The notorious case of four youths jailed for murder in a rust-belt town in the US is the legacy of the abandonment of the American working-class following Reagan-era trickle down economic policies, author Chris Kraus says.
Kraus’ upcoming novel The Four Spent the Day Together tells the story of a violent methamphetamine-fuelled murder involving four teenagers on the Iron Range of Minnesota.
Set to be published in serial form by New York online magazine Broadcast next month, Kraus hopes the story will reveal something about the state of the American heartland.
Chris Kraus Photo: AFP / FILE
Best-known for the semi-autobiographical novel I Love Dick, Los Angeles-based Kraus spent much of her teenage years in New Zealand, studying at Victoria University and working as a journalist.
Kraus also contributes to Clinic of Phantasms, a collection of the writings of her late friend, New Zealand artist and curator Giovanni Intra, to be published shortly by new imprint Bouncy Castle.
Her book Aliens and Anorexia has been adapted into a play, which had been scheduled to play at the Festival of the Arts in Wellington before Covid-19 restrictions forced its cancellation.
Writing The Four Spent the Day Today involved putting the pieces together to paint a picture of the Minnesota case, Kraus says.
“I have been in touch with everyone involved in the crime. But it’s very limited, what the police are going to say to you, what the investigators, the Bureau of Criminal of Investigation, the judicial system. Even the attorneys - it’s all very regulated, what people can say.”
The victims and defendants however could talk all they wanted.
She chose this particular crime to write about because of the large amount of time she’d spent over the past decade in northern Minnesota, as it reminded her a lot of New Zealand.
“Incredible wild habitat there, very green. It’s a real reprieve from being in southern California where I normally live. My partner, who is a psychologist and works in addiction, he actually moved up there for several years and was working in social services there.
"So I started to get a sense, we had a cabin there way out in the country and I started to get a sense of this big disparity between my world – like, look at the deer, the eagles, should I go for a long bike ride today – and the life that people were living in the town, which is really dire.
“This is the heart of the rust belt. This a town where the social order is about four generations removed from when things had been good, where people had good jobs."
When Kraus came across the murders it helped focus her mind on how different her life was to that lived just down the road.
“We subscribed to the local paper and I read about the crime and I thought ‘wow, there’s such a difference between the lives of these kids and what I think I come here for and I wanted to learn more about it," she says.
The children involved in the crime lived in and out of foster care, which had a devastating effect on them. The crime took place in Hibbing, which she calls a "spent mining town”.
The mythology of towns like Hibbing is they were once places where working-class families comfortably lived off the wage of the father. Kraus is unsure whether this is true, although it was what lay behind Trump’s rallying cry of Make America Great Again.
What is certain for Kraus is that these regions were abandoned by neo-liberal ‘hyper’ capitalism and the ultimate legacy of Reagan-era trickle-down economic policies. She says Hibbing’s social disintegration was the “chickens coming home to roost”.
There is mystery surrounding the crime itself, she says.
“Another thing that captivated me about it was it wasn’t just ‘I’m mad at you I have a gun bang bang, you’re dead. It was more like they spent 36 hours together, these kids. It was really hard to figure out what they were doing.
“They kidnapped the guy and then he wasn’t kidnapped because they were buying parts for his car and helping him fix his car.
“And then they all went to another friend’s house and got high together and then they went back to the apartment and were drinking some more. It wasn’t until 3am after they’d been drinking together for a full day that they took him out in the woods and executed him.
“They shot him in the head, pretending that they were meeting a Mexican cartel in the woods… to sell cannabis to the Mexican cartel to buy gas money to get him home.”
Kraus says a type of meth originating from Mexico that causes instant psychosis, which may be implicated in the murder.
“Definitely meth was involved in this crime. People aren’t just high, they are completely out of their minds in a very violent way.”
The predicament of people living in these rust belt regions is they don’t want to move as their families are the most important thing to them and they’ve been there for generations, she says.
“Asking people to displace themselves voluntarily, that’s really asking a great deal, and the means of support has really been rooted out… It’s really hard for people to survive.”
In stark comparison, she says many of these areas are close to the Canadian border, over which the scene is completely different, with government infrastructure policies focused on making communities thrive.
The children involved in the murder are now in prison.
“The whole thing is tragic. The 18-year-old boy who did the shooting has Asperger’s and he pleaded guilty to first-degree murder, so he’ll be in prison for the rest of his life. He can have a parole in 30-to-35 years. The girl pleaded guilty to second degree murder so she’s in prison for 32 years, she could be out in 25. And the accomplice, who really did nothing but drive the car, also pleaded guilty to second degree murder and he’s in prison for 17 years.”
They’re in a maximum-security prison, working for about 35 cents per hour. “It’s very, very harsh and nothing to do with rehabilitation,” she says.
Kraus' style of writing is informed by her journalistic background and she says her books are part of a genre of reporting in a much more expressive fashion.
After working as a journalist in New Zealand for 5 years, she moved to New York to become an actress and didn't write again for 20 years.
"I've always considered writing a form of reporting. I think literary writing is just a very high form of reporting on something," she says.
