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

by Rebecca Godfrey

Bridges are meant for safe crossing from one place to the next, and you don’t usually see what is under them.

Toward the end of the book, I began to have the strange experience of actually forgetting who the author was; twice I looked at the jacket to remind myself. This has never happened to me previously and I can’t explain it except to say that at a certain point it was almost like the story was telling itself. This probably has something to do with the artfulness of the writing, which so seamlessly joins with the story that I almost lost awareness of it as writing by an author; it was as if I were instead reading about something we might call “fate,” such a stark drama of good and evil that it stopped mattering who the author was. And although I haven’t yet made it clear, goodness is present in this story. Indeed, Reena Virk’s murder might never have been uncovered if it weren’t for the courage and goodness of two particular girls.

It was a strange occupation—looking for something you didn’t really want to find.

When his dad left for California, he said to Warren what he always said when he left. “See you in the movies.” That’s what he always said.

The Five were together for sleepovers, shopping on Saturdays, reading fashion magazines. What were their interests? “Laughing,” Syreeta would later say. “I was always interested in just laughing and having fun.”

Below them, a semicircle had formed, and this semicircle was surrounding the girl on the stairs, Reena. She had tried, and she tried again, to run through and past the girls who surrounded her. “Don’t let her leave,” someone yelled as she moved, or tried to move, out of the circle and up the stairs. Stopped by the swarming circle, she was thrown, forced down on the railing, and the circle tightened around her, closer, the fists to her head, the slapping hands on her skin, the fists on her shoulder. Watching the circle below, Tara turned to Jen, and said, “I can’t watch this. It disgusts me.”

“You don’t catch a killer. He catches himself.” —Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment

And later in her file, Mrs. Smith, who believed in the teachings of Jesus Christ and Oprah Winfrey, would write: “Kelly is well aware of her anger. We discussed it quite openly.”

“Jail’s not so bad,” Dusty said. “I’ve been there before. It’s kind of fun.”

“Well, I’m not going to tell you that I did it if I didn’t. Why would I do something like that?” “I don’t want to know why.” “Why would I put my life in jeopardy?” “How about, ‘Why would I ever hurt somebody like that?’ ”

“On the whole, Glowatski’s evidence was incomplete and improbable. I did not believe him nor do I have a reasonable doubt about the truth of his evidence. I conclude that he actively participated in the further beating at the north end of the bridge and then helped drag Virk, while she was unconscious, to the water, where Ellard probably drowned her. I am satisfied beyond a reasonable doubt that Glowatski intended to cause Virk bodily harm of a kind that he knew was likely to result in her death and also that, by then

When he looked at the little boy, it was then that Warren knew, as if for the first time, what it was that he’d really done.

Syreeta believed in her heart that she was the reason Warren was going to jail. Warren’s father agreed. When asked his opinion of the girl his son so loved, he would scoff before taking a drag from a Marlboro Red. “She pretty much hung him,” he’d say, bluntly.

Her horoscope meant so much to her on the day after the verdict. She cut it out and memorized every single word. April 25, the horoscope for Aquarius. “Whatever else you do or don’t do this week, you must not allow yourself to feel guilty for what happens to other people. You are not responsible for the world and its woes and those who say you have no right to be happy while others are suffering

“Do you accept collect calls from Warren Glowatski?” “Yes.” “No further questions,” Adrian Brooks said, walking away from the girl as if she had just spat on his face.

And yet she wonders why “the media portrayed us as the bad ones when we were the innocent ones.”

Perhaps sensing the board’s agreeable attitude, Kelly, for the first time, confessed to her leading role in the murder, yet her explanation came in the form of an illogical and passive sentence. “She drowned and I put her in the water,” she said. For the first time, she also spoke of Reena with kindness. “I’m very sorry,” she said. “She did not deserve it.”