Archive of Our Own

FIFTY YEARS LATER, THE TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE STILL HAUNTS ITS HOMETOWN

by Lena Picaro, staff writer

Fifty years ago today, the tiny Texas town of Newt was to be forever marked by association with the mysterious, never-to-be-solved disappearance of four young adults who were passing through the oft-overlooked Muerto County. Originally a group of five, with a pair of siblings setting out to visit the gravesites of their grandparents amid a string of recently reported grave robberies in the area, accompanied by three friends, only one would return. Sally Hardesty, the sole survivor of the fateful trip, was delivered to the hospital drenched in blood and incoherent with shock and trauma before falling into a three-day coma. When she awoke, she claimed to remember a number of shocking details surrounding the demise of her friends and her brother, including murders with a chainsaw (hence the lurid name later applied to the supposed incident by the media), the discovery of a house filled with human bones, and rumors of cannibalism. However, police could find no evidence of anything the likely still-delirious young woman spoke of, and the investigation soon petered out. The case made headlines for several months afterward, but was quickly overshadowed by other stories in what would prove to be a tumultuous decade for crime. Hardesty herself would spend a few years recovering in a psychiatric hospital before quietly returning to society. She has lived a private life ever since, and we respect her lack of interest in commenting on what must surely have been a terribly traumatic memory for her, whatever happened.

Still, there remain a few of us who will always be fascinated with what has become a local legend in the area, especially those like myself who grew up in Newt and were now suddenly seeing it put on the map. With the fifty-year anniversary of the date it all allegedly happened approaching, I thought it as good a time as ever to track down some of my old friends and classmates from my hometown, returning to it for the first time in many years.

I thank the Journal for allowing me to embark on this endeavor for an article. As this is a personal story to me, I thought it only right that I be the one to cover it.

Newt was and is a very small town, and was considered a “dying” one even when I was growing up. For decades it had been kept alive by the beef industry, with most of the adult workforce kept employed by the nearby slaughterhouse or meatpacking plant, but the increase over the years of automation in those industries led to both factories shutting down and many a resident out of a job. By the time that finally happened, I was long gone, but I was one of the few who made it out, so to speak. It was never the sort of town people left easily, try as they might.

On the very outskirts of town, about as far as you could get from the center while still being part of it, lived a family called the Sawyers. Everyone in town knew each other, of course, as the populaces of small towns do, but it was partly because of their isolation and partly because of certain eccentricities that the Sawyers were looked on somewhat strangely by the rest of us. They had been there for long enough to have established themselves, and most of us had gone to school or worked with at least one of them, but there was no doubt they were different and we all knew it.

For one thing, they were all women, at least for most of the time we knew them. The matriarch had settled there in her youth and married a man from town, but they only had daughters, and the daughter who stayed in her mother’s house married a man who was never around before he left to fight in the war and then left her for good. It was the women who worked in the slaughterhouse, during and after the wars, and the matriarch’s four granddaughters seemed to grow up as comfortably as they could without a father figure after their grandfather died. Everyone around town also knew that the eldest daughter was forced to raise her younger sisters by herself after her mother unexpectedly died in a tragic accident when she – the daughter – was seventeen years old, leaving her alone with only her ailing grandmother to help, but she never married either and swiftly went to work. In those days this was the subject of much gossip, but it died down soon enough.

The reason I thought of them when I noticed that the anniversary of our town’s one point of notoriety was coming up was that, for a time, they were suspected of having something to do with it. They left town shortly after it happened and didn’t return for thirteen years, before, according to my old neighbors, they came back just as inexplicably. Even if they weren’t responsible, many people believed they at least knew something, but nothing ever surfaced. I never believed these rumors myself, but I thought often about questioning them. Now, I thought, was the time to catch up and see what they did know, if anything.

Two of the four sisters had gone to school in town, although the eldest dropped out before her last year of high school when their mother died. The younger two did not, for reasons no one knew but were courteous enough not to pry about. I shared a year with the second-oldest; we were not exactly friends, but we spent enough time together and had enough mutual acquaintances that I felt we knew each other fairly well, and we’ve been in touch over the years. Only one sister – my classmate’s twin – still lives in town, in the house they grew up in. The order in which I visited them is not the order in which I will report on our conversations, though. One must know how to arrange a story without misleading one’s readers.

Patience Sawyer is the eldest of her sisters and lives outside of town now. I got her location from her younger sister, but they both asked me not to disclose it here.

Patience was known even in my youth as a withdrawn, sullen, and distrustful person, although she was capable of being polite to outsiders. After her mother’s death, she managed a gas station and convenience store on the outskirts, and interacted far more with people from out of town than most of us ever did. Many passed by, but none stayed for long.

Although I was only nine years old when her mother died, I felt sorry for her, knowing she had to give up whatever plans for the future she might have had to take over raising her sisters, being thrust into the role of a parent when she was still only a teenager. I remember her as looking perpetually tired and prematurely aged even only a few years after her mother’s death, and felt a bit guilty that my image of her had not changed much now that she had fully gray hair and more lines on her face.

After confirming that I was not with the police, the government, or “the bank”, Patience let me in. She apologized for not recognizing me at the door, and asked if I was one of Chastity’s friends.

“In a way,” I said. “We went to school together. She said she’d trust me to write about our hometown for the newspaper I work for, and that you’d be the best source of information.”

She relaxed a bit and invited me to have a drink and something to eat. I accepted – Chastity had told me her older sister had won a few awards at county fairs for her cooking and I was interested to see what the acclaim was about. Her home now is comfortable, if not that spacious, resembling a rustic farmhouse in the authentic sense and not the aesthetic sense in which wealthy trendsetters of the younger generations have claimed it. Her kitchen is well-appointed and, I’m sure, would smell like home to people who spent their formative years where we did.

Patience was eager to talk about her family history once we were settled.

“My grandmother came here as a single mother with a daughter in the 1900s, with just enough money to buy a plot of land nothing had grown on for years. She built a house on it almost entirely by herself, and that’s the one we’ve lived in the whole time we were in that town. It wasn’t until after that she got married, and had two more girls. The youngest being our mother.”

Diligence Sawyer, the aforementioned matriarch, had indeed been considered a formidable woman in her time. She raised her three daughters with the help of her husband, but she was the one who took over his job slaughtering cattle when he went to fight in World War I, and continued it after he came back injured and unable to return to work. While her older two daughters would raise their families elsewhere, her youngest, Humility – known to her friends as Homily – stayed behind.

(While the family is far from being Puritan, the virtue names were an old tradition, the origin of which has since been forgotten. Understandably, Humility’s daughters got off fairly easily with the names they were assigned, though Chastity might disagree.)

“Our mother was much stronger than people think,” said Patience, taking on a more solemn and almost wistful air. “People knew her for being very kind, which she was, but she was also smart and practical, just like her own mother. She married a man from out of town to give her some more stability, and I don’t begrudge her that, even though he was – well, he was a bastard, I’ll say it. It’s a good thing he wasn’t around much when I was young.”

Homily’s husband remained largely anonymous to our neighbors. She only went off with him for a few years after her first daughter was born, before he went off to fight in World War II and she, like her mother before her, went to work at the slaughterhouse.

“He came back to give her three more kids and—” Patience closed her eyes, clenched her hands together, as if she were about to get angry and had to stop herself from saying something. “We never saw him again, and good riddance. She didn’t need him anyway. It was her and our grandmother’s good thinking that got us through the Depression, and the war, and everything that’s come since. You don’t know how hard it hit us when she died.”

I asked her if she ever considered taking up her mother’s line of work after her passing, but she shook her head.

“It was a dying business even then, and I never had the stomach for it, to tell you the truth. She always said our grandmother was one of the best to ever do it, and I believed it. She was one of the first women to be employed there and she put all the men to shame, so our mother had a lot to live up to – but she never pressured us into doing the same. I’m glad she taught me how to cook. I was more comfortable working with the end product, if you know what I mean. I thought I might even have a future in it, before – well, you know.”

I knew she and her mother were very close, so I decided not to ask her too much about her death; it was doubtless a sensitive subject. Instead, I asked about her grandmother.

“Well, I was the only one who really got to know her when she was in her prime. She and my mother were – very different, in their personalities, but they got along really well. I think she hated getting old and not being able to do as much as she used to, but she held on for a long time. We’re long-lived in this family. We took good care of her right up until the end. We moved house right after she died, and – it was quick and easy for her, at least.”

“Was that why you left on that day in ’73?” I asked her.

She hesitated, as if thinking. “Yes.”

“How do you think your sisters are doing?” I asked.

“Oh, they seem fine. I hope they’re doing well. I’m proud of them for finally getting out of that town, the two who did. Temperance is still there, but I feel like it’s where she was always supposed to be, you know? Traditionally in our family, it’s the youngest who stays at home in her own parents’ house, but with everything’s that’s happened to us, it feels right that it’s her. Even though I might not have expected that Charity would ever leave.” She smiled slightly. “I was hard on those girls after our mother died. It was hard raising them and I’m sure they didn’t appreciate me trying to keep them in line. It didn’t exactly bring us closer together. But now…I just hope they’re happy. And I hope they know I’m proud of them. We’re all getting too old to hold on to grudges anymore.”

I asked her if she had any ideas on what had happened to those four missing kids who had disappeared while passing through town. After all, she had been one of the last people to see them alive when they stopped for gas at her station.

Her smile faded. “Oh, I don’t know. This was all so damn long ago. Those were the days of the gas shortages, so I had to send them on their way without anything. Could have been any number of things that happened. There were plenty of crazy people around back then – maybe they picked up someone they shouldn’t have on the side of the road, or had a run-in with a leftover from one of those death cults like Chastity got herself mixed up with. I did warn them not to go poking around on other folks’ property, but if they grew up close by they probably already knew that.”

“They found the van they were driving not far from your station,” I said. “It had some kind of symbol written on the side, and they determined it was in human blood.”

“Well, there you go,” said Patience. “Some kind of psychotic cult business, doing Satanic rituals or human sacrifices or something. Wherever they were buried, they’re probably long past the point you could identify them on sight – sorry to get a little morbid on you, but you’re used to reporting on that kind of thing, right?”

I said I was. She offered to give me some leftovers from the last potluck to take home.

I came away from our conversation liking her despite how much Chastity had complained about her in our childhoods. She had a reputation of being a tough old broad, and, well, so do I.

Chastity Sawyer is someone I do consider a friend, even if I didn’t think of her that way when we were growing up together, so I was happy to see her again when visiting her for this article. She lives in an apartment in the city now, which seems appropriate for her; it’s far removed from her upbringing, and she was always the one who wanted most of all to get away.

I remember Chastity throughout our childhood and adolescence as a tall, pale, scrawny girl with stringy black hair and ice-blue eyes behind large round glasses, never quite growing into the awkwardness of her body but retaining a self-assured confidence that kept her from being a wallflower. She was never popular, but she had her own small circle of friends who stuck together. We considered each other acceptable companions when our regular friends were unavailable, and got to know each other that way.

I was one of a handful of people in the Muerto County High School graduating class of 1965 to attend college, so I didn’t see much of my hometown after that year except for occasional visits. On those days, I often saw Chastity around, working at her sister’s aforementioned gas station and its accompanying store, usually cheerfully informing me how much she hated it and wished she could go anywhere and do anything else. Four years later, she managed to do it, spontaneously packing up some basic supplies and whatever money she’d saved up to head west, as a good deal of our generation did in those days when they wanted to escape from mainstream society but didn’t have the first clue how to actually live off the land by themselves. She was thankfully just a little too late to be taken in by the Manson family, but she still ended up under the thrall of a different, longer-lasting, and more notorious apocalypse cult. Many of you might remember it: it was one of the first major stories I reported on in my early days at this very publication.

Chastity looks about the same as I remember her, with her glasses now tinted purple and her long black hair falling to her waist – at least until we step inside her apartment and she takes off her wig, revealing the exposed metal plate that replaced a piece of her skull following a serious injury she sustained in the infamous police raid on the cult compound. (Ordinarily such an injury would be concealed under the skin, with only a raised line of stitched scarring usually hidden by the hair to show for it, but as Chastity explains with a shrug and a grin – “I never was good at letting wounds heal.” I noticed her hand drifting absentmindedly to the skin around the plate several times during our conversation, stopping herself only once or twice.) I did ask if she’d be willing to put in a word for our inevitable 50-year retrospective on that incident, which will be in only a few months’ time from now. She said she’d think about it.

Chass, as her friends often call her, is disarmingly friendly and talkative, if more than a little off-kilter in many ways. Her apartment looks straight out of the 1960s, decorated with psychedelic colors and blacklight posters, and she has an extensive collection of vinyl records lining one wall. Most of them are from the 60s or 70s, with a few 80s albums thrown in, but a quick flip through shows her music taste to be admirably eclectic. In pride of place – wordplay possibly intended – above her vintage record player is a huge, slightly tattered rainbow flag, with not seven but nine distinct stripes of color. The place smells, unsurprisingly, of marijuana smoke.

“It’s great to see you again, Lena,” she said, flopping down on the worn couch. “You want to spend some time catching up before we dive into business?”

It’s hard to pin down a conversation with Chastity Sawyer in comprehensible written form, but I’ll stick to the highlights.

“I know exactly what you’re talking about,” she said in response to my bringing up the “Chain Saw Massacre” incident, “but I wasn’t there for it. I was still out in California, having a pretty shitty time at that point, but I knew something bad had happened when I – well, sometimes, you just get a sense, you know? Like how if me or Temperance gets hurt, the other one of us usually knows even if we’re away from each other. Patience doesn’t believe us, but it’s true. Anyway, it was kind of like that, but I wasn’t able to contact my sisters until a lot later when I got out of court. I had to make three different phone calls before I found where they were, but it’s a good thing I did because I would have been pretty confused if I went all the way home and found it deserted. I probably wouldn’t have just left like that if I were them, because it made it look like we had something to do with it. But I wasn’t there when they did.”

“Why did they, do you think?” I asked.

“Oh – probably something to do with our grandmother. She wasn’t doing well.”

Chastity’s experiences during that time could fill their own article, or indeed an entire book, but that wasn’t the main subject of our conversation. Suffice it to say, she had made it out of the legal system after testifying that she had not killed anyone, and even received a decent settlement owing to the injuries she’d suffered in the raid. With this, she returned home.

“I think Patience only let me come back because I’d brought money,” she said. “It helped us buy a nice new house up near Dallas, and I used what was left over to buy this really neat abandoned amusement park nearby. Ever been to Texas Battle Land?”

I hadn’t, but I mentioned that I remembered the still unexplained explosion that had taken place underneath it in 1986 and had claimed the life of someone connected to our Massacre survivor – her uncle, a retired sheriff with the unusual name of Boude “Lefty” Enright. He had been one of the only people to believe her claims of outlandish murder and had spent the remainder of his life trying to track down whoever might have been responsible, but sadly was written off as a delusional man obsessed with a revenge that would never happen before his unfortunate death by misadventure.

“Yeah, I don’t know what he was doing down there, but that place was probably just waiting to blow ever since the park shut down,” said Chastity. “My sisters and I used to go exploring in it, but we really shouldn’t have been. Patience kept saying it was a waste of money to buy that property even though I really thought I could have gotten it fixed up, even built something new on it, but…that’s what finally convinced me I should give it up. We moved back here right after that. Patience had done well for herself out there. She was running a catering business and actually making money with her food just like she’d always wanted.”

“Why’d you leave, then?”

“Well…” Chastity looked briefly uncomfortable. “Our grandmother had just died, and, you know, maybe she wanted to be closer to the rest of our family. But who knows why Patience does anything? Maybe you can ask her when you talk to her. Anyway, I’d missed our old house too. I was glad to be back. Mostly.”

I switched gears to talk about the Massacre. “Do you think there’s any truth to what Sally Hardesty said happened to her friends? The chainsaw murders, the cannibalism, the masks made of human skin?”

Chastity cracked a grin. “Oh, man. I mean – that was a crazy story. I thought probably she was just getting what really happened mixed up with some other stuff, like maybe her mind wasn’t ready to accept the truth so she was confused. Poor girl. Maybe she’d been reading about Ed Gein or someone like that in the papers – those grave robbings that were going on got me thinking about it, I’m sure you know what I’m talking about. Or maybe she’d just seen Psycho and was still thinking about it that day. Remember when that movie came out?”

I asked Chastity if she was living with anyone else right now, and she smiled fondly. “I am, actually. She’s not home today, I wanted us to have some time to ourselves. Most of the plants and flowers around here are hers.” 

Before I left, I asked Chastity about the whereabouts of her sisters. She gave me two of them.

“Bother Patience all you want, she’s calmed down over the years. She’ll probably be happy to talk to someone as long as they don’t ask too much about sensitive subjects. Temperance, I don’t know. You’ll have to see what you can get from her, but she might have some interesting things to share. Just don’t go looking for Lacey – I mean Charity. She’s happy where she is now being left alone, and we’d like for her to be able to stay that way. She deserves it.”

Finally, I circled back to where everything had begun, including my own story, in the little town of Newt. No one knows the origin of the name, but I think it suits us.

The main center of town was more populous than I thought it would be – it seems to have been gentrified somewhat in recent years, which would be the subject of a whole article all its own. There were enough older people still living there to make it feel like the same place, though, and the Sawyer house is still standing. I’d never been inside even as a child, and still haven’t – Temperance didn’t invite me in and insisted that we have our conversation outside, despite the heat. We sat down on a nicely sized porch swing that was actually situated just off the back of the house and looked like it had been built by someone in the family a long time ago.

“You weren’t expecting visitors, I imagine,” I said. “House a mess?”

She glanced back in its direction. “You could say that.”

Temperance Sawyer has always had something of a strangely otherworldly quality to her, in a way I could never quite explain. She didn’t go to school with us, but in the days when all the neighborhood children would play together before we’d solidified our friendships, she made for an entertaining companion to traipse through the sparse wooded areas around town with. She and Chastity are twins, but you’d never guess at first glance, since they look nothing alike. While I didn’t hang out with Temperance nearly as much, I still remember something she told me when we were young. I’d asked which of them was the older twin, and Chastity had quickly declared it to be herself. I asked by how much, expecting it to be only a few minutes at most, and Temperance had spoken up:

“Our mama says by an hour, maybe more. It took a long time for me to be born. She says sometimes that the fairies tried to steal Chass after she was born and switch her with me, but our mama held on to us both and ended up with two babies. One from her and one from…somewhere else.” She laughed, then, brightly and suddenly, but even though I was old enough to know better, I would have believed her. Temperance was the kind of kid to tell the others that she was a witch, or a werewolf, or a vampire, and while only the youngest ones really believed it, there was something about her that made it easy to imagine that she had mystical powers or turned into a wolf at night. Maybe it was that she often seemed to really believe it herself.

In that respect, little has changed about her. Little else, too – her long brown hair now streaked with gray but still looking tousled and windswept like she’s spent all day outside, her homemade jewelry of animal bones (today, a small bird’s skull on a string around her neck and a kind of charm bracelet strung with some creature’s vertebrae), and the most striking feature of her appearance, the prominent port-wine birthmark on her face. It’s easy to mistake for a streak of blood if you don’t know, starting next to her right eye and continuing down across her cheek, blooming out like a river delta before trickling off at the bottom of her chin. Her sister Chastity has one of her own on the left side of her face, but true to their fraternal-twin status, it looks rather different – smaller, thinner, grayish-purple, more like a bruise than a bloodstain, but still striking against her ghost-pale complexion.

Temperance had never minded anyone staring at her birthmark when we were children, which may have been because she liked making up stories to explain it. It’s the one thing keeping her from being conventionally pretty, but some might call it a charm point. Not that she cares one way or the other – I remember once, when we were teenagers, a boy from school trying altruistically to invite her to a dance and clearly assuming she must be insecure about her facial marking, telling her earnestly that he actually thought it made her more beautiful, added character to her face. She responded by staring, laughing incredulously, and walking away.

Today, Temperance retains an aura I can only call “witchy”, more genuine ancient pagan than her twin sister’s New Age hippie, but she still enjoys the status of resident eccentric when she ventures into town. She often goes exploring on her own, although she doesn’t have a car – in fact, she still doesn’t have a driver’s license and never learned.

“It sucks how you basically can’t get anywhere in places like this without a car,” she said, “but it’s never been a problem for me. Back in the day I’d go off by myself all day, but I’d still have to be home on time, so I’d just hitch a ride back home. Nowadays people don’t do that much anymore and you’re way less likely to get picked up, but I live alone now, so I don’t need to be back by any time but my own. I don’t mind walking. Gives me more time to look for things – I’m getting twice as many good pictures as I used to, and collecting at least twice as many things from the ground. Bones and feathers and cool rocks – I’ve always liked making art from nature.”

Temperance, by contrast to her sisters, was eager to talk about the events of August 18, 1973 and remembered that day clearly, as well as the following one.

“The main thing about that day for us is that it ended up being an unplanned feast day – that’s a special dinner we’d have sometimes, usually we’d plan it out in advance when we’d do it, but some stuff went a little wrong that day and we had to throw something together last-minute. Anyway, the next morning I remember because I got hit by a truck. It’s a good thing one of our aunts is a nurse, because if they hadn’t rushed me down to see her right after I probably wouldn’t be here right now. That was kind of the start of a whole bunch of crazy stuff, like Chastity coming back home after we hadn’t heard from her in a couple years and us all moving upstate. So yeah, I remember. You always remember the last normal day you had before everything went off the rails – don’t you?”

I said I thought so. “Chastity said that she wasn’t home that day, but she knew something bad had happened, then she said something about you and her always knowing if the other was hurt – do you think she knew about you getting in that accident?”

“Oh, sure she did. I was hurt bad, there’s no way she didn’t feel that. She said later that she’d thought I was dead, but we’d know if one of us was. I do think I might have actually died there, for a short time, though. Something brought me back and it might have been her helping me out.”

I didn’t quite know what to say to this, so I said, “Oh?”

“Yeah, and then a few months later I was still recovering and I woke up with this splitting headache, and I knew it was something to do with Chastity. I was lying there thinking as hard as I could, Chass, don’t you die on me, you’d better not have gotten yourself killed right after I almost died, and then it turned out she’d gotten shot in the head out there or something. She said the doctors seemed really surprised that she pulled through. I think we were maybe both supposed to have died, and maybe in some other universe we did, but something here between us wouldn’t let that happen.”

I had heard from her sisters that Temperance was interested in photography, so I showed her some pictures and asked if she knew anything about them. She zeroed in on the van with the bloody symbol on its side right away.

“I thought it might be them,” she said. “I got a ride from these kids on that day.”

“Your sister Patience said they stopped at her gas station,” I said.

“That’s right, they did. Our paths crossed in all sorts of ways, huh?”

“So they dropped you off at home?”

“No, actually, I never made it that far. Had to walk back by myself and got home way too late…they threw me out.”

“How come?”

“I think I put people off sometimes without even meaning to. I tried to sell them one of my photos and they didn’t want it, so I had to burn it. Then I remembered that if you take a picture of someone and then destroy it, that’s a good way to put a curse on them whether you mean to or not, so I tried to do something quick to protect at least one of them. I’d taken a liking to this one guy who seemed interested in what I was talking about, the only one of them to try and be nice to me, really – but I maybe should have explained myself better.” As she talked, I noticed she had taken out a straight razor from somewhere I hadn’t seen and was idly playing with it, flicking the blade in and out without looking but still managing not to cut herself. I also noticed a scar across the palm of her left hand that looked like it had healed many times over, but I didn’t say anything about it.

“What do you think this means?” I asked, pointing to the blood symbol.

She cocked her head at it, held the photo up to the light. “I don’t know. Might be a zodiac thing – you’d have to ask Chass about that. If it’s really human blood, though, someone was definitely putting a curse on them. No wonder I couldn’t save them.” She smiled in an oddly nostalgic way.

We also discussed the graverobbing incidents that had been occurring in the area at around the same time, and Temperance took a moment to bound back into the house and get a few photos from her collection to show me.

“Had to get up real early to get this,” she said, handing me a picture of a grotesque display of exhumed corpses that she had found in the local cemetery that very morning. I’ll include it here, since I don’t believe this particular scene has ever been photographed or reported on anywhere else before, but I will warn for graphic content. At any rate, my conversation with Temperance ended up being very informative and enlightening, and I left it glad to have had the experience of speaking with her one more time.

The one sister who could not be reached for comment was the youngest, Charity, whose older sisters urged me not to try contacting her. Since respecting the privacy of those who do not wish to be interviewed or otherwise put in the public eye is one of the tenets of journalistic integrity, I heeded their advice.

Her sisters spoke of her fondly, their tones filling with real warmth and affection every time her name came up. Interestingly, the twins both casually referred to her as “Lacey”, a nickname that went unexplained and which I did not remember from my time growing up with them. I did remember the youngest Sawyer sister as a child – a sweet but painfully shy girl who never seemed to speak to anyone outside of her family, with large brown eyes and thick dark hair that she frequently tried to hide behind when in public. I usually saw her accompanied by at least one of her sisters, and she went out less and less as she got older.

Charity, despite being the youngest of her sisters, grew up to be easily the tallest in a family that already produced a number of taller-than-average women. From what I remember of her mother, and from what I saw of her as a teenager, she also ended up being the one to bear the strongest resemblance to Homily, who was also a large woman with wavy black hair and soft brown eyes that lent her face a gentleness to offset her physical strength. (Meanwhile, based on photos, Chastity is the one who takes after their grandmother the most, being tall and pale and bony with straight black hair and light blue eyes, while Patience – average height, black hair in her youth, blue eyes as well – and Temperance – taller with brown hair and eyes – are a more even mix of their mother and grandmother, with doubtless some influence from their unknown father.) Also like her mother, Charity would be employed in the local meat industry, slaughtering cows alongside her sister Temperance for a short while before the plant shut down. (While Charity was let go along with many of the other workers through no fault of their own, Temperance was either fired or quit on her own earlier, for reasons no one seems to be sure of.)

I asked around town about her, talking to people I hadn’t seen in years. It was almost startling to reencounter them and see how much they’d aged, especially since the Sawyer sisters hadn’t as much. Back in the day many of our neighbors described Charity Sawyer as “slow”, as well as using some other words I won’t repeat here that they would never say in front of the older sisters for fear of harsh retribution. Despite how often they bickered and squabbled, the girls were fiercely protective of one another.

I talked to a man who used to work at the slaughterhouse with the Sawyer sisters before it closed. “Sure I remember Charity,” he said. “She was a very nice young woman. Didn’t talk much – didn’t talk at all, really, and only her sisters seemed to be able to understand her when she did. But she did her job well and people mostly left her alone. She was the quickest hand we had at killing cattle – one stroke of the hammer, maybe two, and they were down. Lived up to her mom and grandma’s legacy, I can tell you. People say the new way they do it is better for them, the cows, and maybe it is, but when you have someone who can do it that efficiently on staff, I think it’s just as good as any machine. Maybe better. She knew exactly how to hit her mark. You might be surprised how shy and gentle she was off duty, but I wasn’t. I don’t think she ever wanted to cause a living creature undue harm.”

Temperance, apparently, was a different story. “The sister – well, she wasn’t like that so much. She creeped a lot of people out, to be honest. She was a little too interested in the blood and gore and the death aspects of the job, and I’m not surprised they fired her early, if they did. Even after that she kept hanging around, trying to steal samples of the discarded body parts and snapping pictures of the dead animals. I can tell you the rest of us weren’t like that, even if some people thought we were. Goes to show that just because someone wants to do a job doesn’t mean they’ll be the best fit for it, if they want it for the wrong reasons. Charity was a perfect fit. I felt especially sorry for her when they laid us off, but I figured at least she had her family to take care of her. Some of us had nothing…Where is she now, do you know?”

I said she was living somewhere else, but I was respecting her privacy and not looking for her. Her sisters seemed to think she was doing well, though, and he said that was good.

“Do you know why they call her Lacey?” I asked.

“Her sisters? I never heard that while she was working with us. One thing about her that was kind of strange, but we didn’t comment on, was she always used to wear something over her face while she was working. Like a mask, something that covered her face but she could still see out of, made of cloth mostly but at some point I think leather. I used to think she was trying to keep stuff that might be floating around in the air there out of her eyes, or keep her face clean the same way most of us wore aprons or something to keep from getting blood and guts all over our clothes. Extra precaution, maybe a good idea. But I think she just didn’t like having her face exposed to the air for some reason. Some people have issues with feelings like that, especially – well, I don’t know what her deal was in her head. Wasn’t polite to ask, and we didn’t always have words for things back then. I thought she was smarter than some of the townsfolk gave her credit for, though. I never said a mean word about her behind her back.”

I asked him if he knew anything about the massacre. He said it was a shame what happened, but most people in town didn’t know much about it, since it had happened fairly far away.

“I think they just happened to be passing by here and people assumed it had something to do with something in town, but no one knows where or when they vanished. The Hardesty kids’ grandparents used to live around here, but they and anyone who was connected to them are either dead or long gone from this place. It was such a shame, though, to hear about. They were so young. I was young, when it happened.”

“Do you really think anyone was killed with a chainsaw?” I asked.

“Oh, who knows? The only time I’ve ever seen a chainsaw used around here on something other than wood was when a cow got hit by a truck and they had to cut up the body so they could move it off the road. If that was involved, it was probably only in disposing of the body. Bodies. I don’t want to think about that too much.”

I apologized and thanked him for his time. He said it was no trouble at all, and wished me well.

“Good for you on getting out of here, Lena,” he said. “Not everyone is as lucky.”

When I started out on this little investigation into a crime that supposedly took place in my own hometown fifty years ago, I don’t know exactly what I expected to find – certainly not to solve said crime, but perhaps to gain a little more insight into the case, into the effect it had on the town, and what people thought about it. In the end, I didn’t really. Admittedly I got a little distracted from whatever my goal originally was, as I sometimes do when researching for articles. In the past this has produced some of my most interesting and memorable pieces, at least according to our readership and journalistic circles, but here I’m not sure, exactly, what I ended up writing.

This endeavor turned out to be a good chance to reconnect with old friends and acquaintances, to learn more about them and even introduce my readers to them; if anything, I gained more insight into what their lives were like fifty years ago and what they’re like now. But I didn’t quite get anything useful about what my readers would probably be most interested in. Most of the people I talked to either didn’t know much about the case or didn’t seem to want to talk about it, which I understood. If I still lived there, I don’t think I would appreciate it much if the one thing my town was known for was a group of disturbing unsolved disappearances that have been all but agreed upon to be murders.

It’s hardly the most famous case in the country, but it still holds a degree of fascination for everybody who knows about it. What happened to these young people, and why? Why does anything of this caliber happen? After all my years as a journalist, I’m no closer to finding an answer than anyone. It simply does.

“Sometimes fate works against you,” said Temperance, when I asked her what she thought. “Things align and they push you in a certain direction and you wind up in the center of something – something terrible. And there’s nothing anyone can do about it.” She smiled in that way that many people find unsettling but I always found just another part of her overall demeanor, setting her apart from the average person in an interesting way.

“August is a big month for retrogradation,” said Chastity. “The planets align and they’re all going backwards. Weird things happen. Not always bad things, but weird. Take a look at the horoscope charts for that week – wasn’t the one girl who lived a Capricorn? Not a good time for people who are. Capricorn’s ruled by Saturn.” (As always, this week’s horoscopes can be found on page 7. Many planets are indeed in retrograde right now, including Saturn.)  

“Bad luck accounts for a lot,” said Patience. “Maybe those kids should’ve known better and avoided whatever they ran into, but maybe it was something that could’ve happened to anyone. We’ll never know. I might chalk it up to them being ignorant if they were all out-of-towners, but two of them grew up around here, didn’t they?”

I find myself missing my hometown more and more as I grow older. It’s funny; when I was young I wanted nothing more than to get out of it, and now that I’ve been back one last time, I’m thinking of returning to it. I know my most loyal readers dread the day I retire, but it’s most likely coming up soon, I’m sorry to say – I’m getting old and we’re only just barely holding on in the last days of print media. Not everyone feels the same, but I think that coming back to where you were born to live out the rest of your life and, yes, die, is a good way to lend your life some symmetry. Go back to where you came from and see how it’s changed, how it’s stayed the same. In the end everything comes full circle.

There will always be cold cases that will never be solved, and there will always be people who think they’ll be the ones to solve them. I’ve long since accepted that I will probably not be. All I can do is look around a bit, talk to people, get their opinions, collect the available facts, and report it all to you.

I don’t know what I’m really getting at here. For all I know this might never be published; it’s not that good of a retrospective article, to tell you the truth. If it isn’t, I think I’ll be okay with that. My little journey over the past days and weeks has given me much to think about. It’s not a definite resolution to the mystery of the Texas Chain Saw Massacre, and it’s not a probing look at the heart of small-town rural America, and it’s not even an ode to the benefits of getting back to your roots. But it’s something.

As always, the world spins ever on, and whatever you believe in, we are ultimately at the mercies of the universe. In the meantime, keep on searching.