Once Upon a Time . . .

It was kind of a fairy tale, I guess, assuming that fairy tales often follow winding paths through dark forests.

Guy Galloway was 27, Marilyn, 22.

They had come to L.A. from New York as they said they would, and had unpacked their dreams in a city where dreams are supposed to come true.

It was a magic time for the young married couple. Music floated through their lives like ribbons of gold.

Guy played the keyboard and was hired by a band. Marilyn worked in an office during the day and went to school at night.

She was studying musical engineering, but aimed for a singing career. Their dream was that Guy would have his own band in the Happy-Ever-After and Marilyn would be his vocalist.

He wrote her a song she fell in love with, and she promised someday she’d perform it on stage, backed by Guy.

He called it, appropriately, “Fairy Tales.”

Talk to stuffed animals / Can’t they be real? / Make believe you live with them / For always . . .

Marilyn was the kind of person who believed what the lyrics implied, that dreams and reality can be joined by just closing your eyes and clicking your heels.

But after two years in the City of Angels, something began going wrong.

The long, late hours spent apart, once perceived as the sacrifice that would make their dream come true, clawed at the fabric of their marriage and, in the end, destroyed it. They were divorced.

“It was strange,” Guy says today. “We were getting so close to what we wanted, and then woke up one morning and it was gone.”

He never believed the fairy tale was over, and maybe it wasn’t. But a harsher reality intruded before the tale could continue. Marilyn Galloway, still chasing a dream, was murdered. She was 26.

By any measure, hers was not a significant death in a city that records three homicides every day of the year.

Marilyn and 12-year-old Jose Morales, a son from a previous marriage, were found stabbed in their tiny stucco home in a run-down part of the waterfront.

There was no apparent motive. The killer is still at large.

As brutal as they were, their murders weren’t prime time news. We carried a brief notice in a suburban edition. That was it.

Marilyn and her son had become statistics, certificates of death, a police problem.

But there are those, thank God, who will not allow to pass unsung lives that once burned with special fire.

“I am the mother and grandmother of the mother and son slain Dec. 2, 1990, in the Wilmington area of Los Angeles,” Marilyn Sloane wrote from her home in Jamesville, N.Y.

“I have searched for evidence of a story on their murder and can find nothing. It is upsetting to me to that this awful crime could go unreported.

“The people of Los Angeles should know that someone murdered a young mother and her child and brought a nightmare to my family. . . .”

She sent photographs. Marilyn’s face, dark-eyed, smiling whimsically, stares out from its final imprint. Her boy wears a tie. His expression is hesitant, uncertain.

I telephoned Sloane to say that their deaths had been reported. She thanked me and said, “But is that enough?”

I guess not.

Marilyn Galloway was one of those free spirits whose existence was somehow larger than her surroundings. Her highs were higher and her lows lower than almost everyone else’s.

She was a joking, teasing tomboy, her mother says, who often came home tattered and bruised from the risks she willingly took.

She challenged life. She dared it to be different.

“I never knew anyone so open to adventure,” Sloane told me. “She was never afraid. Could that have been her problem?

“The last time she phoned, she had just moved into a new place and was going to school. She said, ‘I’m excited, mom. Everything’s going to be OK.’ A few days later, we got a call from the coroner’s office.”

What her daughter wanted more than anything, her mother remembers, was a place for herself.

“That’s what she was looking for when she went to L.A., her place

Guy thinks about Marilyn every time he hears the song he wrote. “Fairy Tales” runs through his memory like a half-forgotten dream.

“Marilyn was beautiful and I still love her,” he says. “We broke up for all the wrong reasons, but I always thought I’d get her back.”

He repeats the words of his song, softly and with feeling: It’s always true, / fairy tales were made / for me and you.

And then he falls silent, remembering. . . .