Webb: Grade school one of final pieces to puzzle in book about Brenda Keller

“Brenda would have walked down this hall. She would have sat in this classroom, listening intently as her favorite teacher taught her first-grade class.”

Those thoughts and dozens of others ran through my mind a few weeks ago when I toured the Dover Grade School for my book about Brenda Keller. Though I’ve been in the tiny town hundreds of times now, sat in the houses of numerous people who knew her, and have spent much of the last five years learning as much about her life as I can, I’d never been inside the school.

A little more than a year ago, my wife said something important when I gave her a list of things I needed to do to start writing the book. There were several interviews on the list, along with a few files (some of which likely don’t exist 30 years later) and a handful of places to visit.

“So, when are you actually going to start writing?” she said. “I understand you’re being thorough, but you are getting to the point where you’re researching too much.”

In a way, my wife was calling me out because she knew I was a little afraid to start writing. After thousands of hours of tracking people down, hundreds upon hundreds of phone calls to land critical interviews, and driving thousands of miles to track down case files and other information, the thought of piecing everything together was daunting.

I started writing the next day. The first few chapters came slowly and, frankly, aren’t that good right now. It took me several months and multiple chapters before I found a style that helped immensely. I started using subheads to connect the dots and transition.

I got to the fourth and fifth chapters and realized that those were the two parts of the book that I really did need more information to complete. One is about the church, the other is about the Dover Junior High and grade school. Before writing about the church, I needed more historical context. Before writing about the schools, I needed to see them.

Before I did, however, I moved ahead and focused my attention the section of the book the folks in Dover want to read: the search, the investigation, the confession and the aftermath. All the interviews and the gigantic stack of case files and court transcripts are the nuts and bolts of a fascinating story that most people don’t know about.

One of the turning points in putting the story together was learning more about the man who took Brenda’s life. That was more difficult than anything I’ve done as a journalist. Ultimately, a break in the form of a random comment on my blog from his stepsister opened the floodgates.

Two years after that random comment, my wife and I drove around the neighborhood he grew up in and interviewed a woman who knew him well. His story is not for the faint of heart (nor does it excuse the awful crime he committed).

I’ve been writing for 17 months now and recently passed the 100,000-word mark. A few weeks ago, it was time to finish researching the schools. Fortunately, the folks in Dover are passionate about history. How else do you explain leaving the grade school largely as it was, even though it’s now a community center?

On the morning of the scheduled visit, the kind woman who manages the building texted me to say the community center usually leaves the heat off when it isn’t being used to save money, so it was going to be cold. “Do you want to reschedule?” Absolutely not. I’d waited too long for this experience. Fortunately, she left the decision up to me. A few hours later, we were in the school, bundled up and walking down memory lane.

I arrived a few minutes early, walking around the building to get a feel for the grounds. As I looked back to the southwest, not far from the property were Brenda died, I thought what I’ve thought many times: “What this man did was incredibly brazen.” There were so many ways he could have been caught taking her that night.

Once my guide arrived, she walked up to the large, heavy glass doors and muscled up to pull one open. The aroma of your typical school filled my nostrils. I could hear the sound of children walking quickly to the auditorium for lunch after smelling hot, fresh rolls cooking all morning. I imagined the sound of Ms. Starbird, a teacher for nearly 50 years, writing on the chalkboard in her classroom. I could see Glenn Lange, Terri Anderson and Pam Leptich sitting in the tiny principal’s office.

After spending 90 nostalgic minutes in the community center, I had what I needed to write about the grade school. I’ll go back, of course. I can’t resist the draw of the history room, a classroom transformed into a museum of old photos, jerseys, cheerleader outfits, yearbooks and much more. And I can’t resist spending more time in a place Brenda loved so dearly.

BOOK UPDATE

A quick update on the book: after nearly four years of research and a year and a half of writing, I’m two chapters and a epilogue from completing a rough draft. When that is finished, my wife and I will edit it, and I’ll refine it before it’s published. My hope is to complete that process sometime next year.