In 1962, it was very common for partygoers to create their own Halloween masks from plaster, burlap fabric, and paint. If you were really strapped for cash you asked your neighbor if he had any chicken wire left in his shed and you used paper mache.

In 1962, a fairly small town was about to see its worst event in its history 20 years before it and well over 20 years after it happened. We’re talking maybe 30 kids in the graduating class kind of small.

The high schoolers who did decide to meet up at Marla’s house that year all knew that Marlas dad was a drinker and that it’d be easy to pull up some cheap beer from her fridge. Especially as she made a point to whisper by the lockers to anyone she’d invite that her old man would be out of town for Halloween this year and that “It’d be real nice if you stop by.” She would repeat that phrase to anyone in the hall.

So that Halloween night a bunch of kids from high school made their masks and headed out to Marlas for the evening. They did regular teenager rowdiness, dragging the boulevard in Kenny’s mother’s Coup, or throwing water grenades at neighborhood mailboxes (Back then it was Ellingtons Water Grenades, nowadays everyone just calls ’em water balloons.)

The trick-or-treat children stopped knocking at the door around 9:30. More than one bottle was laying around open at that point. Tommy had a new polaroid that had a flash and everything as he asked everyone to gather together to get a photo. Everyone piled in from the floor to way up high wearing their masks.

But there was one person.

One person in a black hooded mask reminiscent of an executioner in the middle of the crowd. No one would realize how important that image of that one person would be until the next day.

The evening was getting later, and this is where many accounts get real fuzzy. Someone described how they saw a dowel rod propped onto the top half of the window on the outside placed real quietly. They thought it was strange but brushed it off.

Some say Marla and Tommy were in a bedroom down the hall and were first found by Karen, their throats slit deep-like and gushing out blood in small spurts down their front.

Karen was about to scream, but felt the knife come in her back so suddenly she lost all her breath from it puncturing her right lung. We only know this from where they found her, and how she was described during the autopsy.

But at that point, someone in the front room saw Karen when she dropped down. Screams erupted and the entire house broke out into a panic. Rushing for the front door they found it jammed. A large porch chair had been propped under the handle and it wouldn’t budge. The windows blocked by the wooden dowel rods.

The man in the black hooded mask swung the knife around expertly. Someone said he was being very careful as to how he held it as it was slick with blood. Almost as if he’d done something like that a thousand times.

Frankly, when you live in a small town like ours, growing up on a farm it isn’t uncommon to know how much pressure to apply to a pigs throat. Or the angle needed to snap a chickens neck. But this man was something else.

They say he had no hesitancy when he gutted Marla, or when he was able to finish off three other victims before he took his leave through ONE window he’d left open.

Police found Tommy’s photos and a couple of days after that the mask itself was found on the side of the road heading out of town toward the mountainside, but to this day no one knows who that was.