There's a stage in a teenager's development when one begins to feel uncertain of one's purpose and station in life. The signposts are unclear and the pathways are murky when one is not yet faced with adult responsibilities and privileges.

       How much worse, given the degree of teen angst that young people feel today, is this dissatisfaction and confusion for those who are not part of a larger peer group, for those who exist at the fringe, seldom seen and even more seldom noticed?

       Bellevue, Washington is an upscale suburb of Seattle. Here we find the bored, the restless youth of the monied and the not-so-monied, aimlessly wandering about the city after the sun goes down. They're too young to drink, but too old to stay at home, so they take to their cars and spend the late evening hours riding around, gossiping, and smoking cigarettes.

       They pause in their circuits sometimes at the local Denny's restaurant, to grab a cup of coffee and engage in conversation with other teens who, like them, are out in the night.

       Some of these young people consider themselves "goths." The term is short for "gothic," the 18th and early 19th century literary form that encompassed the mysterious, the grotesque, and the desolate. In Bellevue, though these youths are few in number, they are easy to spot. They dress in dark clothes and dye their hair black. They wear long black trenchcoats. They are a subgroup among other subgroups in their society. They exist on the fringes.

       Fantasy lives, you see, in the Bay area. On any given weekend, people gather together by the thousands to shed their workaday roles and engage in role-playing games. Many participants devise elaborate characters and intricate props for themselves. A person might choose, for example, to become a fallen angel, or a vampire. Some of the players are aspiring actors, preparing for greater stages. Some, however, have trouble separating fantasy from reality, or they just refuse to play by the rules.

       For some, the struggles become real.

       A cardinal rule of the RPGs, however, is no touching. It's fantasy. Pretend. No fighting, even when sword-fighting.

       Some can't differentiate.

       And all of this leads us to our subjects. First, however, let's look at the crime.

       Woodbridge is an affluent area within Bellevue. Bracketed by the junctions of interstates 90 and 405, it is an area of quarter-million dollar homes, parks, and schools.

       Kimberly Ann Wilson had volunteered for President Clinton's Americorps. At home on a two week leave, she liked to take long walks around her home and visit friends.

       On January 5, 1997, a young boy found Kimberly Wilson's body in Woodbridge's Water Tower Park. She had been strangled, and the cord was still wrapped around her neck.

       Detectives found her checkbook and discovered that she lived only a few blocks away.

       It is a grim duty to have tell loved ones that a child is dead, and this duty fell to police detective Jeffrey Gomes.

       When there was no answer at the Wilson home, Gomes opened a sliding door and stepped into the house. It was quiet.

       He found the body of Kimberly's younger sister Julia in a hallway. In the master bedroom, he found William and Rose Wilson, the parents. All three had been stabbed and bludgeoned to death, and the attackers, two of them, had left bloody footprints on the carpet around the bodies.

       Police interviewed seventy residents in the Woodbridge neighborhood. One recalled having seen a strange truck parked near the park late the night of the murder. They interviewed Kimberly Wilson's friends. A picture of the young woman began to emerge. She was described as friendly, opinionated, and out-going. She had friends outside her circle. She was a "people person."

       Then someone mentioned a pony-tailed youth that had hung around Kimberly at Denny's. The only child of divorced parents, he was described as a loner. And he wore the dark, theatrical attire of the goths.

       This young man's name was Alex Kevin Baranyi.

      The differences between Kimberly Wilson and Alex Baranyi, the police learned, were stark. Wilson was attractive and outgoing. Baranyi was retiring and aloof. She was a student at Bellevue Community College, while Baranyi had been a student at the "Off Campus School," an alternative high school. She was 19; he was 17.

       The police brought Alex Baranyi in for questioning on January 9, 1997. During a lengthy interview, they placed him under arrest. Before the questioning was over, the police obtained a confession.

       David C. Anderson, or Dave, was Baranyi's closest friend. Both were self-described goths, both were students at the Off Campus School, both participated in role-playing games, and they both sometimes worked together at a water-proofing business in Seattle. And they were both interested in knifes and swords.

       Baranyi was retiring and reticent among large groups, but Anderson sought, and captured, attention for himself. Anderson was popular within his and Baranyi's school, while many students later professed to never having heard Baranyi's name.

      It was Anderson who introduced Baranyi to Kimberly Wilson.

      The police had questioned Anderson in association with the Wilson investigation on the previous week. After reviewing Anderson's statement and linking him to evidence at the crime scene, they arrested him on January 14. (He was sitting in his girl friend's car outside of Bellevue City Hall at the time.)

      This was also the day that Alex Baranyi's charges were read.

       David Anderson had long thought about killing Kimberly Wilson. He had bragged to girls that he went out with that he would someday commit murder, just to see if it felt as good, got him as high, as he thought it would. He even tried to enlist another high school buddy in a murder-robbery scheme in which he mentioned the Wilson family as possible targets.

       It was originally David's idea, but it wasn't hard to convince Alex to participate. Both held a grudge against Kimberly. Alex's was that she shunned him and would not share cigarettes with him. David's was that she had loaned him $350 and was actually demanding that he make repayment.

       Psychologist Robert Wheeler described the night of the crime. David had borrowed an ex-girlfriend's pickup, and he and Alex had gone to Shari's restaurant where they drank coffee and discussed murder. Later that night, they somehow lured Kimberly Wilson into the park and strangled her. Then they went to the Wilson home, turned their shirts inside-out, slipped socks over their hands, and entered the Wilson house.

       Alex Baranyi had a baseball bat. David Anderson had a knife.

       There were forty-three stab wounds among the three victims. The number of blows was more difficult to enumerate, but Richard Haruff, the Queens County Medical Examiner, deduced there were twenty-five.

       Police had found the truck that the boys had borrowed. In it, they found rope similar to that used in strangling Kimberly Wilson.

       A witness testified that David Anderson went home that night, dead tired - too tired even to pull off his boots. Forensic testing found inconspicuous spots of blood on these boots.

       At Alex's house, police found a pair of bloody bootlaces in a waste basket. They had been cut off for some reason.

       The prosecution presented both physical and psychological evidence. In separate trials, both young men were found guilty of the four murders and sentenced to life-time prison terms.

       Baranyi at first told police that he could never rat on Anderson, but later confessed his own participation in the murders. His lawyers, having obtained a diagnosis of bipolar disorder from a hired psychologist, tried a "diminished capacity" defense, arguing that Baranyi was not responsible for his actions in planning the murders, and, therefore, not completely guilty.

       Anderson's lawyers tried to create a picture in which Baranyi was the mastermind.

       The juries didn't buy either argument.

       In Baranyi's case, the prosecution had a taped confession. The jury heard: "Killing somebody never really ends up with something good... There is just, there is just that opportunity to experience something truly phenomenal." Later, he compared the smell of the bloody crime scene to his mother's baking chocolate-chip cookies. "Every now and then," Baranyi said on the tape, "...it will just come back to me and I'll remember what it smelled like. Then I remember what I did and really regret it."

       In Anderson's case, the prosecution obtained a notebook that Anderson had written in sometime before the murders took place. The prosecution presented parts of it as a poster-size display for the jury. Some of it read: "Possibly, he is trying to do the same thing to me as I will do to Kim... I also wonder who is the monster. Is it him? Is it me? Or are we just children playing a child's game while waiting to grow up?"