A Marine, Two Murders, and a War on Women 56%
By Deanne Stillman51%
7/15/2026, 9:00:00 AM
BS Summary: This article contains 38 faulty reasoning types, including Negativity Bias, Availability Heuristic, and Hasty Generalization, with Biased Writer Voice as the most egregious example at 30.1% saturation with 784 hits. Analysis detected 7,430 faulty-reasoning hits from 2,606 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 53.9% and a BS Rank of 56% (7,085 of 15,985 articles). This article is worse (more manipulative) than 55.70% of the article peer group.
For a long time, I’ve been wondering if the war on women—possibly the world’s oldest siege—would ever come to a halt.
Recently, it seems as if there’s been a shift in this matter, with many victims coming forward en masse with horrifying accounts of sex crimes—and being heard in new quarters.
For decades, there was no safe zone where this could happen, so women remained in the shadows, lest they face excoriation, threats, and erasure.
This is all still happening, but not to the degree that it once was.
Indeed, something of an emotional security space has emerged, and the floodgates have opened.
For instance, consider the victims of Jeffrey Epstein’s sex trafficking enterprise, in many cases when they were teenagers, including the late Virginia Giuffre, whose testimony years ago about being raped by Prince Andrew of Great Britain’s royal family finally led to his arrest —albeit for another crime.
The shift to which I refer has happened following the publication of Gisele Pelicot’s astonishing memoir, A Hymn to Life: Shame Has to Change Sides .
The French woman’s account of being drugged by her husband and then raped by dozens of men at his behest for years shocked her nation and the world.
He had arranged the violations while she was drugged and oblivious.
After a four-month trial, he and 51 other men convicted of rape, and Mme Pelicot emerged as an unlikely heroine who never sought the limelight while stepping up gracefully and with great impact.
In recent years women from all over the globe have come forward with accounts of violence, along with those who have witnessed it.
I refer to women in Afghanistan who are stoned to death because they’ve been raped—and thus deemed “unclean,” women in Iran who are arrested and tortured for removing their hijabs and revealing long hair not to mention their eyes and faces, women in Ukraine who were raped while being held as prisoners in Russia, Yazidi women who were sold, raped, and trafficked in Iraq, Israeli women who were raped after being abducted on October 7 and are now telling their stories, Palestinian prisoners in Israel coming forward upon release and now offering accounts of rape as well.
The stories that break on an almost daily basis follow high-profile trials of figures such as Harvey Weinstein and Bill Cosby, both widely accused of rape and later tried and convicted for the same, not to mention the #metoo phenomenon, in which a number of women came forward to speak of being assaulted by prominent media figures and others in workplaces across the country.
Even while I was working on this piece, there came another shocking disclosure on this front: Dolores Huerta, 95 years old and the widely admired co-founder of the United Farm Workers with the revered Cesar Chavez, revealed that Chavez, after whom countless schools, streets, and parks around the country have been named, had assaulted and raped her decades ago, resulting in two pregnancies.
She gave the babies away, and it was only recently that she told her family about what happened.
Having taught writing for a long time, I’ve known about this epidemic of sexual violence almost since the day I started teaching more than two decades ago.
Most of my students were women (since they enroll in creative writing programs in numbers greater than men), and at any given time, I’d say that about a third were working on memoirs, often about rape and incest.
Sometimes the weight of what they were carrying inside them (along with a few men) was so overwhelming that I could barely bring myself to lead my own workshops.
I can think of one occasion where these terrible tales were converging for discussion at the same time—powerful locomotives heading down parallel tracks—and I feared a pile-up and then a classroom meltdown, even consulting friends about my concerns.
Indeed, the engines collided in a monumental explosion as one student read a particularly harrowing book excerpt aloud, then burst into tears.
So did everyone else, except for one of the guys who said, “It’s a good thing someone in here is emotionally shut down,” prompting the relief of laughter and a group hug.
As it happened, I had already written a book about sexual violence—and much more, Twentynine Palms published in 2001 and then again in 2008.
It is about two girls, Mandi Scott and Rosalie Ortega, killed by a Marine in 1991 in Twentynine Palms, California, east of Los Angeles.
It’s now celebrating its 25 th anniversary, and to my good fortune, it was endorsed by the late Hunter S.
Thompson and other fine writers as well as being named a Los Angeles Times “best book of the year.”
Its focus is the rootless kids who live in the shadows of the world’s largest Marine base.
I trace the histories of each murder victim for generations, in one case to the Donner Party and the other to a shack in the Philippines.
Poverty and violence are passed down through the generations, from mother to daughter, who make a mighty, although ill-fated, attempt to break free of the generational trauma.
The Marine who killed the girls had a backstory of committing sexual assault before joining the Corps and while in it.
During the 10 years that I worked on my book, I was almost run out of town via inflammatory op-eds in the local paper; see subsequent Los Angeles Times coverage of the controversy following publication of my book.
You see, the story was perceived as “ bad for business ” in a place that is home to the world’s largest Marine base and the gateway to Joshua Tree National Park; the Corps and tourism are its primary sources of income.
What would happen if my book drove away tourists and resulted in the confinement of Marines to the base?
Some members of the town establishment were asking these questions and made their concerns known to me in a meeting with local realtors who were concerned that news of a double homicide in town could lower property values.
I had requested the meeting so we could reach an understanding about the book I was working on and alleviate the threats coming my way.
(Incidentally, I had already written travel pieces about the area for The New York Times travel section and elsewhere, and then my book brought more tourists to the area, not because of the double homicide, but as readers told me, because of how I wrote about the desert.
Although it was true that my book did cut into commerce to a degree, leading to the end of “dollar drink night” at local bars, a biweekly offering on Marine payday, the night on which the double murder occurred.
However, it came to my attention that years later, in a suite at a local inn, there was a sign that said: “Deanne Stillman slept here.”)
Indeed, the Marine who was convicted of killing Mandi and Rosie, Valentine Underwood, had made the rounds of various pubs in the evening before the murders in 2001, shortly after his return from the Gulf War.
I recount those hours in my book, with scenes of desperate hookups unfolding in which some girls were trying to snag a Marine—the rich guys in town—so that they could land a husband and become eligible for health care on the Corps plan.
Later, Underwood attended a party for Mandi Scott on the eve of Mandi’s 16 th birthday, thrown by Rosalie Ortega, who was almost 21, at her bungalow.
Before joining the Corps, Underwood’s history of sexual assault was either ignored—and no incidents were tried in court, as far as I could tell—or buried because he was a college athlete with NBA aspirations, and later a star on the Marine basketball team at Twentynine Palms.
In fact, it was his basketball connection that led to his arrest for the murders of both girls, each of whom he stabbed 33 times.
That was the number on his jersey for the Twentynine Palms town rec league, a connection made by an investigator for the Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS) after the autopsy report was released; he was also on the team and remembered the number and that Underwood admired Patrick Ewing, the New York Knicks star, also #33.
The brutal double homicide may not have happened if anyone had listened to 17-year-old Tammy Watson, who was raped by Valentine Underwood six weeks before he killed Mandi and Rosie.
By the time I heard her story, it was too late.
During the decade that I spent writing this book, I had several conversations with Tammy.
She had been afraid to come forward for many reasons, most notably that her father was the highest-ranking black non-commissioned officer in the Marine Corps at the time, which would cause problems.
Nevertheless, she reluctantly told him.
Underwood should have been restricted to the base while the investigation unfolded.
He may or may not have been, except for the night of the murders, when he was out on the town.
The star athlete showed up the following day for a basketball game against the Camp Pendleton team which took place on the Marine base at Camp Pendleton near San Diego.
He had what turned out to be a tell-tale cut on his hand.
Later, the verdict in his lengthy murder trial in Victorville, California—issued in 1997—was negatively impacted by the O.J.
Simpson verdict, according to what jurors later told me—the notorious and oddly parallel case involving a famous football player with a history of sexual battery against his wife.
Simpson was acquitted of the double homicide of his wife and a companion in the criminal case, a verdict that some attributed to defense lawyer Johnny Cochran’s epic line, “If it doesn’t fit, you must acquit,” referring to a glove found at the murder scene that allegedly belonged to Simpson.
The verdict in favor of Simpson had come down around the time of the Underwood trial, and apparently inside the jury room for that case, the pro-prosecution line became “If the shoe fits, you must convict,” referring to a shoe imprint in blood on the floor of the murder scene which matched a loafer that belonged to Underwood.
In another—and even Shakespearean—twist to evidence in this case, there was a bloody palm print on the wall of the murder scene; it too was a match for Underwood’s.
But although Tammy Watson had tried to warn others about Underwood, she soon became a pariah in certain quarters for coming forward against a Marine, the kind of thing that goes against the code of “Semper fi,” even for members of a Marine family.
In other words, one is “always faithful” to the Corps, regardless of personal consequences or how something may ricochet elsewhere.
In the wake of revealing her story to her father, Tammy became quite sick with Lou Gehrig’s Disease, an affliction of the nervous system.
And then one day—amazingly enough, while on a double date with another Marine, and Krisinda Fuselier, the half-sister of murder victim Mandi Scott, and her boyfriend—Tammy picked up the local paper, and Valentine Underwood’s face was splashed across the front page of the local paper.
“Oh my God!”
she exclaimed.
“That’s the guy who raped me.”
“That’s the guy who killed my sister,” her friend Krisinda said.
Underwood had recently been charged with the crime.
From then on, Tammy blamed herself for the murders.
Soon after I met her, she told me the story of her rape and the aftermath.
It was during the course of my research that I also learned that Underwood had raped other women before joining the Corps, incidents ignored as well by authorities.
A few years ago, my book helped cops make a 20-year-old cold rape case against him while he was already serving a mandatory life sentence for the two murders.
This involved a woman who was repeatedly knifed and then raped at the side of a highway in New Hampshire—an attack similar to the one against Mandi and Rosie.
For far too long, talk of such things has been confined to writing classes and police reports gathering dust, not followed up on because the victims, sometimes paralyzed by fear, decide not to come forward.
And until recently, no one wanted to hear these stories.
My book was rejected many times until it wasn’t.
“Who cares about these girls?”
was something I often heard from publishers, a reference to the fact that they came from working-class families; their fathers were often enlisted men, frequently deployed or when back in Twentynine Palms, in trouble or just gone, and their mothers worked at service jobs at local bowling alleys, bars, or as maids at hotels that catered to high-end tourists from Los Angeles who frequented Joshua Tree National Park.
This publishers’s dismissal of the girls was no different from bar denizens describing them as “just some trash in town” (in the same way Ghislaine Maxwell has spoken of her marks).
“All it takes is one person to say yes,” my agent said at the time.
The editor who said yes was Rachel Klayman at William Morrow, who later acquired Barack Obama’s memoir, Dreams from My Father.
If anything, the story I told is largely about America’s dirty little secret—class.
When Scott and Ortega were described to me as discardable, I knew there was more to the story.
In fact, as I learned over time, they looked after Marines, cooked for them, babysat their children when they were deployed, partied with them, sent them off to war, greeted them when they came home, and all the while, took care of each other because their own parents were unavailable.
To me, Mandi and Rosie were unsung American patriots.
Their bodies had been left on the field in a sexual war zone on the home front.
I vowed to tell their stories and retrieve the girls from the national dustbin.
Nowadays, many things have changed since I wrote Twentynine Palms , including a certain degree of gentrification in town; in fact, it’s been celebrated in Vogue and Town and Country .
It’s heartening to see that a number of Epstein’s victims have come forward to claim their stories and that Gisele Pelicot has been welcomed around the world with a warm embrace.
Clearly, she has come through her ordeal with a great deal of dignity and style.
There has indeed been a reassignment of shame, to paraphrase the subtitle of Mme Pelicot’s memoir, but not entirely, and why more people don’t feel shame in general these days is a riddle for the ages.
And as it stands now, the war against women continues.
We see it day after day and in the split reality televised earlier this year at the State of the Union, where Epstein victims were the guests of Democrats.
Republicans shunned them (although some have since broken ranks, after initially blocking an investigation at Trump’s behest until he relented), in effect telling them to remain hidden in metaphorical hijabs—unless unmasked in files for all to see while the names of those who should be ashamed of themselves remain redacted.
It will take a monumental shift for this war against women to resolve fully, involving a reconciliation of other endless assaults against the land, the sea, all creatures great and small—and I believe that we are heading in that direction, even as the forces arrayed against it hold on ever more fiercely.
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