Under The Bridge [Hardcover]

Rebecca Godfrey begins with an Author’s Note covering her role in the use of all the available records of the murder: “The material in this book is derived from author interviews and observations, official records, and court proceedings. Certain conversations have been largely re-created based on these sources and some names and details have been changed.” That said, the reader is invited to share in her careful re-creation of the circumstances and the cast of the blood-chilling murder of a teenager. “Who were the seemingly ordinary suburban teenagers who found themselves under the bridge in Victoria, B.C. on the night of November 14, 1997?” begins the dust jacket summary. “Seemingly ordinary” is the key phrase. As the story unfolds the reader is bound to hope devoutly that this group is anything but ordinary. They seem, as events unfold, like aliens from another planet and yet-and yet-they are currently joined in the news by two teenagers in Toronto who have just been convicted of drowning their mother.
Godfrey has divided her text into seven parts: Prologue, The Youth of View Royal, The Killers, An Unusual Investigation, The Trials, The Adulthood of View Royal, and a four-line Postscript. In Part I, “The Youth of View Royal”, she situates us in a Suburb of Victoria, B.C., and sketches various players in the drama. Colin Jones, who at sixteen was the oldest of the players, was popular with the younger girls, and accordingly, was pestered by them. He had a state-of-the-art sound system, albums that made him the envy of the younger crowd, and access to their favourite drugs, marijuana and acid. Warren Glowatski, a fifteen-year-old, recently left alone by his father who took off for California to live with a rich widow, has no place at all to stay and has just been introduced to acid. 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.” Warren loves Syreeta, fourteen, with Spanish blood, glamorously dark and blind from birth in one eye, so that “she sees the world differently from other people.” Her mother will not agree to letting Warren move in with them. Josephine, fourteen, has been kicked out by her mother and lives in a Kiwanis group home that closes its doors at eleven. Colin calls her a “twisted little troublemaker” and she and Kelly Ellard, her “best friend”, he calls “lost puppies”. In spite of sworn, everlasting loyalty, Josephine, calculating and cold-hearted, in love only with her own self-termed beauty, betrays Kelly, and through it all even manages to avoid appearing as a witness.
Reena Virk, the victim, was the child of a hard-working East Indian immigrant family, the only unbroken, functioning family among all the participants in the tragic murder. But Reena had become increasingly alienated from her home, its rules and expectations, and had moved to the Group Home where she met Josephine and Dusty, another constant troublemaker. Reena was “different”, unacceptable to her teenage peers, though she was desperate to be one of them. She copied them, pestered Colin for a date, thereby offending Josephine who considered him her property. This made Reena Josephine’s mortal enemy. Before the fatal night, Josephine’s mother heard her telephoning Kelly to plan killing Reena. She talked of digging a hole in the forest, throwing her in and burying her deep. Afterwards the girls called Reena, begging her to join them. The idea was to beat her up and leave her unconscious.
Josephine and Kelly were the ringleaders, but it seems plausible that Josephine just intended to beat Reena to unconsciousness, and leave her to make her way home somehow without a bus pass (which they had destroyed). Instead, a series of events, involving Kelly and Warren, left her dead through drowning, and submerged on the other side of the bridge from the site of her beating. Her body was not recovered for ten days. It might not have been found at all had it not been for two girls of Russian background who went to the police. The Russian girls had had lives as sad and traumatic as the rest of the teens involved in the event, but they were outside the conspiracy that formed to keep the beating secret. They were also upset by the rumours making the rounds, and they did what they knew was the right thing to do with the story as they had heard it. They went to the police. The large group of teenagers who had been either onlookers or participants in the beating had kept the whole thing secret among them for more than a week. It was only after Nadja and Anya had alerted the police and they had began questioning the members of the group that divers and a helicopter were sent to search for Reena’s body and finally found her.
Warren was found guilty and so was Kelly, but she was granted a second trial on the grounds that she had been unfairly questioned in her former trial. By this time Warren had been imprisoned for seven years and was reluctant to testify, but he finally decided to do it and of course his testimony incriminated Kelly beyond doubt. In spite of this, the jury, after days of deliberation-exhausting for all, the jury, the accused, their families and Reena’s family-could not unanimously agree on a “guilty” verdict. One juror disagreed. The judge ordered a retrial. Here Godfrey breaks her narrative, leaving the reader to wonder about Kelly’s fate.
Warren G. is the only one of the major perpetrators who commands our sympathy, and that is surely because he commands Godfrey’s as well. A vulnerable boy, smaller than his associates, without a place to stay, he really worked at educating and rehabilitating himself in prison. In Part V, “The Adulthood of View Royal”, Warren comes first, then Syreeta, who always regrets that she left Warren that night, because it was after her refusal to let him walk her home that the final tragedy occurred. Raj, Reena’s cousin, who had taken her driving in his yellow Kharmann Gia, became helpless from MS: “Almost eight years later, nobody wonders who is driving the car, weaving through the streets of falling petals.” The mysterious silver cross placed anonymously on the bridge as a memorial to Reena, is removed because as the mayor explains: “The kids were scared to cross the bridge . . . It was unfortunate, really sad . . . but I don’t think many people in the town think much about it any more . . . as long as people’s toilets flush when they want them to flush, they don’t complain.”
There is a new Casino with slot machines in View Royal, but “no plans for a youth center currently exist.” Josephine, never called as a witness, went on to work on the strip-tease, lap-dancing circuit. Reena’s father dreams of Reena and in the dream she holds him and he says to her: “Reena where did you go? Reena where have you been?” Finally, the four-line Postscript tells us that “in November 2004, Warren Glowatski was denied parole; in April 2005, Kelly Ellard was found guilty of the second-degree murder of Reena Virk. She maintains her innocence.”
This is a tortuous and disturbing tale, but Godfrey has done a remarkable job of weaving together a coherent narrative from its many players and various stages. She seldom allows herself to show emotion, to sound any way other than objective, but when she does it has the impact of a hammer-blow. This happens on several occasions: when she writes of the guidance teacher at Shoreline High School who “believes in Jesus Christ and Oprah Winfrey”; the meeting of the gardening matrons of the wealthy district of View Royal, completely oblivious to the dark side of their world, who are getting instructions about growing sturdy oaks from little acorns; the various single parents who cannot control their children and have given up trying. Her analyses lead us through the maze to finally reaffirm Under the Bridge’s beginning epigraph: “Never again are you the same. The longing is to be pure. What you get is to be changed” (from “Prayer” by Jorie Graham). No one reading Godfrey’s reconstruction is in any danger of ever forgetting the tragic, senseless, brutal murder of Reena Virk.
Clara Thomas (Books in Canada)

With a gripping journalistic style, novelist Godfrey (The Torn Skirt) recounts the story behind a horrific murder in a small British Columbia town. One November night in 1997, 14-year-old Reena Virk was savagely beaten and drowned under a waterway bridge. From a small East Indian community, Reena was alienated from her family and spent her time desperately trying to find a place with a tough crowd of teenagers, several of whom had been in trouble with the law. But one of the girls held a grudge against her, and Reena apparently was lured to her violent end by a promise of friendship. Seven girls and one boy initially were charged with assault. Two were convicted of murder: Warren Glowatski, now serving a life sentence, and Kelly Ellard, who was found guilty in 2005 after three trials. Godfrey is careful not to make judgments, but her informed writing reveals a remorseful Warren, an unrepentant Kelly (who denies her guilt) and other psychologically damaged members of the group, sharply etched, whose casual brutality, enabled by drug use, led to a brutal and senseless death. Godfrey's account contains some recreated dialogue but overall is meticulously researched and harrowing to read. B&W photos.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an alternate Hardcover edition.