The Insects That Solved a Murder

Since moving upstate, I’ve been introduced to a frenzy of insects and bugs. (All bugs are a type of insect, apparently, but not all insects are bugs. Or something like that.) My house and property host an array of compelling insects. I will tell you about them. And then I will tell you about a Bakersfield homicide—a quintuple murder, no less—that was solved by insects.

During my first summer in the Hudson Valley, the southern side of my house attracted parades of stink bugs. If you read my book, you know that Felice and I encountered fleets of stink bugs when we vacationed upstate. It was vile. Mercifully, the bugs that appeared in my house visited for a week or so and then departed.

But other insects took their place.

Wasps nested in an eave upstairs. When my parents came to visit, the wasps attacked my stepdad in his sleep. He woke up with welts all over his body. Carpenter bees drilled holes in the awning above my deck. One week, ladybugs stormed inside. Something died in my mailbox, which crawled with ants. Last summer was the summer of horse flies.

This appears to be the summer of the spongy moth. They come to us from France, I’ve learned, where they’re called “Spongieuse.” The spongy moth caterpillars feed on tree leaves. They’ve munched all of the beautiful blossoms off of my apple trees and are currently attempting to defoliate my honey locusts.

They’re in the woods, too, dangling from silks and stripping the oaks in the forest. According to entomologists, the rain-like sound in infested forests is actually the gypsy moth caterpillars pooping. Move to the country, they said. It’ll be nice and quiet . . .

I take great pride in killing these caterpillars, knowing this is a battle I will not win. My current preferred methods are squishing them, picking them off trees with chopsticks and dropping them into bowls of bleach, and wrapping my tree trunks in sticky tape to catch them when they hatch and crawl. I may soon advance to burlap traps. This is the country. I never know what I’ll do next.

In my current bug-focused state of mind, I remembered a rather well-known murder case out of my hometown, Bakersfield—a terrible place to live (sorry, mom) and an even worse place to die. Here’s the case: