3. Saturday, September 2, 2023 #3
“There’s something I need to tell you,” she says, interrupting the peaceful quiet between them so she can’t hear the voice in her head.
“About the house.” She doesn’t want to, she knows her mom is going to freak on her, but she feels like she has no choice.
Quinn is going to get to school on Tuesday and everyone will be talking about it.
He turns to her, a goofy, stoned grin on his face.
“It’s a crime scene, dude.”
Quinn works hard to pull himself out of his stoned stupor to sit forward in his seat. His brown eyes are bloodshot and puffy, and his mouth droops. He’s actually not that bad-looking when he relaxes, she thinks.
“Is that why those kids at the party called it the murder house?”
“So, you’ve heard.” Polly feels even more justified in revealing the secret. God, her mom is so stupid sometimes. She can’t believe how na?ve that woman can be. “Yeah, that’s why. A woman named Justine Gordon murdered her husband and two sons here.”
Quinn clumsily slaps the arm of the chair. “I knew we must have gotten it for cheap.”
“Anyway, Mom didn’t want either of us to know, so don’t say anything to her.”
“Fuck that!” Quinn shoots back. “As if I’m not going to make her pay for this… subterfuge.”
Polly swats his arm with the back of her hand. “Don’t be such an idiot, Quinn. If you make her pay, she’ll make me pay and I’ll have to take it all out on you.”
Quinn slumps back in his chair and is quiet, staring out at the woods. Polly does the same, regretting her idea to get high with her fifteen-year-old brother. “I can’t believe we live in an actual murder house,” Quinn says after a few seconds of silence.
“Almost sounds like you think it’s cool.”
He shrugs. “It kind of is. I mean. Maybe it is. I’m not sure yet. I’m going to try to find out more about it. But don’t tell Mom I said that. I want her to think I hate everything about this house.”
“You’re so weird,” she says, shaking her head.
A loud bang echoes through the dark, causing them both to jump. They look upward just in time to see the sky light up with fireworks that break apart to sprinkle the night sky with fragments of white, blue, pink, and yellow.
“Cooool,” Quinn drawls, and Polly can’t help laughing.
“You sound like such a stoner.” They look at each other and laugh delightedly while fireworks continue to explode above them. For the first time in a long time, Polly feels better. Lighter.
“Oh fuck,” Quinn says suddenly, leaning forward in his chair, staring hard into the woods. “I must be really stoned. I’m seeing things.”
“Like what?”
“I could have sworn I saw someone standing there at the edge of the woods by the light of that last set of fireworks.” He points across the lawn toward an opening in the trees.
“It’s just the weed,” Polly reassures him.
When a burst of fireworks lights up the sky again, she focuses extra hard on the spot where Quinn pointed. She relaxes when she sees there’s nothing there. “Yeah,” she says, “it’s just the weed.”
“Still,” he answers. “Those woods are pretty creepy. Don’t you think?”
“Nah,” she says with a wave of her hand. “The woods are fine. I’m not creeped out at all.”
Liar, Liar, pants on fire, her sister’s voice sings in her head.
Quinn
When he came inside from watching the fireworks with Polly, the first thing Quinn did was to call Panda up on his bed beside him, then search online for Justine Gordon. That’s how he found the podcast he’s listening to now, in the dark, lying on his bed, staring out his window at the woods.
The podcaster is a woman named Cleo, and her deep, throaty voice turns him on a bit.
Cleo: One of the most fascinating things about the Justine Gordon case is that she continues to insist that she did not kill her family.
She maintains that her victims were posing as her family members, and that she had no choice but to kill them in an attempt to get her real family back.
In our restless pursuit to understand what causes family members to turn on each other, I’m going to give you a snapshot of each murder committed by Justine Gordon and what followed.
Listeners beware: What you’re about to hear is not for the faint of heart.
Cleo: According to police records, Justine Gordon’s murder spree lasted three days, and she used a different method with each of her victims. The extended timeline and the changing MO make the case stand out.
In most of the cases we investigate, the suspect kills family members within minutes of each other, at the same location, using the same method.
Not Justine Gordon. According to her confession and evidence gathered at the scene, Justine killed her husband first. It was the morning of May tenth, 2019.
The boys had left for school and she and her husband were due to leave for work shortly after.
Justine called her husband into the living room under the pretext of needing help getting a book down from a high shelf.
While his back was turned, she struck him from behind with a fire poker, knocking him out and then bludgeoning him to death.
According to investigators, she wiped the tool down afterward and put it back in the set beside the fireplace.
She called in sick to work just before nine a.m., then Justine dragged her husband’s body out to the woods behind their home and buried it in a shallow grave.
When her kids got home from school later that day, she told them that their dad had gone away on a last-minute work trip, and that she didn’t expect him back for a few days.
They had no reason to believe otherwise, and life continued as usual.
One day later, on May eleventh, 2019, Justine entered the bedroom of her fifteen-year-old son in the middle of the night and smothered him with a pillow until he suffocated.
When talking to the police, Justine said it took a lot of strength, that she had to climb on top of him to do it, but that she did it this way to avoid looking into her son’s eyes.
Saying, and I quote, “They looked like his eyes, but they were not his eyes.” Then, like she did with her husband, Justine dragged the body out to the woods and buried it in a shallow grave.
In the morning, she told her older son that she’d taken his brother into school early to leave for a three-day field trip.
Justine said that her elder son seemed suspicious at first, but that eventually he believed her.
One day later, Justine made dinner for her and her son, what she referred to as her “world-famous chili con carne.” Before serving her son, Justine added a large dose of rat poison to the pot of chili.
She served him a bowl, then excused herself, saying that she had to make a work call but that he should start eating without her.
Justine left the kitchen for fifteen minutes, thinking that the poison would take effect within that time.
When she went back into the kitchen, her son was gone.
Police deduced that when the poison started working, her son realized his mother was trying to kill him.
That he stumbled into the woods to escape and used his cell phone to call 911.
During that phone call, he told the dispatcher he thought his mother had poisoned him, and that she may have killed his father and younger brother too.
Police dispatched to the scene that night apprehended Justine Gordon and organized and conducted a search of the woods on the Gordon property for her missing eighteen-year-old son.
Days later, police located his cellphone and torn and bloodstained items of clothing.
Justine confirmed the clothes as belonging to her son.
To date, his body has not been found. He is presumed dead by police.
Justine Gordon did not resist arrest that night, and she confessed almost immediately to the killings.
She showed police where she had buried her husband and younger son in the woods, side by side.
Autopsy reports of the recovered bodies listed death by blunt-force trauma to the head and asphyxiation, respectively, but also noted deep incisions in both torsos.
When questioned by homicide detectives about those cuts, Justine explained that after their deaths, she cut open their torsos looking for “the thing from the woods.” She was trying to find the entity that had taken them over.
Justine’s lawyer entered a plea of not guilty, by reason of insanity.
When the judge asked if Justine understood and agreed with the plea, she stood up and announced to the courtroom, “I didn’t kill my family.
I killed the imposters. The woods took my family.
And the woods should be on trial today, not me. ”
Quinn hits Pause on the podcast. Only in the silence does he realize how loudly he’s breathing, and that if he listens closely, he can hear the trees swaying and creaking in the strong breeze outside.
He’s frozen in place, staring out at the woods where Justine buried her victims. Something about them bothered him before, but now…
He squeezes his eyes shut to block it all out, hoping that the sense of dread squirming around in his gut is just the aftermath of getting high and nothing more. He scoots closer to Panda.