Murder In the Red Barn

Despite the whitewwater weekends, despite the chickens and the swimming pool and the garden and the Ben and Jerry's mural, there was a dark side to life in that little town in upstate New York.

A few houses up the street, a man picked up two teenage boys at a trailer park and brought them back home for an afternoon of drinking and sex.  They drank beer in his living room while the man showed the boys his guns and talked about drugs and his military service in Vietnam.  When the man tried to get sexy-time going and the boys weren't into it so much, things got out of control, a fight broke out, and one of the boys wound up stabbing the man in the neck with a paring knife. 

Panicked and not knowing what else to do, the boys decided to make the incident look like a burglary and a Manson-style satanic ritual.  According to press reports, they wound up stabbing the man 351 times, both before and after he actually died, and nearly severed his head.

The boys put all the items they had touched, a remote control, a towel used to wipe the paring knife, a bread knife, and their bloody shirts, into plastic bags. They left the apartment, but forgot to take the bags, leaving the evidence behind at the crime scene.  Not knowing what else to do to get back home, they called a taxi from a neighbor's house (not mine), and took a cab to McDonald's.  It didn't take the police long to find them.

It was 1992, a year after the Jeffrey Dahmer story had come out.  That year, Tom Waits released the album Bone Machine, featuring the song Murder In the Red Barn.

I lived in a red barn.  For the record, I had nothing to do with the ghastly incident up the road, but a running joke among friends was to always check my refrigerator for severed heads when they came over.

At least, I think they were joking.  

Weren't they?