Rebecca Godfrey, 54, Who Was Captivated By Murder Case, Dies

A book that drew comparisons to Truman Capote’s ‘In Cold Blood.’

Rebecca Godfrey, who mapped the complex landscape of teenage transgression with exquisite detail and precise language in a novel, “The Torn Skirt,” and later in a nonfiction book, “Under the Bridge,” about a murder that became a cause célèbre in Canada, died on Oct. 3 in Manhattan. She was 54.

Her agent, Christy Fletcher, said the cause of her death, in a hospital, was complications of lung cancer.

In 1997, Ms. Godfrey was in her hometown, Victoria, British Columbia, where her novel was set, researching a juvenile detention center, because her troubled heroine would spend time in one. While there, she caught a glimpse of the teenagers who had been charged with the murder of 14year-old Reena Virk, and she was caught off guard by their youth and vulnerability. Ms. Godfrey became captivated by the case and decided it would be the subject of her next book.

She learned that Reena had been an awkward outsider, desperate to be accepted by a tough clique of girls led by a diminutive queen bee named Josephine, who had been cycling in and out of foster care. Reena’s attempts to get Josephine’s attention — acting tough herself, mouthing the gangsta rap lyrics the girls were all enthralled by, stealing a jacket and Josephine’s phone book — meant, in Josephine’s mind, that she had to be taught a lesson. It went horribly off the rails when a mob of girls organized by Josephine lured Reena under a bridge and beat her so badly that her injuries resembled those suffered by someone who had been run over by a car.

Reena was then beaten again, by a relatively privileged young terror named Kelly and a hapless, homeless boy named Warren. She drowned in a salty inlet downstream.

Ms. Godfrey was turning 30 that year, but as a slight woman with a loose bob, she could pass for a teenager. She had been a bit of a goth and a punk in her own youth, and she could perhaps see more depth and humanity in the assailants as well as the victim than the other members of the press corps, most of them male and much older, who swarmed the town in the aftermath of the terrible crime and the trials that followed.

“The Shoreline Six,” some called the girls who had beaten Reena, for the school that only a few of them attended. “Bad Girls,” declared the headline of a cover article in Maclean’s magazine two weeks after the murder.

Over time, Ms. Godfrey gained the trust of those involved. Warren’s girlfriend had kept a diary and gave it to Ms. Godfrey. Even Reena’s parents warmed to her. Someone slipped her the police file, and she drew heavily from the verbatim accounts of the children’s interrogations for the book she was writing.

The vividness of these exchanges — the banal vernacular of the teenage girls and the techniques of their much older interlocutors — make for some of its most compelling chapters. During one interview, Josephine tells the police: “We don’t talk about murder. We talk about cigarettes and makeup.”

The book, nearly a decade in the making, was published in 2005 and drew comparisons to Truman Capote’s “In Cold Blood.” It was reissued in 2019 with an introduction by Mary Gaitskill, a longtime friend of Ms. Godfrey’s and the author of the acclaimed short-story collection “Bad Behavior” (1988). Ms. Gaitskill called “Under the Bridge” “a remarkable piece of investigative journalism,” adding that Ms. Godfrey “allows us to almost see what is essentially unseeable.”

“Rebecca was like a deeply rooted plant that moved with the water; it seems fragile but just try pulling it up,” Ms. Gaitskill said in a phone interview. “She was delicate but strong and deep.”

Ms. Godfrey’s first book, “The Torn Skirt,” a novel about a 16year-old misfit and rebel named Sara who goes looking for trouble and, terrifyingly, finds it, eerily foreshadowed the world in which Ms. Godfrey would immerse herself for “Under the Bridge.”

Reviewing “The Torn Skirt” in The New York Times in 2002, the author Erika Krouse called it a “stark, bewitching Canadian noir,” and described Sara as having “a voice that is fresh, disaffected and angst-ridden — authentic enough to be convincing but peculiar enough to be interesting. ”

Rebecca Margot Godfrey was born on Dec. 2, 1967, in Toronto. Her father, David Godfrey, was an English professor and a publisher; her mother, Ellen (Swartz) Godfrey, was an editor and a mystery writer.

In 1977, Mr. Godfrey became chairman of the creative writing department at the University of Victoria, on Vancouver Island, and the family moved there. When Rebecca was 13, her 16-year-old brother, Jonathan, fell from a bluff near their home and drowned. As she told the author Leslie Jamison, who interviewed her for The Paris Review in 2019, she remembered how jarring it felt when a reporter knocked on their door after the accident and asked her, “Did you know the boy that died?”

Decades later, that memory tempered her own approach as she researched “Under the Bridge.” “I didn’t want to be that intrusive or voyeuristic,” she said, “so I was quite tentative by journalistic standards.”

Ms. Godfrey earned an undergraduate degree in English at the University of Toronto and an M.F.A. in creative writing at Sarah Lawrence College. Until recently, she taught creative writing at Columbia University.

She is survived by her husband, Herbert Wilson; their daughter, Ada; her mother; and her brother Samuel.

At her death, Ms. Godfrey had nearly completed a new novel, “Peggy,” based on the early life of Peggy Guggenheim, the modernart patron, including an affair she had with Samuel Beckett in Paris in the late 1930s. After spending so many years immersed in a violent crime, she told The Poughkeepsie Journal in 2019, “I wanted to write a love story.”

She left copious notes about how she wanted to finish the manuscript, her editor, David Ebershoff, said. It is scheduled to be published by Random House next summer.

“Under the Bridge” was optioned by Reese Witherspoon’s production company, but that project appears to have fizzled. Next month, Hulu will begin production on a limited series based on the book. The writer and director Quinn Shephard collaborated with Ms. Godfrey for two and a half years to adapt the story for television; both are credited as executive producers.

The book was written largely from the points of view of each of the people involved with the case, with Ms. Godfrey mostly absent from the narrative, an affecting technique that was also cultural. Unlike Americans, Ms. Godfrey said, Canadians are taught to see the community before the individual; Ms. Godfrey considered the first person showy. But when Ms. Shephard reworked “Under the Bridge” to make Ms. Godfrey the show’s heroine, she didn’t balk.

“Rebecca allowed me to embrace the rebellious, sensitive and mischievous spirit she had at the age when she wrote this,” Ms. Shephard said. “I wonder if at the time, when she was in it, it was hard to see how special the story of her writing this truly was. She would often say that looking back, she wondered how she was able to do it, withstand all of that darkness for so many years.”