Gitchie Girl: The Survivor's Inside Story of the Mass Murders that Shocked the Heartland by Phil Hamman & Sandy Hamman

kept desperately talking without even pausing to listen.
    “I know what happened to him because I was with him at Gitchie Manitou last night.” Her mind was weary, and the words started rolling out of control. “These three guys came up and shot him and said they were cops and the bullets weren’t real that it was tranquilizers.” She paused for a breath.
    “Sandra, slow down, I—”
    “One of them raped me.”
    He hesitated for just a moment. There was something she needed to know, but he couldn’t tell her over the phone. “Where are you? I’m coming to pick you up.”
    What Roger’s brother hadn’t told her was that his family had already received the news that Roger was dead. Instead, he remained steadfast and brought the girls to the police station, where a detective wearing a dark suit directed Sandra and Roger’s brother into a cramped office.
    “This is the girl who was with my brother,” he explained to the detective.
    The detective’s steeled eyes exuded seriousness. He got right to the point. “There has been a homicide,” he said, looking at Sandra. “Do you know what a homicide is?” The way he asked the question indicated she should know. Sandra didn’t want to appear stupid so she answered yes even though she didn’t know. Her life experiences to this point could be wrapped up in what she’d learned from TV shows like The Brady Bunch and Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom . Upon hearing that, the man closed the door behind them and immediately began reading Sandra her rights.
    The moment he heard this, Roger’s brother flew into a rage. “What the *&%$ is this? This girl was with those boys. She’s a victim, too!” With his long hair and strong voice, he reminded Sandra of an older version of Roger but never so much as now when he jumped to her defense, a girl he barely knew.
    Sandra’s mind was straying into a strange zone of being wide awake yet yearning for sleep to wash away the horrid memories of the previous night. Her greatest comfort at the moment was that Roger’s brother had taken charge and defended her.
    “Sir, this is standard police procedure, and I need to ask you to leave the room.” The detective’s sober face did nothing to ease the sick gnawing in Sandra’s stomach. After repeated attempts at persuading the detective to let him stay, Roger’s brother was eventually led out of the room, still protesting Sandra’s treatment.
    Soon another policeman entered and herded Sandra down the hall for mug shots and then fingerprinting. Sandra bristled but she was light-headed from lack of sleep and nauseated from lack of food. After washing the dark-staining ink from her fingers, he guided her into a small bare room with a single table, fluorescent overhead lights, and an assortment of mildly comfortable chairs. It would have been a quietly nondescript place had it not been for the task before her. The investigators now needed her handwritten account of everything she could remember from the night of horrors.
    “Include everything you can remember: colors, sounds, names. Sometimes it’s the small things that help us solve a case,” she was instructed. And write she did. The investigator sat by, silently composing his own report. By the time she was finished, a ten-page account lay fanned out on the table before them. He was impressed by her determination yet something was amiss. The problem was that her story just didn’t add up. There was no apparent motive according to her version, and the likelihood was pretty slim that three men would just appear out of nowhere and murder four strangers for no reason. Then there was the fact that she had not been murdered. To top it off, the detectives seemed to have the same gnawing question: why would a murderer drop her off at her house? The whole situation was highly suspicious. There had to be something she wasn’t telling them.
    How was it that this girl, who had witnessed the murder of her boyfriend, could garner enough