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Twentynine Palms: A True Story of Murder, Marines, and the Mojave
The gruesome true story of a troubled Marine with a long history of sexual violence profiles Valentine Underwood, who murdered two young women in a small town in the Mojave Desert, and provides a searing examination of a military culture and its code of silence.
- GenresTrue CrimeNonfiction
277 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2001
18 people are currently reading
272 people want to read
About the author
Deanne Stillman
28 books36 followersDeanne Stillman is a widely published, critically acclaimed writer. Her books of narrative nonfiction are place-based stories of war and peace in the modern and historical West.
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Displaying 1 - 27 of 27 reviews
August 27, 2012
This is a superior book of the 'true crime' genre, and closer to the approach of Truman Capote or James Ellroy rather than Ann Rule. Rule's books recount an enthralling murder case, and basically it's, 'just the facts', and the other two authors try to capture a bit more of the 'emotional fall-out'of the atrocity. And, this is what Deanne Stillman has beautifully accomplished.
Much has been made about how the author presents the Mojave desert as a major ingredient in this bloody and senseless double murder. But, I think what really sets this novel apart is how she showcases the 'less than sterling' characters of the victims and their families. Mandi Scott and Rosalie Ortega were promiscuous drug takers who hung around with the 'wrong crowd', yet Stillman really evokes empathy for them. They really come across as loving and caring individuals wise beyond their years, and this makes the tragedy even more devestating.
This is a great read, and I'd recommend it to anyone who loves 'true crime' books that aspire for just a bit more.
Much has been made about how the author presents the Mojave desert as a major ingredient in this bloody and senseless double murder. But, I think what really sets this novel apart is how she showcases the 'less than sterling' characters of the victims and their families. Mandi Scott and Rosalie Ortega were promiscuous drug takers who hung around with the 'wrong crowd', yet Stillman really evokes empathy for them. They really come across as loving and caring individuals wise beyond their years, and this makes the tragedy even more devestating.
This is a great read, and I'd recommend it to anyone who loves 'true crime' books that aspire for just a bit more.
April 11, 2021
The author paints an unattractive portrait of people who call the Morongo Basin home. She fails to recognize the beauty of the desert and the quality of good people who live there. Oh, and then there is the fact that this story is full of half truths and victim blaming. Kind of annoying when you actually lived through the events sort of described in this book. MISS YOU MANDY!
March 28, 2023
For a true crime book, this was terribly boring. This was based on an article, and that is very apparent, because it feels as if the author has tried to stretch out that article, and in doing so has written something very repetitious and rather mind-numbing. We hear over and over how weird the desert is, and apparently everyone that lives there is also a misfit of some sort. I have a hard time believing this. And not one of the people in this book comes life. They are all just faceless stereotypes with names. These are real people, a few pics would have been nice, but I don't know that would've saved this. Also, it took way too long to get to the actual subject of the book. Pet peeve.
May 23, 2016
It was AWFUL!!! I think it might have given me a small stroke just from reading it past page 100. It took me three times longer than a normal book its size simply because it is written in such a confusing manner. Painfully plodding. Skipping around without any need, and done clumsily! The whole point of the story is lost in a tale, or tales of drug abuse, alcohol abuse, sexual abuse, etc. etc. It seems as though the author's mind has suffered and succumbed to her own drug abuse! (Sorry but where was the publisher on this one? Aren't they supposed to guide the writer and help them stay on track?) This book is mental abuse upon the reader. I stuck it out only because I'm a masochist! The story might have been worth the telling at some point but the author turned it into a confusing, garbled, unintelligent recap of multiple womens history of abuse at their husbands or boyfriends hands while living in the steamy desert outside of Los Angeles. I know the area and it's beautiful, but now, I'm afraid, the author has made it seem like it's completely overrun with nothing but trailer trash and meth heads. I read these reviews a little too late. I only read this book because some lady I know told me I should. I found out later, when I had finished, and went to ask her why in heavens she thought this book was worth reading, that she told me she herself had put it down shortly after telling me to read it, and simply forgot that she had recommended it to me. DO NOT READ THIS TRASH! IT IS A WASTE OF TIME AND WILL ROT YOUR BRAIN!!! LITERALLY!!!
August 30, 2010
I had been visiting Twentynine Palms for many years before I read this book. It made a big impression on me, I think Stillman loves the desert.
March 9, 2021
I usually love true crime, but this book rubbed me the wrong way. The only reason I finished it was to see if justice was ever done for the families involved. There were way too many stereotypes involved in the descriptions of people and slang used to try and sound current, but most of the time it just sounded condescending.
Currently reading
June 22, 2023I'm the author of this book and thought you all might like to know that there's an updated edition - https://www.amazon.com/Twentynine-Pal.... The first edition was an LA Times "best book of the year" and an LA Times bestseller, and Hunter Thompson called it "A strange and brilliant story by an important American writer." Here's an interview about it that I did for its 20th anniversary, which provides a lot of backstory about how and why I wrote this book. http://deborahkalbbooks.blogspot.com/...
There's also this piece from the LA Review of Books that came out for its anniversary as well.
https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/t...
There's also this piece from the LA Review of Books that came out for its anniversary as well.
https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/t...
January 23, 2016
Terrible murder set in an out-of-the-way corner of America. It's as much about the weird, alienated culture of the Mojave desert as it is about the lives and deaths of Rosie, Mandi and their killer. The author zigzags all over this story, taking you back two generations for the deep underpinnings, then fast-forwarding to now, then weebling to ten years ago and wobbling to last week. She also uses a lot of out-of-control run-on sentences. But it's a memorable story that ultimately all comes together in a nightmarish way.
January 5, 2019
This book, technically a “true crime” book, is not perfect. It’s a bit wordy and overexplained in places. But it has stuck with me since I read it (about 6 months ago) for its insights into how women (usually abused women) work hard to make new lives for themselves—living “at the edge” in so many ways—and why their efforts are so often unsuccessful.
March 21, 2015
I read parts One and Two, but couldn't go on. It felt like every man beat his wife, every woman was a victim, and there was way too much description about the natural beauty of the area. I also though the story jumped around too much.
February 19, 2016
A haunting and evocative journey to strange and recognizable terrain, 29 Palms is a fascinating and chilling read. This was another book where I was completely engrossed by the characters - the conscientious research makes this book stand above other true-crime reads.
September 18, 2010
I have to say I love true crime, a dirty vice, and the descriptions ofthe mojave were good. I like the idea of the desesrt as a grim oven --and that out there history doesn't matter, space does
November 24, 2013
Gritty, down in the dumps realism by Deanne Stillman in her depiction of life of these two families who were involved in this crime.
June 16, 2023
Had a hard time with this one. A white woman focuses on the white victim in this double homicide, treating the Filipino woman who was also a victim as an afterthought.
Not to mention she screwed up the gang color affiliations, writing details on subjects she knows nothing about clearly. She wrote racist things over and over again. I know the early 2000s, were a different time, I lived them. It was very cringe.
The whole situation is just absolutely awful though. My brother is a marine. They are broken men that the government takes advantage of their poverty and trains them to be killers, and sends them back into the world with no support except for macho camaraderie.
Not to mention she screwed up the gang color affiliations, writing details on subjects she knows nothing about clearly. She wrote racist things over and over again. I know the early 2000s, were a different time, I lived them. It was very cringe.
The whole situation is just absolutely awful though. My brother is a marine. They are broken men that the government takes advantage of their poverty and trains them to be killers, and sends them back into the world with no support except for macho camaraderie.
January 27, 2020
The beginning of the book is loaded with too much minutiae regarding the desert and local settings. Once you got past over 50 pages, you got to the heart of the story which bounced back & forth between the trial and the the crime. Even more interesting than the crime was the disregard of service officials in enlisting those with criminal backgrounds just to make quotas and then not investigating charges against the serviceman that might have stopped the crime before it started.
July 21, 2017
An excellent, well researched, true story. I couldn't put the book down.
November 2, 2017
very sad very good
August 1, 2020
Genuinely gripping. Loved how it was structured. Amazing details! The desert is its own character here.
April 3, 2023
This story is heartbreaking-even more so because it's true.
July 20, 2016
In the notes at the end of this book, Stillman mentions many of the other novels, works of nonfiction, essays, and films that informed her development of Twentynine Palms: Shot in the Heart by Mikal Gilmore (Gary's brother), Baudrillard's weird blatherings about the American desert, and the diminutive progenitor of the whole true crime genre, eclipsed many times over and since by later efforts -- In Cold Blood.
Certainly Stillman aspires to these ranks, and her effort is at times lyrical, prophetic, earnest. She nails the ticks-in-the-floorboard disappearance of the Mojave's underclass; the desert's ruthless heartbeat, the liquor and grim sun. The crime scene sequences are measured, a good cadence, a bad brotherhood with the Marine whodunit.
But the book aims higher, and misses each mark, sometimes by a hair, and other times by a bit more. Three points stay with me:
1) They didn't have to be heroes. Stillman casts the two dead women at the center of this story as heroes. She actually uses the word, at least once, to describe them both. This is cheap, and beyond that, it is ideologically unnecessary and perhaps even counterproductive to her second aim (see below). The truth is, these women were not heroes. They were not special. They were, perhaps, not even average. But the harder truth, the more important truth, the one that Stillman does not raise, and at which she does not even hint, blinded as she is by the burden she made of making them heroic, is that IT DOES NOT MATTER. In the way we now speak of Black Lives Mattering, no matter which type of life the person chose in life, we must also recognize that Poor Women Matter. It doesn't matter whether Mandi and Rosie were sluts or goddesses. It doesn't matter if they were "good people," in singular vernacular or plural. It does not matter if they were trash or class. They were women, who died violently, who died brutally, who died unlawfully. By belaboring their rebirth into heroes, Stillman loses sight of the universality of their death. They were humans. Americans. Women. They did not deserve to die, no matter how good or bad they were.
2) The Marines' 'war' against women goes unproven. Stillman makes this a theme of the narrative. It is even in her subtitle. And I am very sympathetic to the suggestion that the American military has waged a systematic campaign of violence against women - at home and abroad. However, Stillman provides just that -- a suggestion. Rhetoric, off-hand comments, conclusory statements, unsupported. She does not provide data about military or Marine rates of violence against women, or data about military/Marine rates of homicide or other crimes. It again does a disservice to this important issue to leave this thread hanging. It is, at best, sloppy journalism to devise a theme of your story that you do not develop, but rather assume as a premise.
3) Racism begins at home. Stillman takes valuable pains to discuss the shadow of racism that follows black Marines, particularly in the poor white desert, where they literally and figuratively "cannot hide." However, there is something vaguely, hauntingly, nearly racist about her own telling of this story. Not about the black killer -- there, she does a good, professional job of sorting out the racial issues. But rather about the two dead women -- the Filipino Rosie, and the white Mandi. The book is about Mandi. She is the star, the real hero. Rosie is the sidekick who dies too. The uneven time devoted to each victim does, over the course of the book, feel problematic. There could be completely innocent reasons for this journalistic decision. Perhaps Rosie's family was less available than Mandi's; perhaps there was a language barrier that made getting close to them more difficult. Perhaps the records were somehow better or more complete in Mandi's legal case than Rosie's. But Stillman does not explain why this is Mandi's book, and not Rosie's. Without an explanation, it just feels strange.
In the end, I did enjoy this book. Stillman's language and voice are often clear, imaginative, and unusual. I see she has written more books about the desert, and I would gladly read them.
Certainly Stillman aspires to these ranks, and her effort is at times lyrical, prophetic, earnest. She nails the ticks-in-the-floorboard disappearance of the Mojave's underclass; the desert's ruthless heartbeat, the liquor and grim sun. The crime scene sequences are measured, a good cadence, a bad brotherhood with the Marine whodunit.
But the book aims higher, and misses each mark, sometimes by a hair, and other times by a bit more. Three points stay with me:
1) They didn't have to be heroes. Stillman casts the two dead women at the center of this story as heroes. She actually uses the word, at least once, to describe them both. This is cheap, and beyond that, it is ideologically unnecessary and perhaps even counterproductive to her second aim (see below). The truth is, these women were not heroes. They were not special. They were, perhaps, not even average. But the harder truth, the more important truth, the one that Stillman does not raise, and at which she does not even hint, blinded as she is by the burden she made of making them heroic, is that IT DOES NOT MATTER. In the way we now speak of Black Lives Mattering, no matter which type of life the person chose in life, we must also recognize that Poor Women Matter. It doesn't matter whether Mandi and Rosie were sluts or goddesses. It doesn't matter if they were "good people," in singular vernacular or plural. It does not matter if they were trash or class. They were women, who died violently, who died brutally, who died unlawfully. By belaboring their rebirth into heroes, Stillman loses sight of the universality of their death. They were humans. Americans. Women. They did not deserve to die, no matter how good or bad they were.
2) The Marines' 'war' against women goes unproven. Stillman makes this a theme of the narrative. It is even in her subtitle. And I am very sympathetic to the suggestion that the American military has waged a systematic campaign of violence against women - at home and abroad. However, Stillman provides just that -- a suggestion. Rhetoric, off-hand comments, conclusory statements, unsupported. She does not provide data about military or Marine rates of violence against women, or data about military/Marine rates of homicide or other crimes. It again does a disservice to this important issue to leave this thread hanging. It is, at best, sloppy journalism to devise a theme of your story that you do not develop, but rather assume as a premise.
3) Racism begins at home. Stillman takes valuable pains to discuss the shadow of racism that follows black Marines, particularly in the poor white desert, where they literally and figuratively "cannot hide." However, there is something vaguely, hauntingly, nearly racist about her own telling of this story. Not about the black killer -- there, she does a good, professional job of sorting out the racial issues. But rather about the two dead women -- the Filipino Rosie, and the white Mandi. The book is about Mandi. She is the star, the real hero. Rosie is the sidekick who dies too. The uneven time devoted to each victim does, over the course of the book, feel problematic. There could be completely innocent reasons for this journalistic decision. Perhaps Rosie's family was less available than Mandi's; perhaps there was a language barrier that made getting close to them more difficult. Perhaps the records were somehow better or more complete in Mandi's legal case than Rosie's. But Stillman does not explain why this is Mandi's book, and not Rosie's. Without an explanation, it just feels strange.
In the end, I did enjoy this book. Stillman's language and voice are often clear, imaginative, and unusual. I see she has written more books about the desert, and I would gladly read them.
August 22, 2007
As a fan of both the high desert and true crime, this book was a can't miss. Just as an aside about the genre of "true crime": Really, true crime is a bit of a misnomer. Parts of any true crime story are fictionalized due to the inevitable problems of sourcing a recent crime. Additionally, I don't see how you can write a true crime story without shifting focus between the perpretator, the victim and the setting. All three help reveal whatever "truth" that can be learned from the description of a murder or whatnot.
That being said, Stillman, a writer from Los Angeles, does an at times workman-like and at times inspired job of revealing the murderer and victim. Where she really shines is her treatment of the desert of California as a character. Her descrptions of the world of the high desert are evocative and resonate with other, similar descriptions contained inside and outside the genre of true crime.
As a criminal defense lawyer, I thought Stillman gave short shrift to the legal machinations surrounding the trial, but I can't blame her for it, since the tone of the book is apparent from the blurb on the back.
I'd recommend this to fans of true crime and post modern philosophy, but I urge the old and easily horrified away. If this book freaks you out, you probably won't get much from the book aside from the facts of the case.
That being said, Stillman, a writer from Los Angeles, does an at times workman-like and at times inspired job of revealing the murderer and victim. Where she really shines is her treatment of the desert of California as a character. Her descrptions of the world of the high desert are evocative and resonate with other, similar descriptions contained inside and outside the genre of true crime.
As a criminal defense lawyer, I thought Stillman gave short shrift to the legal machinations surrounding the trial, but I can't blame her for it, since the tone of the book is apparent from the blurb on the back.
I'd recommend this to fans of true crime and post modern philosophy, but I urge the old and easily horrified away. If this book freaks you out, you probably won't get much from the book aside from the facts of the case.
January 6, 2013
This book started out slow but I kept with it.It was nice to read about places that I know.At one point it just lost me.I missed the part about the murder and I diddnt skip any pages.I could not follow the story line any more.Had to move on to something else.
July 22, 2014
Started out strong but jumped around way too much. Glamorized the drugged life of people down and out in the desert and the promiscuous lifestyle of the teenagers trapped in bad situations. Too much desert talk and not enough about the actual crime
May 18, 2010
Ok. I'm beginning to think living in the desert causes your brain to fry. Think Glass Castles, now this.
June 16, 2011
Wrong approach to this story, and wrenchingly overwritten.
February 8, 2013
As a friend of Amanda's (Mandy) there was a lot more that could have been put into this. RIP MANDY ALWAUS REMEMBERED NEVER FORGOTTEN
June 18, 2013
True story version of Hazardous Material
Displaying 1 - 27 of 27 reviews