Murder Was the Case

by Rebecca Schoenkopf

VH-1 is classier than I am.

This gives me pause.

I tried to watch Megan Wants a Millionaire yesterday, but good old VH-1, home to the worst trash on TV (some, like the Rock of Love herpes and weave-pulling franchise, I had a standing date with; others, like Real Chance of Love and Charm School, I left to my son) had the good taste not to let me. It had replaced Megan Wants a Millionaire with some show, with a Robin Leach-style voiceover, about rich guys on private jets. Watching millionaires, of course, wasn’t why I wanted to watch Megan Wants a Millionaire. I wanted to see how murderers act when they’re trying to bag a hotty on reality TV.

Lest Celeste Fremon at WitnessLA.com murmur disapprovingly at me, I do know Ryan Jenkins is innocent until proven guilty. I’ve donated to the ACLU, though unlike Mike Dukakis I don’t have a card.

It just seems very ... likely, you know?

My interest in this case is purely prurient: ladies aren’t found in suitcases in Buena Park very often, and I was looking forward to hearing more about it like I was looking forward to a good Law & Order. A few days later, when it morphed into bikini model (stripper?) and her reality-cad husband, it was ripped from the headlines of my dreams.

It wasn’t personal, like Lily Burk had been.

When Lily Burk was murdered last month, the horror was manifold: how her parents must have dealt with having had her on the phone and not realizing she was in mortal danger. How fragile our little ecosystem is in the parts of the city we traipse around like Disneyland. My boyfriend and I spent plenty of time in the grungy, gritty neighborhoods east of downtown—the Toy District, the Bong District, the outskirts of Little Tokyo, where Lily was found—but the first time we drove east on Sixth Street after Lily’s murder was like a trip through the mall in Dawn of the Dead.

Lily Burk; Dae’von Bailey; Jasmine Fiore

When I was a little girl, Richard Ramirez, the Night Stalker, was on the loose. For a few days, until those awesome, macho Mexican-American dudes caught and held him in East L.A., we actually locked our front door. (My mother had to root around in her jewelry box to even locate the key.) And that was the last time, until Lily, that I’d been scared of the other. I leave it to Bush voters to be scared about crime.

Lily changed that for a bit: she was one of us. For two weeks after she died, I clicked “refresh” on every news source, waiting tearily and fearfully for updates on the murder of this whip-smart, compassionate, artistic, and completely bitchen young woman. Her mother teaches law; her father is a music critic; Lily was a National Merit Scholar and volunteered at a needle exchange. These are our people. It happened to us.

A bikini model, not so much.

That’s terrible, isn’t it? The bikini model had a name, but even now, I have to look it up (not entirely my fault, since she seemed to change it a lot): her name was Jasmine Fiore. Today’s LA Times said when a new neighbor moved in, Jasmine and her roommate left a note introducing themselves, and said to call them if they needed anything, or even if they were being too loud and they’d shut up. That’s nice! That’s thoughtful! That’s friendly! And I still look at this story as entertainment. As suspense. I’m awful. Will they catch him? Of course they will.

Last week, I focused on the thought of getting a foster kid, one who, like six-year-old Dae’von Bailey, was in danger. That brave little boy, I read and wept, trying to tell that he’d been beaten, trying to tell he was being beaten still. I wanted a child from a terrible family, the more endangered the better. I could read to him, and tuck him in, and bring him back from the brink. I would have mostly eternal patience for any acting out, until he knew that he was warm and safe. I talked about it with my family: what did they think? My father was for it, and my brother was too. A few days later, my brother, in one of his unkind moments, turned wanting to get a foster child into yet more proof that I’m despicable. I’d only wanted to do it for the money, he said—you know, those princely payments from the DCFS—and to have someone to rage at. Okay, honestly, fuck you.

Dae’von was real to me like Jasmine Fiore isn’t. I identified with him like I identified with Lily, not based entirely on similarities in class and education and location but in her worldview. A tanned and blonded and implanted Vegas stripper with a douchey “millionaire” reality show husband feels more foreign to me than the little black kid from a broken ghetto with a family that’s fucked-up on drugs. To her mother, I am sorry. Just because she isn’t real to me doesn’t mean she isn’t real to you.

But Dae’von, with his bravery, was one of us too.

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