I was twenty-two the first time I saw the ocean. To my utter shock, I discovered that the Pacific was ice cold beneath the blazing sun and bobbing with blobs of tar leaking from oil pumps off the Santa Barbara shore. Still, it was undeniably beautiful, both in cold reality and hazy illusion.
By the time I made it to Santa Cruz a few years later, I was ready for the chilly waves, but I wasn’t expecting the soul of the place. The depth. I’d never yearned for L.A. or San Diego or Hollywood. I shy away from sun and glamour. But Santa Cruz was different. Of course there were tourist traps and oceanfront restaurants and sunny beaches, but there were also old train tracks bordered by wild irises, riverways dotted with tents and transients, and darkly forested mountains climbing up from busy roads.
It makes sense when you pull back and take in the coastline south of town, Monterey Bay curving all the way down to Big Sur. Civilization is quickly stripped away to reveal what it all used to look like: deadly isolation. It’s only logical that Santa Cruz feels a bit dark, a bit daring. I loved it from the start.
Why Santa Cruz?
When I started writing my latest book, Bald-Faced Liar — the story of a woman who moves constantly and uses lies to protect herself from the world — I knew I needed to drop her into a busy town, somewhere she could feel comfortable disappearing. But the place needed more than just traffic, it needed enough heart to pull this character, Elizabeth, to a stop, to suck her in and settle her down for the first time in her life. I knew Santa Cruz had to be the setting.
Elizabeth is a bit odd, so it helps that Santa Cruz is, frankly, weird. Like most epicenters of counter-culture, a lot of the edge of the 1960s and ‘70s has worn down beneath the flow of skyrocketing property prices and the wandering wealthy. But this town is still a stew of tourists and students and surfers and millionaires and vagrants rubbing elbows with hippies both young and old. Everyone is here because they chose this place, one way or another. Santa Cruz called them just as it called my character.
Still, “Murder capital of the world” isn’t just 1980’s graffiti from the opening scenes of The Lost Boys movie. Every true-crime reader has heard of Ed Kemper, one of the most notorious serial killers in the world. Santa Cruz was his home and his home base, and his victims’ bodies were found throughout the imposing hills that surround town. But he wasn’t the only menace haunting the area.
Another local serial killer, Herbert Mullin, was active at the same time, killing men and women at random all over Santa Cruz. He was arrested after shooting his last victim in broad daylight, and the police were stunned when women kept disappearing after he was jailed. They had no clue about Ed Kemper, a close friend to many of the local officers. As one cop said, “We then have another homicidal maniac.”
Two homicidal maniacs in a town of about 35,000 people. Imagine the terror. The bone-deep dread. The killings continued for months, and the press dubbed the town “the murder capital of the world.” Even fifty years later, it remains a truly dark setting for any scary story.
A Place That Hides and Reveals
But Santa Cruz isn’t just a setting. When a movie is filmed there, the town screams its presence. The Lost Boys wouldn’t be The Lost Boys without the jagged Boardwalk energy and the pounding surf and the solitude of the steep hills. Santa Cruz was a vibrant character in that movie, just as it was in 2019’s Us.
Because the town is alive. Santa Cruz has a personality and a beating heart. It’s welcoming and wild and full. Full of people coming and going, with joy and despair, peace and chaos, living and dying. That’s why my character feels safe there among strangers, safe to be herself. But there’s a danger in that vibrancy and that freedom. After all, in a town where no one cares where you come from, there’s a good chance no one will notice if you disappear into the fog.
