On August 11, 2006 — a sweltering Friday night — 16-year-old Amber Wyatt reported that she had been raped in a storage shed off a dirt road in Arlington, Texas. Few believed her. Her hometown turned against her. The authorities failed her.

This is how Washington Post columnist, Elizabeth Bruenig (now 27 years old) begins an article of her three-year investigation into Amber’s rape. Arlington, Texas is Bruenig’s hometown and Amber Wyatt was Bruenig’s high school classmate. Bruenig’s article (linked in the first sentence of this paragraph) is admittedly long, but includes compelling videos and photos. This article should be required reading for everyone, particularly teenagers and professionals in the healing arts, not only because Amber’s story must be heard, but also because Bruenig’s narrative is haunting. Searing. Even beautiful.

While I read the article, I was reminded of portions of Truman Capote’s ground-breaking book, In Cold Blood, that ushered in a new literary form: “the non-fiction novel.” The book could have easily laid out the basic facts about the murder of four members of the Clutter family in the little town of Holcomb, Kansas on November 15, 1959. But Capote took those facts to a new place: poignant insights into the nature of American violence. Following is the first sentence  of In Cold Blood:

The village of  Holcomb stands on the high wheat plains of western, Kansas, a lonesome area that other Kansans call “out there.”

Already, the reader knows that what is to follow will be something beyond what she or he has experienced. For two and a half pages, Capote then details the seeming serenity, even ho-humness of Holcomb . . . until the last paragraph of the opening:

 . . . few Americans — in fact — few Kansans — had ever heard of Holcomb. Like the waters of the river, like the motorists on the highway, and like the yellow trains streaking down the Santa Fe tracks, drama, in the shape of exceptional happenings, had never stopped there . . . . But then, in the earliest hours of that morning in November, a Sunday morning, certain foreign sounds impinged on the normal nightly Holcomb noises — on the keening hysteria of coyotes, the dry scrape of scuttling tumbleweed, the racing, receding wail of locomotive whistles. At the time not a soul in sleeping Holcomb heard them — four shotgun blasts that, all told, ended six human lives. But afterward the townspeople, theretofore sufficiently unfearful of each other to seldom trouble to lock their doors, found fantasy re-creating them over and again — those somber explosions that stimulated fires of mistrust in the glare of which many old neighbors viewed each other strangely, and as strangers.

Haunting. Searing. Even beautiful.

Following is an excerpt from Part One of Bruenig’s account of Amber’s rape:

Eventually, I heard that the girl had recanted her allegations and then had gone away; the writing on the cars, too, went away, and the question of what had happened that night.

And then it was quiet, life was mundane, things resumed: Like an ancient society settling back to rights after a gladiatorial game or ritual sacrifice.

Yet despite the fortune of a happy life, I found it difficult, over the ensuing years, not to think about what happened that August. I still remembered the taste of summer there, and the pregnant threat of storm clouds, among which flashes of lightning pulsed like veins of silver, and the sense that youth meant collecting inklings of things I couldn’t fully know. One of them was the impression I had gained that year, that vulnerability sometimes begets bloodlust and revulsion, even in seemingly ordinary people. Another was the sense that the damage that follows litters the underside of society, beneath the veneer of peace.

Bruenig’s vulnerability validates the truth that is to follow. Amber was raped in the loft of a shed. Crime scene photos show 12 buck heads neatly hanging on the first floor of the shed:

. . . another half dozen strewn on the ground of the loft, antlers tangled like bramble, eyes wide and staring. Wyatt’s panties are there, too, on the concrete under the empty watch of the beheaded deer. How blunt it seems, overstated almost — prey among prey.

Many a treatise on brutality has taken deer as its subject, because the pleasure derived from killing them is so disturbing in light of their docile grace. Montaigne laments the dying cries of a wounded hart in his essay on cruelty; so does William Wordsworth in his poem “Hart-Leap Well.” Both Montaigne and Wordsworth meditate on the deer’s last stagger, the long prelude to death, the moment the light leaves its eyes.

Wyatt had eyes like that: thick-lashed, wide and dark, dimmed to vacancy at times by drugs and alcohol. She was beautiful, and she was vulnerable. And everyone knew it.

Over and over again, Bruenig  demonstrates the ultimate purpose of stories: every story is light, and every story is us. Read Amber’s story and discover who we are.