Craig, Colorado, is the landmark near which the book places the killing and abandonment of an eighteen-year-old motel maid, the final victim in the account of George Ronald York and James Douglas Latham’s crimes. The location marks the bleak end of her brief association with the pair, who had invited her to join their trip to California.

Setting and Associated Events

The young woman worked as a maid at a motel in Colorado where the two men spent a night. After she let them make love to her, they said they were heading to California and invited her along. She accepted, packed a cardboard suitcase, and traveled with them; the book locates the place where she was left in a ravine near Craig, without identifying the motel as being in Craig itself.

Narrative Significance

The passage makes the invitation’s promise of a shared journey sharply contrast with its outcome: the girl and her suitcase were left in the ravine. It identifies her as the pair’s final victim and notes that, only hours after she had been killed and left there, the men appeared before motion-picture cameras. Craig thus anchors the passage’s contrast between the young woman’s fate and the public spectacle that followed.