Under the Bridge: The True Story of the Murder of Reena Virk

by Rebecca Godfrey

It is Rebecca Godfrey’s great accomplishment that she allows us to almost see what is essentially unseeable.

“Never again are you the same. The longing is to be pure. What you get is to be changed.” —Prayer, Jorie Graham

the fall of the girl next door.

Though Reena’s grandmother had once believed in the Hindu faith, she’d spent the past thirty years as a believer in the prophet Jehovah. Soon after her arrival in Canada, two smiling visitors had knocked on her door and greeted her warmly, and did not look, as others often did, with discomfort or disdain at her sari. She invited the strangers into her home, brought them tea and cookies. Her English was faltering, but they did not mind. They told her about the Watchtower. They spoke slowly and left her books with pictures of the world in flames. She phoned them and asked them to come over for tea again next Sunday. And they came, unlike the neighbors, who declined her invitations because they said they were going camping or were working on Sunday. The ladies were very friendly to her, and she enjoyed their stories, and slowly learned to read English through warnings and promises contained in their brochures.

Karmann Ghia,

if youngsters don’t feel like important members of a family group, well, they look for another group to belong to, a gang. “I sense these children are filled with a global anger. They are missing something they’d never had. Those were the ones who commit vandalism, get into fights, seek to escape unhappiness through the abuse of drugs.”

All this talk about “it takes a community to raise a child,” that was flat-out wrong. A father and mother would be sufficient.

almost all violent criminals were sex abuse victims in childhood?

whatever happened under the Craigflower Bridge is not a school problem. Whatever happened under the bridge is a problem within our society.

“Violence is a rule bound and purposeful activity engaged in to redress the intolerable balances girls perceive in their largely hierarchical social world.”

She did things for the heroin, and then she did heroin to forget about the things she did for the heroin.

James Wesley Williams often reflected on the difference between those who were violent and those who were not criminal. He himself believed the factor that allowed some to cross the line was, simply, conscience. For conscience allowed you to stop yourself from harming others — it “acts as a brake upon your conduct.”

“Stories do not end.”

“The kids in the beating and murder, not one of them came from an intact family.”

“Mercy alone transfigures the human heart.”