Heidi Guilford rode shotgun in her boyfriend's white Dodge Charger. Her stepsister and a couple friends sat in the back, with the windows rolled down for the smokers. It was a cool night in June—sweatshirt weather—an unremarkable Sunday on an island off the coast of Maine. They could have been in any small town, just about anyplace. A loud engine, blaring music, laughing shouts from the front seat to the back. And all around them: Quiet. They were headed back toward Heidi's place when they saw a Chevy Equinox they knew belonged to Jennie Candage racing past them. But Jennie would never drive that fast, so they figured it had to be her boyfriend, Roger Feltis. Roger was a local lobsterman, fairly new to the island, twenty-eight years old and husky—big enough that he could seem intimidating, but with a sweet, goofy smile. They started to follow him, but he sped out of sight, so they looped back down through town and out toward the high school. That's when Roger appeared in their rearview mirror, then pulled up alongside and told them to meet him in the school parking lot. |
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| The Silent Epidemic Affecting Generation Z |
Marcus McKinley was a junior at Ohio University when his mother, Kim, then fifty-five, collapsed at work. He figured it was dehydration, but when he got to the hospital, he found out it was more serious than that; she'd had a stroke and needed brain surgery. Her right side was paralyzed, so she couldn't walk, and when she first got out of the ICU, Marcus couldn't understand a word she said. The weeks and months just after a stroke are the most important for rehabilitation, but Kim's initial progress was minimal, and she languished. His mother had been gregarious and liked to go line dancing, or watch Browns and Buckeyes games. Before, she had a wide, warm smile, but now her face drooped. For about a year, Kim's fiancé did the physical work of caring for her while Marcus provided financial support from his part-time job at a tire factory and from a summer internship as a software engineer at a bank. But a couple of months after Marcus's graduation, his mother's fiancé called to tell Marcus he had to go out and then, when Marcus got to their house to lend a hand, told him he was leaving for good. After that, his mom's fiancé only answered their phone calls once, to inform Marcus that he planned to stop paying his mother's utility bills. Marcus realized he would have to step in. |
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The Luxury Headphones That'll Transport You Straight to a Recording Studio |
Scattered across my desk right now are 23 pairs of headphones and earbuds. I mention my collection not to brag, but as evidence of my obsession with audio. Consider me an expert in shutting the world out with sound. When you live in New York City and have misophonia, you kinda have to be. Some highlights from the collection include: A few cheap buds, which I lovingly refer to as my dog walking buds; my wired, hi-fi Audio Technicas; a random assortment of older and newer generation AirPods; the Sony WH-1000XM4s; and a refurbished set of Bose QuietComfort45s. Unfortunately, I don't use any of them anymore; not since I got my paws on Bowers & Wilkins' new active noise-canceling headphones, the Px8. These puppies are like the Maserati of over-ear headphones—or should I say McLaren, because they have a collab for that too. |
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Sex, Lies, and Murder on Mulholland Drive |
There was a distraction, a flaw in the paradisiacal canvas of the summer of 1981: the disappearance of a girl leaving a party on the outskirts of Encino in late July. There was very little reported about the disappearance at first and none of us knew her—she might have stayed a rumor or what would later be known as an urban myth, teenage girl disappears from party never to be seen again—but she was soon connected to two other cases, one from the summer of 1980 and another in January of 1981, and after Julie Selwyn's body was discovered at the end of September, it was revealed that the victims resembled each other and there were details about their deaths that connected them as well. In 1981 no one knew what had happened specifically to Julie Selwyn or Katherine Latchford or Sarah Johnson, or that the same person or persons had killed them—just that they had been abducted and were missing for two months with Katherine's and Sarah's bodies discovered in remote locations, called in by what investigators assumed was the killer in a fake groaning drawl, who wanted to know why the girls, dumped weeks earlier, hadn't been discovered yet—he was waiting for his work to be admired. The matching mutilations that the victims suffered were not fully revealed to the press and it was almost a year after the last girl was found at the end of 1981 until most of these details were ultimately known—in a pre-digital world secrets were more easily kept; in fact, secrets were the norm in a pre-digital world. |
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We Sent a Reporter to Interview M3GAN and Things Went Horribly Wrong |
The following transcript marks the last known whereabouts of Esquire's entertainment editor, Brady Langmann. Following the release of M3GAN, Esquire coordinated with Blumhouse and Universal Studios for a profile of the film's doll, who plays herself in the film. On Monday, January 9, at approximately 12:26 P.M., Langmann entered the Pret A Manger on West 48th Street. He never came back. This recording was pulled from his cell phone, which police found wedged between a tuna and cucumber baguette. If you know the whereabouts of Langmann—or M3GAN—please email editor@esquire.com. |
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There's only one way to get on Rikers Island and one way to get off—a narrow, forty-two-hundred-foot-long bridge spanning a part of the East River. At the ribbon cutting in 1966, Mayor John Lindsay called it the "Bridge of Hope." Forty years later, in 2006, the rapper Flavor Flav dubbed it the "Bridge of Pain." Purchased from the Rikers family in 1884 for $180,000 (about $5.1 million today), it began life in the nineteenth century as a motley assortment of jails and "workhouses," or debtors' prisons. Using fill from the construction of the Manhattan street grid, the city expanded the island from 87 acres to roughly 415 acres. Over time, it became known by the jailed as the "House of Dead Men." But the city stuck with Rikers as the place to leave the people society had deemed worthy of incarceration, the vast majority poor and of color. It was out of sight, hard for visitors to reach, closed, and foreboding. For some of the hundreds of thousands of souls who have made the passage over the past five decades, a trip to Rikers may be the first time they will sleep somewhere away from home. For others, it's their only chance for a bed and a warm meal. For some, it might be the place where they find themselves fighting for their lives. And still others may never make it out. The memories of their first day on Rikers are ingrained in the minds of the people who worked, visited, and served time there. It's an experience no one forgets. |
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