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tall and lanky, yet attractive in a debonair, boyish way. Two years her senior, Glenn was taken right away by the outspoken seventeen-year-old blonde from Groton who was studying to be a nurse.
    By the end of June 1987, after dating Glenn throughout the winter, Strickland transferred to Wachusett Community College in Gardner, Massachusetts, and then to Greenfield Community College—just a twenty-minute drive from Northampton—to continue studying for her nursing degree and, more important, to be closer to the man she had fallen in love with.
    Northampton was a melting pot for some of the upper echelon of Massachusetts, full of lawyers, doctors, artists, writers, professionals and, like Glenn Gilbert, middle-class blue-collar workers.
    One of the better places to live in the state, it only seemed fitting that the elegant and beautiful Kristen Strickland, now a well-educated woman of twenty, live among people she could relate to. After all, she was going to be a nurse soon. The prospect of living among the cultural elite in Northampton seemed appetizing to Strickland, who had, up until that point, spent most of her life in rural, backwater towns where not too much of anything ever happened.
    But it was Glenn, after all, who fit a picture Strickland had of someone she could shape and mold into whatever she wanted. Glenn was blue-collar, and by no means a rocket scientist—yet, by the same token, was exactly what Strickland was looking for.
    While attending classes at Greenfield Community College, Strickland took a job as a home health aide with the Visiting Nurses Association of Franklin County.
    One of her first patients was a blind, deaf, mute, and severely handicapped young boy who lived with his foster family in Bernardston, Massachusetts. The family, who also had a younger foster child, had already had Strickland’s coworker, a young woman in her late twenties, over to the house on several occasions to care for the two children and ready them for bed.
    When Kristen and her coworker arrived one summer night in August 1987, the coworker introduced Kristen to the family, showed her where to bathe the retarded boy upstairs, and assured the foster parents they could take off.
    â€œI am going to leave you with him and go get the other child ready for bed, Kristen. Okay?” the coworker said.
    â€œSure,” Strickland said.
    An hour or so later, the parents returned, and Strickland and her coworker left.
    When the foster mother checked on the boy Strickland had cared for, she found his legs bright red and “demarcated by where the water level of the bathwater should have been.”
    The boy had been scalded over sixty percent of his body.
    This was impossible to do by mistake. The family had specially ordered a faucet that was preset to a certain temperature. The only way to raise the temperature was to “unlock the faucet [and] adjust the faucet from its preset position.”
    The following morning, the foster mother called the VNA and said they “never had a problem with the faucet before” and, when the mother checked it out afterward, it had worked fine.
    â€œWell, madam, we are—”
    The foster mother interrupted. “We never want her to come into our home again.”
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    By Christmastime 1987, Glenn and Kristen knew their relationship wasn’t just some fly-by-night romance. It was time to take the plunge.
    But a full-fledged wedding was out of the question. Richard Strickland had suggested they get married in Long Island, where he and Claudia had moved with Tara right after Kristen went off to Bridgewater. Strickland said he would spring for the entire bill.
    But Glenn and Kristen were adamant: They wanted to elope.
    â€œOur families wouldn’t have gotten along,” Strickland later told a friend. “Neither of us [was] particularly religious, anyway. It would have been nothing but a big hassle.”
    By the time January 1988 turned into