This is a very well written work of non-fiction. The author is in fact a writer of fiction, but she spent years investigating the crime at the center of the story (now a series on Hulu) and interviewing the many people involved. She attended trials and spoke with legal and law enforcement agents. This story of the murder of a 14-year-old girl by her peers is both chilling and difficult to put down. Godfrey paints a vivid picture of a community rocked by the shocking brutality of the crime, and she provides an amazing amount of detail about the people involved in it: mostly other teenaged girls and one boy, who had to give numerous interviews to police as well as testifying in court. The constant refrain from those who knew the perpetrators is that they simply couldn’t believe it was true — that these 14 and 15 year olds lured, beat up and murdered another girl. The crime itself is hard to read, but one is also astounded by the events following the murder and the toll the crime takes on everyone touched by it.
In November of 1997, 14-year-old Reena Virk was murdered. The police did not discover the murder immediately. Reena’s parents notified authorities when she did not come home from a party, but she was missing for a week before investigators began to look into the possibility of foul play. The fact that a young girl was missing and that this was not treated as a matter of serious concern reveals a lot about the community it which the crime occurred. View Royal, which is in Vancouver, British Columbia, was not an affluent area. View Royal experienced its share of drug and alcohol abuse, gang activity and crime. In the first part of this book, Godfrey introduces the reader to the teens of this community, with much of her information coming from interviews she conducted herself. The teens involved in the murder were obsessed with gangs like the Crips and the music that glorified violence. Some of them came from stable families but others had fractured families and/or had been in and out of foster care or facilities meant for troubled youth. The victim, Reena, was the daughter of Indian immigrants who rebelled against their conservative ways. She wanted to be accepted by the dangerous girls of the high school, and strove to prove that she was one of them. As Godfrey introduces the “players” to us one by one, we see with growing horror how the crime could take place.
The beating of Reena Virk by a group of teens is chilling to read, but the details of the grisly murder only come out later in this book. It is amazing to see how easily this murder could have gone unsolved, partly because the investigation started a week after the crime had already been committed but also because no one, not even investigators, could believe that teenaged girls could have done it. The teens involved in the crime, however, could not stop talking about it, and in typical teen fashion, told details to friends after the event expecting them to keep it quiet. When the police finally rounded up the suspects (thanks largely to the intel offered by a teen in a halfway house whose roommate had been involved and talked about it constantly), View Royal is rocked by the news. The families of these girls and one boy named Warren were shocked and would not believe that their children had done what they stood accused of doing. Friends of the teens were also repeatedly interviewed by police for information, and for Warren’s girlfriend, it was especially difficult. She loved Warren and wanted to protect him, but she also was horrified by the crime. Meanwhile, the police were still trying to find the body and later, any hard evidence to tie the perpetrators to Reena’s death.
The teens involved did eventually go to trial, some for assault, but two for the murder of Reena Virk. The details about the legal specialists involved (judges and attorneys) are fascinating. Warren’s representation in court was not as good as the other perpetrator’s, and she very easily could have walked without any punishment at all. Appeals meant that the witnesses would have to testify again and again to the gruesome events of the night of the murder. Godfrey also provides updates on these teens (the book was published in 2005) as they grew up and moved on. It was heartening to see how some of them changed as a result of the murder, but unsurprising to see how some remained exactly the same. Reena Virk’s family displays an extraordinary kind of grace in the face of the senseless violence that took their daughter.
This is the kind of book that haunts you after you finish reading it. These teens made horrible choices with dire consequences for Reena, forever changing the trajectories of their own lives. Somehow, I feel sorry for them and yet remained horrified by their actions.
