Nobody's Property: Living on the Remains of a Life in Calfornia
15 episodes - English - Latest episode: about 13 years ago - ★★★★★ - 1 ratingNovember 4, 1971
Jennifer Rose Cooke, a girl from California, just turned 18, goes missing in a frigid forest in West Germany. She has been hitchhiking. First she caught a ride with a trucker, then with a West German soldier. Maybe she was trying to visit a young professor she had met on the boat over from New York. On that trip, he had heard her say she might throw herself overboard.
April 28, 1972
Another girl, just turned three, lives with her parents in a house in Laurel Canyon that lets the California rain in. Her biggest fear is of the brown snails in the garden; she will not cross the brick path if one is there. It is her father's twenty-sixth birthday; on this day his sister Jenny's remains are found. Officially, she died "of exposure," although a murder investigation is begun and the file remains permanently open.
This is the tale of a relationship only half lived. I have no memories of my Aunt Jenny as a living person. For all of my younger years I knew her only as someone who had died, and the only lessons her story held for me were about death and the probability that the worst would happen. Then I began to write about her. This was the next logical step since for me she was pure story already. While I started trying to find the truth of what had happened to her, I began to see that each person in my family had a different version of the story that suited their particular worldview and satisfied their particular needs. I was no different.
In a sense, Jenny's story has become the instrument that I'm singing along to--singing about a childhood in gorgeous 1970s-era L.A., about a friendly divorce; about the changing California landscape, its violent beauty; about traveling with my dad to try to get closer to what happened; and about getting to know something about a living girl who, it turns out, preferred to be called "Rose," not Jenny.
I've left Rose alone for a few years, but now we're traveling together again.
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Episodes
Nobody's Property 15
April 28, 2011 19:13 - 31 minutes - 28.6 MBThree o’clock in the afternoon, and Shirley, of Shawnee Memorials, just across Harrison Avenue from Fairview Cemetery, was not taking any shit off my dad. We had come here at my urging; Dad had mentioned that he still needed to order a stone to mark the plot where Jenny’s and Edith’s remains were buried together. I could see that if I didn’t push a little, it wasn’t going to happen any time soon. And the grass in the Rose family plot, though a bit dry and thatched in patches, covered their g...
Nobody's Property 14
April 22, 2011 21:33 - 31 minutes - 28.9 MBThe sound of pistons pumping, a lawn-mower pulse and wheeze, comes up behind her, and she looks over her shoulder to see the VW coming up fast: black and chrome, some of the shine worn off and anyway looking duller in this flat November light. She keeps her thumbs hooked under the leather of her backpack straps, walks backward and keeps her gaze straight and sober toward the driver of the car. It pulls over a few paces ahead and stops at an angle on the gravel margin. Under her boots the gr...
Nobody's Property 13
April 15, 2011 00:18 - 42 minutes - 38.8 MB"I serve with the German Armed Forces. My garrison is Hardheim, where I am stationed at Carl-Schurz-Kaserne. At present, I attend the Bundeswehrfachschule in Tauberbischofsheim. "On Friday, 5 November 1971, I was driving in my VW...from Tauberbischofsheim to Hardheim between 12.20 and 12.30 o'clock. About 200 meters past the stone works on the B 27 I saw a young woman walk on the right-hand side of the road. She did not use the usual signal to indicate that she wanted a ride, but she turned...
Nobody's Property 12
April 08, 2011 20:56 - 29 minutes - 27.1 MBTerminal burrowing can be identified in reports of hypothermia deaths, but has only recently been given a name. It is a behavior pattern observed in the last stages of hypothermia whereby the afflicted will enter small, enclosed spaces, such as wardrobes, cupboards, and closets. Outdoors, the victim may burrow into piles of leaves, the crevices between rocks or fallen trees, or into culverts. Searchers must be aware of the possibility that the missing persons may be thoroughly hidden and to...
Nobody's Property 11
April 01, 2011 18:24 - 33 minutes - 31.1 MBIn Tübingen the houses sit along the River Neckar like nineteenth-century ladies on lounge chairs with flowing skirts and big hats: they look comfortable and bourgeois and unassailable. Like most of Germany. From the bridge over the river you can see a tower, painted yellow now, where the poet Hölderlin went crazy for 36 years: a long, slow burn that might, in other circumstances, be called life. This is where he wrote these words, which I found quoted by Paul Auster in The Invention of Soli...
Nobody's Property 10
March 26, 2011 00:39 - 25 minutes - 23.8 MBCharles had given us maps and a police report when we visited him in Oklahoma City. He pulled out one map, of Hardheim and its surroundings, and pointed. “This is where Jennifer was…uh…murdered,” he told us. At the time, I wondered if his hesitancy over the word indicated uncertainty. But later I found that I, too, was reluctant to say it: murder. Not an easy word. We had this itinerary we’d been given: Jennifer’s last stops on this earth. Did we think visiting them would make sense of thi...
Nobody's Property 09
March 17, 2011 17:27 - 27 minutes - 25.4 MBWe had our money out to pay the Lufthansa flight attendant for our drinks—my no-name red wine and Dad’s Glenlivet—and when she moved on without even looking at the fold of bills in Dad’s hand we were practically giddy. Free drinks! It made being stuck in a metal and plastic capsule for eleven hours seem worth it. The flight attendant, a slim German woman with blond hair gathered expertly into a chignon, must have thought us such rubes. We didn’t care. Salt of the earth! Thankful for s...
Nobody's Property 08
March 10, 2011 22:10 - 38 minutes - 35.6 MB“I’ve been thinking about a trip to Germany,” my father says on the phone one day. “I’m thinking I need to start thinking about Jenny in a new way.” I’ve been thinking that too. And my father: the first thirty years of our time together are over; what are the next thirty going to be like? What will we do in Germany? I’ve thought of going by myself, trying to find some things out. I see myself in a room with a man who was the last person to see Jenny alive. Did he kill her? Or did he just ...
Nobody's Property 07
March 03, 2011 18:45 - 28 minutes - 26 MBDo you think you are free to live your life? We try to tell ourselves that the worst won’t happen, that we can leave the doors of our lives unlocked and the crazies won’t come through them, or if they do we can talk them down. We search the papers for the reasons behind the senseless murder—the plot. How can we still be doing this? I grew up with the plot in my head: Jenny died hitchhiking. That was the “reason.” That was the “plot.” Her parents sent her there. That was the “pathos,” the “...
Nobody's Property 06
March 01, 2011 04:56 - 37 minutes - 34.3 MBHush-a-bye, don’t you cry Go to sleepy little baby. When you wake, you will find All the pretty little horses. Dapples and grays, pintos and bays All the pretty little horses. Way down yonder, in the meadow, Poor little baby, crying “mama”. Birds and the butterflys flutter ‘round her eyes. Poor little baby crying “mama”. Hush-a-bye....
Nobody's Property 05
January 27, 2011 22:13 - 29 minutes - 26.8 MBA few years ago, my father told me the story of how my Aunt Jenny's remains were shipped back to be put into different ground. Dad called me from Oklahoma to describe how my grandmother Edith stood by while workers dug up the urn from under the small brass marker that barely wrinkled the surface of the grass in Oak Park Cemetery. They opened the urn; Edith looked inside. I could see her standing there, in a tasteful suit and stockings and pumps, her light hair neatly and stiffly styled, bow...
Nobody's Property 04
January 22, 2011 04:44 - 30 minutes - 27.5 MBAfter my father stopped living with Mom and me, he spent his nights in his woodshop, in the lemon packing house that my grandfather Charles owned. The remains of the citrus groves still grew all around us in Claremont, and an old guy sold wooden crates of local lemons off the loading dock of the packing house: the sole survivor. When I visited my dad's shop there, I was afraid to go to the bathroom, because it was all the way on the other side of the packing house, and the big, scarred wood ...
Nobody's Property 03
January 20, 2011 20:53 - 21 minutes - 19.8 MBFor a few years while I was growing up, a book called How to Do Your Own Divorce sat undisturbed on a bookshelf by our living-room fireplace. It just sat there, its paper spine facing out, between Passages and Last Things. This was in Southern California, on an alluvial fan of the San Gabriels, in a little falling-down house on Twelfth Street in Claremont. We moved there when I was five years old. My father’s parents, Charles and Edith, had fronted him the down payment for the house and plan...
Nobody's Property 02
January 18, 2011 21:36 - 21 minutes - 19.5 MBWhen I was two years old, my parents and I lived for a while in a cottage up Laurel Canyon. There is a picture of me from this time: I'm wearing toddler-sized cowgirl buckskins, my red hair is in high pigtails poking out each side of my head, I'm smiling, and I'm holding a toothbrush. Remember, this was less than two years after the Manson Family came down from the Ranch and murdered Sharon Tate and her guests up on Cielo Drive. The crazed women tasted blood and used it to scrawl PIG on the...
Nobody's Property 01
January 14, 2011 20:10 - 28 minutes - 26.2 MBI’m on the middle road from San Francisco to L.A., the 101, doing seventy behind a Chevy Chevelle past open-bed trucks hauling vegetables and buses hauling field workers, twin port-a-potties towed behind them. I noticed the Chevelle pulling out from the center divider outside Salinas—the gray dust it kicked up matched the primer that coated its aging body. Now every bus and truck it passes I blow by moments later, easing back into the right lane once I see both headlights in the rearview. I...