's fucking lame," Hirten recalls thinking. "In some ways she's an easy target because she's obvious and outspoken and well-known and makes herself known."
Rumors spread. Nobody official gave a name, but nobody needed to. We heard a girl, a senior, an athlete, was the victim of anti-gay attacks, and we guessed rightly who was meant. Mary and I had been friends in middle school, but by senior year, we had grown apart. I wouldn't have felt comfortable approaching her and saying I was sorry about what was happening. This is partly because I had no real confirmation she was the victim, but also because whatever was happening to her was embarrassing and strange. Years later, I wondered if this was cowardly.
On Nov. 19, a note was found under her doormat at home: "THEY MAKE IT HARDER BUT NOT IMPOSSIBLE AND WE ONLY FIGHT HARDER THIS IS YOUR LAST WARNING WE'RE AROUND EVERY CORNER AND IT'S TIME." Two days later, in the evening, Mary went out to her car. She noticed an egg had been smashed on the back of it, and saw another on the ground nearby. It was then, she'd later tell authorities, that a third struck her in the temple. She looked up, she told them, shocked, confused, and heard laughing and unintelligible yelling. When sheriffs arrived on scene, emotions were running high. They had to separate Mary and her mother so they could calm them down and get statements. When they investigated the scene, authorities also discovered "FAGMOBILE" scrawled in dirt on the car.
"She never saw who it was," Mill Valley Police Department Captain Jim Wickham told the Marin Independent Journal that week in the first news story about the incidents. "It may be students; that's one thing we're looking at." Multiple former classmates who are gay but weren't yet out now cite the incident with the eggs as one that scared them the most — the idea that she'd been followed home.
In late November, they found "FAG CLASS" on the doors of one of her classrooms. In early December, it was "DIE FAG" spray-painted red in two-and-a-half-foot-tall letters in the school's central Keyser Hall, a location that investigators noted the victim had to pass to get to her first class. "DIE FAGGOT" was found scrawled on the girl's bathroom door. "FAG CLASS" on another classroom. Around this time the sheriff and police department devoted further resources to the investigation; the FBI was contacted. Still, as the IJ reported, "No suspects have been identified."
"The mother was calling me constantly," Ms. Curtis says. "'How are you keeping my daughter safe?'" She didn't have a good answer. No matter what she did, she would get another call early in the morning across the walkie-talkie, a custodian saying she better get down and take a look at something. "My stomach would just get in knots. I was on edge every day for all those months, never knowing when something else was going to happen."
When she'd worked at another high school in the county a few years prior, Curtis remembered the IJ "blasting" the school because of some what she terms "racial incidences" that had occurred. On an impulse, with no permission, and certainly no budget, she and her secretary designed and ordered a big banner and had it hung from the clock tower. "I had no idea when I got it how expensive it was going to be," she says now, chuckling. It read: "AccepTance, compAssion, eMpathy."
Curtis made a point of attending the Gay–Straight Alliance meetings, which were now occurring weekly; Mary was co-president. A letter was sent to the students and their families by Principal Chris Holleran, detailing the crimes and their efforts to curtail them, including the "establishment of a $1,000 reward for information, support services for the targeted student, and promotion of our anonymous tip line." Fliers littered campus. "Got information?" they asked, adding, "It's your community." Another of the victim's friends began a campaign passing out rainbow ribbons.
Finally, one night, police seemed to catch a lead: They caught three students on campus dressed in camouflage. This included the 18-year-old Perry twins, who were somewhat infamous around campus and town, always, it seemed, protesting their innocence to a hall monitor or jumping off something tall. Police drew firearms and got them on the ground. Their 17-year-old companion was released, but the Perrys were photographed and fingerprinted and charged with trespassing while detectives tried to get them to confess to the crimes. But they insisted they'd been trying to solve the crimes: "We were trying to figure out who was doing this," Clayton Andrew Perry explains now. "I have family members that are gay." (They were maybe also interested in the cash.)
"We're good people, right, but we just had this stereotypical kind of outlook on us," he says, adding that he and his brother are both paramedics. He spent two days in county lockup, the only time in jail he says he's ever done.
A candlelight vigil was held in the front of the school in mid-December, where 250 attended; even the TV news was there. Guest speakers included two representatives of a local LGBT organization called Spectrum and a woman from the office of the local San Francisco state Sen. Carole Migden, herself openly lesbian. The winter sun descended early and candles flickered. The event ended with a junior on a guitar leading the crowd in a tearful rendition of "Let It Be."
"That place was packed. Absolutely packed," Candace Curtis recalls.
Jeff Vendsel / Marin Independent Journal