My rage is radioactive. It infuses every atom of my being. It will linger in the atmosphere a millennium after my bones have crumbled into dust.

My pain is different. As time passes grievous losses—romantic betrayals, the deaths of cherished pets and friends—begin to shrink into scabbed-over wounds so deeply embedded in my core

I can inveigle myself into believing these sorrows no longer trouble me at all.

My true crime obsession, I believe,

is a way to reexperience and exorcise my personal anguish at a safe distance—and the murders presently twirling through my mind are the unsolved homicides of Donald Ray Young and Rebecca Lou Hastings.

“It’s the most frustrating thing I’ve ever worked on; I don’t have a weapon, a suspect or a motive. I don’t know why it happened. We’ve ruled out all the usual reasons. I’ve interviewed about 50 people and I can’t come up with even two people who didn’t like them, much less hated them enough to murder them. It was almost like they were two perfect people.” Phoenix Police Department Detective Jim Thomas, Arizona Republic, May 19th, 1985

Rebecca Hastings and Donald Young—Becky and Donnie to intimates—may have been two perfect people but they were not, as it turns out, a perfect couple.

Twenty-three-year old Becky was eager for marriage and Donnie, thirty-four and thrice divorced, preferred to saunter to the altar at a more leisurely pace.

Deeming their differences insurmountable, the couple decided to end their romantic relationship and remain friends.

On the weekend of January 7th, 1984 the duo were in the final stages of dismantling their conjoined existence at 3514 West McKinley Street in Phoenix, Arizona;

Becky spent Saturday afternoon looking at new apartments with a male friend.

On Saturday evening Becky spoke on the phone with her mother and a friend, telling both she planned to spend the night at home—she intended to take a bath and go to bed early, she said.

Donnie spent the evening drinking with a female friend at a bar located in the West Valley Mall.

He dropped off his companion at 1am and, assuming he drove home directly, would have arrived back at West McKinley Street at 1:45am.

At noon on Sunday Donnie’s longtime best friend Kim Siegfried stopped by West McKinley Street to help with some home repairs. The door was unlocked—the door was always unlocked—and he entered the single-story residence.

His shouted greetings unanswered, he peeked into the darkened bedroom and spotted Donnie prone on the bed,

upper body hidden beneath a blanket.

“So I went and did some work,” Kim Siegfried will later tell an Arizona Republic reporter.

“I walked past his room a little later and he hadn’t moved and I thought he must’ve really tied one on the night before.”

Kim Siegfried completed the repairs and returned home but something about Donnie’s position—facedown, swaddled in blankets, only his bare feet and ankles poking through—nagged at him.

He chain-called throughout the afternoon, hoping Donnie would answer and becoming increasingly anxious when Donnie did not. At 7:30pm Kim Siegfried returned to the small house on West McKinley Street.

The door was still unlocked and Donnie was still in the same position.

“I didn’t know Becky was in there until I turned on the light,” Kim Siegfried will later tell the Arizona Republic.

“I saw [Becky’s] leg and then I knew without a doubt they were dead. I didn’t even uncover them. I’m a coward,

I guess.”

Bang. Bang. Bang. Bang. Bang. Bang. Bang. Bang. Bang. Bang. Bang. Bang. Bang. Bang. Bang. Bang. Bang. Bang. Bang. Bang. Postmortems reveal Becky and Donnie had each been shot ten times,

primarily in the head.

The term “overkilled” seems insufficient for a murder featuring twenty bullet wounds—“overkilled10” seems a more apt descriptor.

The caliber and type of weapon utilized and the precise location of Becky and Donnie’s wounds have never been revealed by law enforcement.

No bullet casings were found at the scene indicating either a fastidious perpetrator or a weapon capable of retaining spent shells.

No one on West McKinley heard any gunfire the night of the murders,

including one neighbor who lived only six feet from the crime scene.

The extravagant number of gunshots wasn’t the only peculiar aspect of the Hastings-Young homicides:

although she was found nude Becky exhibited no indicia of sexual assault.

The interplay of victims’ bodies was odd as well—Becky lay on the bed faceup and Donnie,

fully clothed, lay facedown directly on top of her.

Beside them on the bed lay a butter knife and Donnie’s house keys.

The only item determined to be missing from the home was Becky’s purse containing approximately twenty dollars.

Although it is only a theory Phoenix Detective Jim Thomas assesses the scene thusly: Becky was slain first, he believes, and the killer was still in the house when Donnie arrived home.

Hearing a strange noise, Donnie grabbed a butter knife from the kitchen and,

house keys still in hand, proceeded into the bedroom.

From the positioning of their bodies it appeared Donnie had been leaning over Becky, possibly to check on her,

when the killer opened fire.

Although Detective Thomas can conceptualize the mechanics of the murder the killer’s motive and principal target remain a mystery. Did Donnie interrupt an assailant targeting Becky? Or was the assailant lying in wait for him?

Nobody knows—or nobody who knows is talking.

Although Detective Thomas is unsure why Becky and Donnie were slain he managed to eliminate several classic motives from the roster of possibilities:

as revealed in the Arizona Republic, neither Donnie nor Becky had any known enemies.

Neither had any known drug involvement.

A burglary gone wrong has also been ruled out since nothing was missing from the home aside from Becky’s pocketbook.

Unable to find any potential red flags in their present lives investigators began to examine Becky and Donnie’s respective pasts.

Both Becky and Donnie were Phoenix transplants—in the Arizona Republic Detective Thomas describes the pair as “trusting people from the Midwest.”

Donnie was a Cape Girardeau, Missouri native and a Vietnam veteran.

He worked as a communications supervisor at the Tanner Construction Company alongside his best friend Kim Siegfried.

Although he had three failed marriages Donnie was said to be on good terms with all of his ex-wives.

He and his third wife, an Arizona Republic employee, had amicably divorced in October, 1983,

eighteen months before the murders.

It’s unclear how long Donnie and Becky had dated but they had apparently cohabitated only a relatively short time.

Becky had grown up in the wryly-named hamlet of Normal, Illinois.

At the time of her death she worked as a file clerk in Dr. Jerold Mangas’s medical practice with a promotion to office manager in the offing.

Although not as matrimonially ambitious as Donnie Becky had been married once, briefly, while still in her teens—the union had been dissolved in 1979, long before she moved to Arizona.

Interestingly, although it’s almost certainly unrelated to her murder, the Bloomington Pantagraph contains a relevant item in the March 6th, 1978 edition:

The tire slashing incident, never again mentioned in the archives, occurred four months before Becky’s August 6th, 1978 marriage—her divorce was finalized fourteen months later, on October 27th, 1979.

Sixteen hundred miles away and six years before her murder the vandalism is most likely a red herring—but it does demonstrate that perfect person though Becky may have been,

at one point there was someone who not only hated her but was willing to break the law to harass her.

Becky and Donnie have long since faded from the media spotlight; their murders haven’t been mentioned in the Arizona Republic since 1985, nearly thirty-five years ago.

The press may have forgotten but ever since I first read about the case years ago Donnie and Becky have remained close to my heart,

the trusting uncoupled-couple from the Midwest blasted with an armory’s worth of ammunition for a reason fathomable only to their killer.

Becky and Donnie’s homicides have been haunting me of late, ever since a nightmare I endured a few weeks ago called them to mind.

I dreamt was back in my ex-boyfriend’s apartment, and just like Becky on her final weekend I was packing up my possessions and getting ready to move out.

The demise of this particular relationship was devastating but it occurred years in the past;

if strapped to a lie detector I would claim to be over the heartache and I would pass the polygraph.

Nevertheless, I woke up crying.

I will admit I had this dream. I will admit I woke up crying.

I will admit that Becky and Donnie have been heavy on my mind.

But here is what I will not admit, even if someone holds a gun of unspecified caliber to my head and threatens to pull the trigger ten or even twenty times:

if given the option, as I boxed up my possessions lo those many years ago, to move out and carry on with my life or stay even one more night—even though I knew a maniac was going to break in and kill us?

I know which option I would’ve chosen.

And it wouldn’t have required a moving van.