True crime, in fact and fiction

The story is brutal, one from which we instinctively wish to avert our eyes: a former fashion writer and single mother from a prominent New York family found murdered in the sleepy Cape Cod town of Truro, Mass., in January 2002. Christa Worthington, 46, had been stabbed in her home in an attack so fierce that knife marks were found in the plank floor beneath her body. Police estimate her body was left undiscovered for 36 hours until a neighbor happened upon the scene. He found Worthington’s toddler daughter, Ava, snuggled against her mother, nursing. The toddler, alone all that time, had tried to help. “A bloodied face cloth was neatly folded across the victim’s forehead, and beside the body, they found the baby’s weighted Tippee Cup that Ava had tried to offer her mother,” writes Maria Flook in her disturbing postmortem of this murder and its unlikely Cape Cod milieu, “Invisible Eden.”

Immediately, there were potential suspects: Tony Jackett, the blue-collar shellfish constable and married man who’d fathered Ava; Tim Arnold, the neighbor who’d found Worthington’s body and had been her last known boyfriend. Tony’s wife, Susan, certainly had a motive, Flook tells us, as did Jackett’s grown offspring and their mates; even Christa’s father and his heroin-using girlfriend were under the microscope. No one has been arrested and the case remains open. A rash of media attention accompanied the story with its rich tones of social class issues and sexual shenanigans. For 30 years there hadn’t been a murder in Truro, a community known for “its stunning wilderness, its remoteness, its quiet” and Christa Worthington was a high-profile victim.

Flook, author of this investigative account whose publication has stirred controversy in the small town and triggered threats of legal action from the victim’s family, lives a mile from where Worthington resided and was killed, yet had never met her. She became interested in the case, she tells us, because she shared similarities with Worthington: both one-time single mothers, close in age, writers who’d chosen the insularity of Truro. What follows is a two-strand narrative: one traces the murder investigation and its almost complete lack of progress, along with background on Truro, its social class stratification, and previous murders in Cape Cod. The second strand attempts to reconstruct Worthington’s elegant, fashion-centered life in New York and Paris and her subsequent relocation to Truro, to unearth the who and why of the killing. In spare prose that seems stripped of all emotion, Flook gathers the facts of Worthington’s life from friends, relatives, co-workers and law enforcement. She then applies a fiction-writer’s lens, visualizing full-blown scenes and even narrating the victim’s thoughts.

While this technique of creating action and dialogue for incidents the author can only imagine has become more common in nonfiction writing (innovated by Truman Capote in his so-called nonfiction novel “In Cold Blood”) it can be disconcerting to readers, especially when it raises questions of how the author knows such intimate details. For example, Flook writes the victim’s first sexual encounter as a teen: “He explored her body with his fingertips in a deft, focused, almost technical examination, that for some reason reminded her of the piano tuner who often came to her house in Hingham.” Why the piano tuner? we wonder. Was the reference invented whole cloth and how did it originate? These questions draw us from the story, breaking the flow.

They also focus our attention on a dicey issue -- the uneasy sensation of intrusion running throughout the narrative, as if the author has mined a degree of familiarity never granted her by the victim, offering readers a view of places and scenes to which we haven’t been invited. For example, Flook narrates numerous sexually explicit incidents to establish that Worthington’s unfortunate choices in mates may have led her to that murderous day. (She had a penchant for married men.) These scenes don’t help to create a clear hypothesis for the murder and, in fact, lend a hazy inference that the victim may have been asking for it, though investigators have not determined whether it was a sex crime. The writing itself is strong and evocative, pulling us into the tale; it sparks our voyeuristic inclinations, whether we’d like them sparked or not.

In Flook’s critically acclaimed earlier work, “My Sister Life,” a memoir that delved into the world of teenage prostitution as experienced by her sister, she used similar fiction techniques adeptly, creating a narrative that was candid and raw. Applying those techniques to the tragic life of a person she’s never met, though, adds a layer of disquiet not easily shaken.

Early in this narrative, Flook considers photographs the police have taken illustrating rows of the victim’s bikini underpants lined up on the bed. They had emptied her bureau to create what Flook assumes is a profiling technique, “as if to document the victim’s lingerie could somehow encompass a person’s prehistory, her life’s goals and expectations. They must think there’s a connection between these common textiles and the victim’s morals and intentions.” This is basically the same profiling technique Flook follows to illustrate, if not the crime itself, then its victim.

By the end, we understand better the social aspects of Cape Cod and its rugged natural beauty, how Worthington moved through and ultimately failed to conquer the fashion world, and the mantle of loneliness she wore. We’re no closer to solving the crime or learning why Worthington was its victim -- though, perhaps, that wasn’t the author’s intent. But we have become pretty adept at rifling through underwear drawers.