ABSTRACT
What happens if a real event that generates anxiety about looking as a threat to the social bond is turned into cinema? The following reports from The Los Angeles Times and The New York Times in November and December 1981 give the first accounts of a murder that took place in Milpitas, California in that year:
More than a dozen high school students who viewed the strangled body of a schoolmate kept her murder a secret to protect the youth who bragged of killing her and proudly showed off the corpse, officials said Tuesday. [Detective] Icely, who interviewed thirteen students who had gone to the murder site, said that the youths were callous and cold, with no apparent feelings for Miss Conrad. ‘Their prime objective was to cover up for their friend. They showed no remorse at all for the girl lying in the ravine… I just couldn’t believe it. Most people who see a homicide are happy to talk about it…’ Mike Irvin, 18, an auto assembly worker, was the first to notify police of the murder. He heard from friends at Milpitas High that a corpse was in the hills. ‘All the kids wanted to go up and see her,’ he said. ‘As soon as I saw it was a body and not a mannequin, I went straight to the police.’
