Pure Land is the story of the most brutal murder in the history of the Grand Canyon and how Mc Givney’s quest to investigate the victim’s life and death wound up guiding the author through her own life-threatening crisis. On this journey stretching from the southern tip of Japan to the bottom of Grand Canyon, and into the ugliest aspects of human behavior, Pure Land offers proof of the healing power of nature and of the resiliency of the human spirit.
Tomomi Hanamure, a Japanese citizen who loved exploring the rugged wilderness of the American West, was killed on her birthday May 8, 2006. She was stabbed 29 times as she hiked to Havasu Falls on the Havasupai Indian reservation at the bottom of Grand Canyon. Her killer was an 18-year old Havasupai youth named Randy Redtail Wescogame who had a history of robbing tourists and was addicted to meth. It was the most brutal murder ever recorded in Grand Canyon’s history. Annette Mc Givney covered the tragedy for Backpacker magazine where she is Southwest Editor and she wrote an award-winning article that received more reader mail than any story in the last decade.
While the assignment ended when the article was published, Mc Givney could not let go of the story. As a woman who also enjoys wilderness hiking, Mc Givney felt a bond with Hanamure and embarked on a years-long pursuit to learn more about her. Mc Givney traveled to Japan and across the American West following the trail Hanamure left in her journals. Yet, Mc Givney also had a connection to Wescogame, Hanamure’s killer, and her reporting unexpectedly triggered long-buried memories about violent abuse Mc Givney experienced as a child.
Pure Land is a story of this inner and outer journey, how two women in search of their true nature found transcendence in the West’s most spectacular landscapes. It is also a tale of how child abuse leads to violence and destroys lives. And it is, ultimately, a story of healing. While chronicling Hanamure’s life landed Mc Givney in the crime scene of her own childhood, it was her connection to Hanamure— a woman she did not know until after Hanamure died — that helped Mc Givney find a way out of her own horror.
Table of Content
Prologue 9
PART I
1 Hiking In 15
2 Earth and Sky 32
3 Nation of the Willows 43
PART II
4 Nature Traveler 55
5 Dad 71
6 Child of Supai 80
7 Child of Conroe 91
8 Michael 102
PART III
9 Mountains and Canyons 115
10 Blues 127
11 Panic 141
12 Route 66 150
13 Randy 163
14 Desperation 172
PART IV
15 Yokohama 185
16 The Land of Wa 198
17 Havasu Falls 211
18 Flashback 218
PART V
19 Search for the Killer 223
20 Confession 239
21 Punishment 250
22 Return to Supai 260
PART VI
23 Collapse 273
24 Elizabeth 283
25 Origins of Violence 292
PART VII
26 Momma 305
27 A Tribe of Women 312
28 Transcendence 320
Epilogue: Where They Are Now 327
Acknowledgments 329
About the author
Annette Mc Givney is an award-winning journalist and the longtime Southwest Editor for Backpacker magazine. In addition to Backpacker, her writing has appeared in Outside, Arizona Highways, and Sunset magazines. Her June 2007 Backpacker article ‘Freefall’ about the murder of Tomomi Hanamure won a Maggie Award in 2008 from the Western Magazine Publishers Association for Best News Story. Mc Givney is the author of the previous books, Resurrection: Glen Canyon and a New Vision for the American West (Braided River, 2009), and Leave No Trace: A Guide to the New Wilderness Etiquette (The Mountaineers, 2003). She teaches journalism at Northern Arizona University and lives in Flagstaff, Arizona.
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