strange piece of paradise

“The sound of screeching tires woke me. It was near midnight, and we had just gone to sleep. A stranger deliberately drove over our tent, then attacked us both with an axe. I saw his torso. He was a meticulous cowboy who looked like he had stepped off a movie set.”

Near the beginning of Strange Piece of Paradise, author Terri Jentz describes the life-changing event that occurred in Cline Falls Park in the Oregon desert in 1977. Shortly after embarking upon a cross-country bicycle trip, two university students are chopped up and left for dead. While both girls survive, their close friendship does not. While her partner represses all memory of the attack, Jentz is driven to revisit the crime scene 15 years later. She retraces their steps leading up to the night of the attempted murder, and then follows a trail of clues that the police, for some inexplicable reason, have not. No one has ever been charged for the attack, and yet everyone in the community near the park has a pretty good idea who did it. And he’s still around.

There was “a series of subtle yet persistent omens that led up to the night of June 22,” Jentz writes, in hindsight. It’s enough to make one wonder how often all of us have walked into nasty situations that might have been avoided had we known how to read the messages given (repeatedly, in Jentz's case) by the world around us.

This densely written personal account also examines the horrible nature of psychopathic violence toward women in North American society and around the world, and the very little that is done to stop it.

Terri Jentz’s webpage contains audio excerpts from the book as well as ordering information. Find it here.