“The truth is everyone knew who killed Caitlin – everyone knew back then, too. It was a massive crime in a tiny village, and about two hundred of the most powerful residents were standing about ten yards away when it happened.”
Twenty years ago, in the elite, idyllic, history-laden Hudson Valley village of Briar’s Green, a sixteen-year-old girl named Caitlin Dale was found beaten to death and floating in a swimming pool during a July Fourth celebration at the ultra-exclusive Horseman Club. Suspicion fell upon a young man named Patrick Yates III, the son of a senator and the great-grandson of a Vice President, but he was never even formally investigated: “Families like the Yateses didn’t face the same sort of consequences as everyone else.”
Alice Wiley has come home to remedy that.
In Kelsey Miller’s Old Money, Alice, then eleven years old, was the only witness to what happened that night to her cousin, but her account was swept under the rug. Now, on the twentieth anniversary of the murder, with the crime now the subject of a book, a miniseries, and a podcast, interest has reawakened, and Alice has returned to the village to burn the place down. Metaphorically speaking, of course.
She has no idea what she’s gotten into. Determined to find the evidence she feels the police never sought, she digs into the town, the people, the country club; chasing down records, interviewing possible witnesses, concocting stories as she goes so that nobody realizes what she’s up to.
Oh, Alice. Once again, everybody knows.
And then someone else dies.
“You do have things to lose, Alice,” she is told. “Many things. Many people.”
If only she had listened.
“The first flickers of the idea came to me in 2019,” the author says, “when I was on a long flight home from St. Petersburg, Russia, where I’d been on a research trip. The trip itself had no influence on the book — it was for something else I was working on — but I think there’s something about flying home from an adventure that makes your mind get a little adventurous. At least, that’s the way I explain it to myself! I was sitting on a plane, thinking about the concept of nostalgia, and how profoundly it can shape our lives and our identities. Experiences become memories and memories become stories, and there’s huge power in the stories we tell about ourselves.
“I was also thinking about culture-wide nostalgia, and in particular, the fixation on certain old or unsolved crimes. There are some stories we just keep revisiting and re-telling, but of course, we’re not necessarily getting further clarity in the process. If anything, tragically, these stories often get more muddled in the re-telling. I kept thinking about JonBenét Ramsey, whose murder had (and has) been covered in the media virtually nonstop since she was killed — even more in the months and years around the twentieth anniversary of her death. I’d certainly consumed some of that coverage, and yet, sitting there, I couldn’t think of a single hard fact about the case. Was it solved? Were they still investigating? Didn’t they have a suspect at some point? I had no idea. I could conjure her image instantly, but I only had a vague recollection of her actual story. I thought about what it must be like to be one of the ‘players’ in these stories that we fixate on for decades — especially if no one knows about your involvement. How strange it must be to try and navigate the world in that position. And what do you do with your story when everyone else is telling it?”
To read more of Neil’s review and discussion with Kelsey Miller, go here.
