Sara and Kito Tidwell’s murder

Sara and Kito Tidwell’s murder is the foundational crime hidden beneath the public history of Dark Score Lake: Jared Devore and other local men attack Sara, then kill her eight-year-old son, Kito, after he witnesses the assault and cries for help. Their bodies are concealed, the community’s response helps drive the Red-Tops from the area, and the official histories leave the crime unrecorded. Jo’s research and the later discovery of the buried remains make the murders legible as both a personal atrocity and a collective act of concealment.

Background and the concealed history

Jo’s inquiry into the township begins as research for an article. She reads, but chiefly gathers history by speaking with local people, listening to stories of earlier days, and persuading them to look for old letters and diaries. Her work is initially a private project; she does not tell Michael, and Frank later explains that she may first have meant to surprise him. The question she stumbled upon was not preserved in the town histories.

One of the surviving printed accounts is Edward Osteen’s privately published Dark Score Days, written in 1965 or 1966. Osteen collected local stories and included an old photograph he believed showed Sara and the Red-Tops at the Fryeburg Fair in 1900. But the newspaper clippings Jo gathered offer a different kind of record: contemporary reviews describe the Black musicians through racist caricature and condescension, while revealing nothing about the circumstances of their departure. The publicity remains; the violence behind the community’s dispersal does not.

Jo’s archive also helps Michael understand the chronology of the Devore family. A clipping dated 1865 identifies Jared Devore as a thirty-two-year-old returnee, placing him at about sixty-seven or sixty-eight by the time Sara and the Red-Tops settled on what became Tidwell’s Meadow. Michael connects that generational gap to Sara’s song about older people showing the young what to do. The clue is not a full account of the murders, but it makes Jared’s place in the history newly consequential.

The attack on Sara

Sara is walking along The Street on a Sunday when much of the township is away: some residents are attending an Eastern Star supper, while others have gone to the dedication of Grace Baptist Church. Kito has stopped to pick berries. A group of men confronts Sara, with Jared as its oldest member and leader. He taunts her, and the men’s arrival appears to Sara to have been planned.

Jared trips and falls. When Sara laughs at the mishap, he turns on her, and the other men join the assault. They prevent her from calling out and move her behind a large gray rock. Sara fears that Kito may come upon them, but hopes he will instead run for help. The men’s violence is collective; Jared directs and participates while the others help restrain and attack her.

Sara continues to resist and speak back. When Jared attacks her again, Kito appears on The Street, sees what is happening, and calls out to his mother. Sara tells him to run. The episode’s decisive turn is that the child’s arrival does not bring rescue: Jared orders that Kito be put in the water and silenced because he has witnessed the crime.

Kito’s murder and the burial

Harry Auster grabs Kito and jumps into the lake with him. Fred Dean retrieves the boy’s floating straw hat, while other men remain at the scene. Harry then forces Kito beneath the water and holds him there until he stops moving. Draper Finney witnesses the drowning and recognizes its horror, but does not intervene. Sara is also dying, and the men leave both mother and child dead.

Nearly a century later, Michael uncovers a mold-covered canvas bundle during the supernatural struggle at Sara Laughs. Inside are two yellowed skulls, a faded red leather belt, deteriorated clothing, and two sets of bones: one larger and one smaller. The arrangement and objects identify them as the remains of Sara and Kito, buried beside the lake for almost a hundred years. The discovery turns Jo’s fragmentary historical investigation into physical evidence of the crime.

Aftermath, silence, and significance

The murders do not appear in the town histories. Jo’s notes instead preserve information gathered from older residents, including the account that by the time the Red-Tops played the Castle County Fair, their lakeside community had begun to break apart. According to Royce Merrill’s account to Jo, active harassment began by Labor Day and grew worse. Son Tidwell refused to leave until he learned what had happened to his sister and nephew; the family remained at the meadow even after others departed for safer places.

The community’s silence is not simply an absence of information. Frank describes how, when the Black residents needed to be treated as equals, the township closed ranks; people did not necessarily approve of Jared and his protégés, but protected their own when consequences threatened. Jo’s notes preserve the gap between the benign local histories and the hidden account of intimidation and murder. The crime therefore explains not only Sara and Kito’s deaths, but also the fear and displacement that followed and the long suppression of what had happened.

The murders also become part of the haunting of Sara Laughs. During the later confrontation, Sara’s supernatural presence is tied to the buried remains, and Michael understands that she has become a conduit for an Outsider. The discovery of the bones gives the haunting a material history: beneath the house’s present-day terror lie the bodies and evidence of a crime that the township had left unspoken. By recovering that history, Jo and Michael expose what the town’s public memory had excluded.