When Ada JoAnn Taylor is tense, she thinks she can feel the fabric of a throw pillow in the pads of her fingers. Taylor has suffered from tactile flashbacks for three decades. She imagines herself in a small apartment in Beatrice, Nebraska. She is gripping the edges of a pillow, more tightly than she means to, and suffocating a sixty-eight-year-old widow. “I feel for her,” Taylor told me recently. “She was my grandmother’s age.”

Taylor confessed to the woman’s murder in 1989 and for two decades believed that she was guilty. She served more than nineteen years for the crime before she was pardoned. She was one of six people accused of the murder, five of whom took pleas; two had internalized their guilt so deeply that, even after being freed, they still had vivid memories of committing the crime. In no other case in the United States have false memories of guilt endured so long. The situation is a study in the malleability of memory: an implausible notion, doubted at first, grows into a firmly held belief that reshapes one’s autobiography and sense of identity.

Eli Chesen, a Nebraska psychiatrist who evaluated Taylor and her co-defendants after their release, told me, “They still believed to varying degrees that they had blood on their hands.” He compared the case with the Jonestown Massacre, in 1978, when a cult leader persuaded more than nine hundred people to commit suicide in Guyana. “You have a group of people who are led to share the same delusion, at the same time, with major consequences,” he said. “Their new beliefs superseded their previous life experiences, like paper covering a rock.”

Taylor still worries that her family and friends are secretly thinking, You are a murderer. “You’re not there, JoAnn,” she tries to tell herself. “It’s O.K. You are not a bad person.” But the memory of holding the pillow still makes her cry.

Beatrice is a city of twelve and a half thousand people in southeastern Nebraska, surrounded by wheat, corn, and soy fields. Its economy relies on the state hospital for the mentally disabled, originally called the Nebraska Institute for Feeble-Minded Youth. The poet Weldon Kees, who grew up in Beatrice, wrote a series of loosely fictionalized stories about the city. In one, construction workers, digging near an Indian burial ground, have uncovered a corpse. On their boss’s orders, they stay quiet and pulverize the body.

Taylor, who grew up on a cattle farm in Leicester, North Carolina, followed her boyfriend to Beatrice in 1981, when she was eighteen and pregnant with his child. Three weeks later, he left her. She enrolled at Beatrice High School and brought up her daughter, Rachel, alone. A closeted lesbian, Taylor typically wore bluejeans and men’s black button-front shirts. She was known in town as a bully. A police officer described her as “some sort of Amazon.” She drew attention to herself by making casually provocative statements. “I come from a very suicide-attempting home,” she’d announce to strangers.

At night, she drank at the R&S, a bar in downtown Beatrice that attracted bikers and misfits. She recalled her state of mind as “wasted, moody, and easy to snap.” She carried whiskey in her jacket pocket and, when she drank, she acted like a little girl, skipping and singing.

At the recommendation of child-protection services, Taylor began seeing a psychologist named Wayne Price, who was charged with helping her become a better parent. “He told me I was like a snail,” Taylor said. “I was reaching out to be loved, but I was closing my doors.” She had been removed from her home when she was eleven, after her stepfather repeatedly molested her, and she spent her adolescence in foster care. She realized that “on the inside there is a soft person waiting to be released.”

Price gave her a diagnosis of borderline personality disorder, an illness marked by instability of mood and self-image. After several months of counselling, Price noted that Taylor was “trying to be more domestic, baking, doing handiwork.” But she was still impulsive and emotional, and, in 1985, he recommended that she surrender her parental rights. Taylor trusted Price and agreed. “ ‘It takes a stronger mother’s love to let go than to hold on’ is the only way I can describe it,” she said. She gave her daughter up for adoption and moved to Los Angeles, where she supported herself by doing sex work.

A few months later, she returned to Beatrice with Joseph White, a handsome twenty-two-year-old who had been making gay pornographic films in L.A. He wanted to help Taylor fight for custody of her daughter. Neither of them grasped that the court procedure was over; she had lost all her rights.

Taylor reunited with a group of classmates from high school who were sexually unconventional, poor, and self-loathing. White, who liked to carve wood and write poetry, became friends with them, too. They started making a low-budget pornographic film. A local cop complained that they “were on the streets of Beatrice at one, two, three o’clock in the morning.” Another officer said, “They had nothing. And they didn’t know nobody.”

The Lincoln Telephone & Telegraph office, in the center of Beatrice, is a red brick structure with a white stone cornice, where some twenty “telephone girls”—women dressed in dark skirts and white blouses—used to connect twenty-five thousand phone calls a day. “Every woman in the neighborhood knows how many chickens every hen within ten miles has hatched,” the Beatrice Democrat wrote, shortly after the company was founded, at the turn of the twentieth century. In the fifties, after the invention of direct dialing, the building was converted into apartments, which were occupied mostly by elderly females and young single working women.

A few months after Taylor returned to Beatrice, Helen Wilson, who lived alone on the first floor, was raped and suffocated. The police found Type B blood from the intruder on Wilson’s mattress, wall, and underwear, and semen in her body. A grandmother, Wilson had played bingo a few nights a week and volunteered at the nursery of the Methodist church, a half block away. The police assumed that the culprit was someone lost in a religious fervor—there were several other churches nearby—or a homosexual, because Wilson had been raped anally. A psychological profile developed by the F.B.I. concluded that the murderer was a loner who’d had psychological counselling and collected pornography, and who was “odd and wimpy.”

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The police placed a voice-activated tape recorder inside a flowerpot at Wilson’s grave site, to track suspicious mourners, and asked the owner of an adult bookstore in Beatrice for a list of known homosexuals. More than three hundred people were interviewed, including White. He had never met Wilson. “I know nothing about her but what I heard from the scuzbut on the streets,” he told an officer. He was eliminated as a suspect, because his blood wasn’t Type B.

Three weeks after the murder, Taylor, having finally realized that she would never be a part of her daughter’s life, returned to her family, in North Carolina. She stopped drinking and worked, in vain, to repair her relationship with her mother. “I tried to forget all about Nebraska completely,” she said.