“SMILEY FACE KILLER” SENTENCED TO LIFE
WILMINGTON, N.C.—Convicted murderer Trapper McGrath has been sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.
“Justice has been served today,” said prosecutor Jack Ledbetter outside the courthouse. “I hope Prudence’s family can finally find some peace.”
McGrath, 28, was convicted for the June 2009 murder of his wife, Prudence McGrath, 23. The couple’s 6-year-old child was at home at the time of the killing and made the grisly discovery.
Dubbed the “Smiley Face Killer,” McGrath fatally stabbed his wife three times in the chest. After killing her, McGrath carved her mouth into a permanent smile, earning him his moniker.
Several key pieces of evidence convinced the jury, including a threatening note the defendant wrote to his wife. McGrath’s fingerprints were found on the murder weapon, which had been dumped in some bushes near the family’s home, and his clothing contained traces of the victim’s blood.
“This sentence can’t bring our daughter back,” said Wells Walker Holland, the victim’s father. “But I can rest easier knowing this animal will spend the rest of his life behind bars.”
Chapter Two
The end of my street butts up against the woods. They’re a shortcut to where my mom lies silently, but I won’t pass through. Not even during the day.
These woods are where Wolf Ridge’s first body was found.
It happened a year before my mom died. Trapper’s suspected previous victim, though they could never tie him to it. No DNA, no fibers, no hair. Her name was Cherry Hobbs, and she worked at a gas station at the edge of town. Some kids found her stabbed to death—just like Mom—in the woods right before Halloween, her body heaped onto a pile of blood-soaked leaves. Poor kids thought she was a prop from the Boy Scout’s haunted house over on Birch Street.
Everyone said she was a junkie, that she slept around. That’s probably the real reason her case remains unsolved.
So I stick to the roads. They’re empty this time of night—except for curious eyes peering out from behind curtains, the blue light from televisions pulsating behind them. Someone is always watching you in Wolf Ridge. What we lack in culture, we make up for in small-mindedness.
I hold my breath as I pass the Cline house, our town’s only funeral home. It’s an old Victorian, white, with peeling paint. When we were kids, there was this old rhyme we used to say every Halloween:
If you knock
On the undertaker’s door,
He’ll lop off your head,
And then come for more.
He’ll cut out your bones!
And dig out your guts!
Hide you in the basement
With the corpses and rot!
Tonight I make the mistake of looking.
Eugenia Cline, their daughter, sits on the porch, head bent over a book, flashlight pointed at the pages. In Wolf Ridge, women and girls are to be seen as beautiful playthings. Us Holland women never leave home without at least a swipe of lipstick and a hint of mascara. Here, if you refuse to do at least that, you’re nothing.
Eugenia is unmanicured, unpainted, and unfinished. Because of that, she’s always been just a little too far down the popularity food chain for me to say hello to. (Besides, she helps put makeup on the dead bodies for viewing. At least that’s the rumor.)
As if she can read my thoughts, she lifts her head. Her dark, almost whiteless eyes meet mine. She doesn’t smile or wave or nod. Just watches me. A chill ripples up my back, and I look away.
I turn onto Dogwood Lane. The Mount Olivet Cemetery sits at the end of the road, behind a line of magnolia trees and a black wrought iron fence. Some of these graves date back to the founding of the town in the late 1700s. The newer stones are near the back, in neater rows, with potted flowers and even a bench to sit on.
I can find my way to my mom with my eyes closed: just follow the gravel pathway as it winds west, the moonlight turning my skin a grayish blue. (I only ever come at night.) Her stone is the biggest: a marble angel with an ethereal face, her wings encircling a slender gothic headstone. Mother, Daughter, Sister is carved on its pedestal.
I touch the angel’s face, same as always, then sit in the grass before it.
“Hi, Mom,” I say, my voice a scratch. I look behind me, just in case, but only the shadows are watching.
That’s one good thing about dead people—they can’t eavesdrop.
“So.” I clear my throat. “It happened. With this boy, Xavier. He seemed nice . . . but then he asked about Dad.”
I wonder what this conversation would be like in a normal mother-daughter relationship, not one separated by six feet of dirt. Maybe other girls don’t tell their moms when they lose their virginity. But if I had my mom, I’d tell her every ugly thing about me.
I crane my neck up, watching the angel’s face. Sometimes, when it’s really late and I haven’t been sleeping much—or I’ve snuck just a little too much from Granddad’s liquor cabinet—the angel’s face moves. Smiles, or grimaces.
Once a tear slipped out of her eye and dripped onto my forehead. It had just finished raining that night, but no one will ever convince me she wasn’t weeping.
“What do you think I should do?” I ask. “Give him another chance?”
Tonight, the angel’s face remains lifeless.
I pluck a blade of grass and roll it between my fingers, gazing at the headstone again. I don’t know why I keep coming out here, thinking Mom’s going to speak eventually. I stand, shaking my head. “I’ll see you later, Mom,” I say, and head back down the gravel path.
As I’m exiting the cemetery, a bat swoops down in front of me. I scream. (Every so often, we get a bat inside Magnolia House—Grams and I usually shriek and cower under the furniture while Granddad chases it with a tennis racket.)
A porch light on the house across the street flips on, and I hide in the only place I can—the woods beside the cemetery. I fit my body behind a huge live oak and hold my breath as a door squeaks open.
“Anybody out there?” It’s the voice of our chief of police, Carl Bigsby, who’s good friends with Granddad.
I peer around the tree. Bigsby stands on his front porch wearing saggy boxer shorts and a white T-shirt. As he looks up and down the street, his wife comes out in her nightgown. She says something, and the chief raises a hand to her. Everyone in Wolf Ridge knows Bigsby puts hands on his wife—but apparently no one is allowed to talk about it, let alone punish this asshole. His wife quickly backs into the house. He spits tobacco onto the lawn and goes inside, flips off the light. I keep watching, and sure enough the curtains in his picture window spread open.
Always watching.
Behind me, the woods offer no light. But they do offer cover, so I venture deeper into them, reluctantly taking the shortcut home. Just this one time. If I don’t, Creepy Chief Fuckhead will bust me for curfew-breaking. No, thanks.
The woods are black. On Halloween, people sometimes smash pumpkins in here or hold séances to invoke Cherry’s spirit. It’s macabre to me—but to them, harmless fun.
I stay as far away from the southern edge of the woods as I can. That’s where she was found.
The spring canopy blocks out most of the moonglow, so I wake up my phone, using its meager light to navigate the fallen trees, twisted roots, and old junk forgotten by generations. It smells like wet dirt. I check my screen for a text from Xavier when my foot connects with something hard, and I topple over, landing on my hands and knees.
“Shit!” I hiss, feeling along the dark ground for my phone.
A twig snaps behind me. I hold my breath. Something scuttles out from under a fallen tree and takes off, a dark shape low to the ground.
“Get it together, Bett,” I whisper. I find my phone, flick the flashlight on again, and point it toward where the animal went to make sure it keeps away.
There’s nothing there. Only a tree, a shiny pink lump wedged in its roots. Probably more garbage. Some people treat any wooded area as a public landfill. I stand, wipe my hands on my skirt, and start walking toward home.
Three steps later, I stop and turn around.
I’ve processed what I’ve seen. Why go back?
The back of my neck grows cold as I slowly, slowly step up to the tree again.
I shine my phone at it, swing it toward the pink shape. It’s all wrong. It sprouts appendages—arms and legs, curled in on themselves. My light slowly moves toward what I know I’ll find, but hope I don’t:
A face.
It’s gray and mottled, its eyes open, and I drop the phone again. The light disappears, and I’m plunged into darkness.
I’m almost glad the face has disappeared. But the smell. The wind has changed, and the stench invades my nose and mouth, as foul as the time a racoon died under our veranda. It’s a smell you can’t forget, the smell of death and decay. Of fear. This body must have been out in the heat awhile. Nature has already started to take it back.
I collapse to the ground and run my hands over the leaves until I grasp my phone, hands shaking so badly I can barely lift or point it.
The pink lump isn’t trash at all—it’s a blood-splattered coat, wrapped around a woman curled up on her side. The light strobes over her frozen face, her blond hair crusted in mud and leaves and blood. But it’s not just any woman lying there.
It’s my mother.
Her blue eyes stare at me, but they don’t blink. Her mouth has been carved into a demented smile. For a moment, the woods disappear, and I’m back in that bedroom in our old house, shaking her, begging her to wake up.
The woods deepen around me. Panic claws from inside my chest. There’s something scratched into her forehead. Tilting my head, I steady the light until I can make out two words:
I’m back.
I open my mouth to scream, but I can’t catch my breath.
That’s when I fall.
