ART LINKLETTER continued his fight against drug addiction, pushing for medical treatment and rational strategies—an evolution that went largely unnoticed. He occasionally relapsed into fury (especially on the subject of Timothy Leary), but embraced the decriminalization of marijuana and other soft drugs, and renounced his earlier, zero-tolerance approach.
“Almost all my assumptions about drug education were wrong,” Linkletter wrote in 1973. “Each time one of my interviews is shown, there is no one to say, ‘That was two years ago, while I was still learning.’”
As for Go Ask Alice, Linkletter stopped short of a public disavowal, but his endorsement vanished from the cover and never returned.
“The time for hating and revenge is past,” said Linkletter. “Once I thought it was ‘us’ against ‘them’—the good people against the monsters. Now I see that unless we search for answers, we’ll never find them.”
He died in 2010 at the age of ninety-seven.
DR. DOYLE BARRETT died on January 4, 2003, aged seventy-seven. He is buried next to Alden in Pleasant Grove City Cemetery.
MARCELLA BARRETT died on December 15, 2007, at the age of eighty-three. She is buried next to her first husband (Bryan Cook, who died in 1948) in Emery County, Utah.
ELAINE BARRETT, Alden’s younger sister, got married in her senior year of high school. More than four decades later, she and Mike are still together. They live in the Midwest.
SCOTT BARRETT eventually reconciled with his parents. In 1996, he self-published A Place in the Sun, his own account of Alden’s life and death. The book got some local press, then faded from sight. On the forty-fourth anniversary of Alden’s suicide, Scott said via Facebook, “A burning question you need to ask yourself if you ever contemplate taking your own life: Who is going to find you?”
After multiple scrapes with the law, Scott moved to Arizona and remarried. In 2017, as I was writing this book, Scott was convicted of molesting an eight-year-old girl and received a chain of sentences totaling twenty-nine years. Scott maintains his innocence.
TERESA BLAIN struggled with grief and guilt following Alden’s suicide, and while others spent years in therapy, Teresa did most of her healing alone. “I just got past it, little by little,” she says, adding, “sometimes I felt Alden’s presence reassuring me.”
In time, she found a measure of peace, and is now a married mother of three, living on the East Coast. She has never read Jay’s Journal.
After editing It Happened to Nancy, ELLEN KRIEGER moved to Simon & Schuster as vice president/editorial director of their children’s publishing division, where she oversaw sleek new editions of Go Ask Alice and Jay’s Journal. For the Alice update alone, Simon & Schuster paid Beatrice Sparks a new advance of fifty thousand dollars.
In 2021, reviewing her correspondence with Beatrice Sparks, Krieger concluded, “This woman was a con artist.”
Also in 2021, Dr. Susan Chu of the Centers for Disease Control (Sparks’s alleged fact-checker for It Happened to Nancy) said she “does not recall ever reviewing [It Happened to Nancy] and has no comments or endorsement on its content.”
SPECIAL AGENT KENNETH V. LANNING remained with the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Perhaps inevitably, his skepticism about occult crime temporarily boomeranged, with a handful of cult truthers accusing him of being a closet Satanist. Lanning shrugged and continued doing his job.
Lanning’s reports from the era (particularly 1996’s The Witch-Hunt, The Backlash, and Professionalism) are now viewed as crucial accounts of the Satanic Panic—exemplars of rational integrity amid mindless hysteria.
In 1997, Lanning received the FBI Director’s Award for Special Achievement for his work on behalf of missing and exploited children. He retired from the bureau in 2000, and is now a private consultant specializing in children’s issues.
DETECTIVE SANDRA GALLANT gradually distanced herself from claims of a Satanic crime wave and downplayed her “pre-1986 police educational materials.” Those materials included her Quantico handout, which had already saturated law enforcement and wider society.
Asked in 2021 if she felt any guilt over her past activities, such as testifying at ritual abuse trials, Gallant denied the premise.
“Why should I feel responsible for somebody else’s thoughts and opinions?” she responded. “I have no effect on that. I never testified in one case involving any of this.”
When I mentioned her 1985 trial testimony in Contra Costa County (see page 258), Gallant grew angry, saying, “I never testified in any such case. I think if I did, I would certainly remember.”
After I sent Gallant a San Francisco Examiner article* describing her testimony in the 1985 case, she responded, “I see the article, but still do not recall this trial.”
KATHRYN FITZGERALD, who acquired and edited Go Ask Alice for Prentice-Hall, became vice president of PH’s trade division. In 1977, she left publishing for a job in finance. Fitzgerald eventually moved to Paris, France, where she died in 2020, aged seventy-eight.
WEBSTER SCHOTT, whose review in the New York Times helped launch Go Ask Alice to super-success, died in 2020 at the age of ninety-three. Interviewed shortly before his death, Schott said he had struggled with how to review the supposed diary.
“I couldn’t decide,” said Schott. “That is, the truth was not available. There was no way to establish the authenticity of the work, in the sense of being real, or whether it was conjured up as a way of writing a book that would sell.”
Asked if a “fiction” label would have changed his review, Schott said, “Of course. I would have been reluctant to embrace it as a work of significance. That is, if it was fake, it was fraudulent.”
MORGAN CURRAN, who discovered Go Ask Alice while grappling with her sister’s meth addiction, kept her vow to avoid drugs, and in 2015, she enrolled at Nebraska’s College of Technical Agriculture.
In early 2016, doctors diagnosed Curran with cardiomyopathy—an abnormal thickening of the heart muscle. Even scarier, the disease had been there for at least two years, masquerading as severe asthma. If Curran had taken hard drugs in any serious quantity, they might have killed her on the spot.
In 2019, Curran completed college, graduating as salutatorian.
Her sister, Sam, continues to battle addiction.
ALLEEN PACE NILSEN, whose School Library Journal article “The House That Alice Built” so angered Beatrice Sparks, is now a Professor Emeritus in the English Department at Arizona State University. She is the author of numerous books on young adult literature, and is widely considered an expert on the genre. In 2015, Nilsen gave an acclaimed seminar on the impact and symbolism of the two Alices: Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Go Ask Alice.
TOBI HUDSON now describes herself as “an inactive Mormon,” but like many who leave the Church, she monitors its progress and missteps as closely as any active member. She and her husband currently live outside the United States.
In 2016, forty-five years after ceasing contact, Tobi emailed Brenda March, apologizing for the disappearance and explaining the circumstances. “If you are willing,” wrote Tobi, “I would be glad to share with you where life has led me, and I would be happy to hear about how you have been, how you are now, and what you are doing. In any event, I ask for your understanding and forgiveness.”
BRENDA MARCH survived a tumultuous adolescence and, in later years, overcame substance abuse. She excelled in college, attaining multiple degrees, and now works with at-risk communities. She is active within the Mormon Church and does frequent social outreach.
In 2016, she responded to Tobi Hudson’s email, and they have remained in contact.
Brenda has never read Go Ask Alice.
ALDEN BARRETT missed out on Star Wars, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and The Book of Mormon: The Musical. He never heard The Wall or Exile on Main St., and he never glimpsed the internet.
Just ten days after Alden’s death, Congress proposed a constitutional amendment lowering the voting age to eighteen. Despite opposition from seven states (including Utah), the amendment became law on July 5, 1971. It was the fastest ratification in US history.* Had he still been alive, Alden could have voted against Nixon in 1972, then watched him resign in disgrace two years later.
The military draft, which had haunted Alden for years, ended in June of 1973. The final batch of draftees were men born in 1952; Alden, who was born in 1954, would have been free and clear. The Vietnam War ended on April 30, 1975.
Ten years after putting Alden’s headstone in storage, the family returned it to the burial plot in Pleasant Grove City Cemetery. The marker is still occasionally defaced, and Alden’s porcelain photo has been largely chipped away. With no one left to maintain it, the image will eventually vanish.
(Photo by Rick Emerson.)
JAY’S JOURNAL has existed for nearly fifty years—three times longer than Alden Barrett’s entire life.
In 2004, rumors circulated that “Beatrice Sparks” was a pen name for Marcella Barrett. The claim apparently started on Wikipedia, and despite a retraction by the user, the story persists, another part of Pleasant Grove lore.
The Library of Congress currently lists Jay’s Journal as “fiction,” but the latest edition of the book itself carries no designation at all, leaving readers (and booksellers) to decide for themselves. In Portland, Oregon, where I live, the nearest bookstore stocks multiple copies of Jay. The price tags all say “Biography.”
GO ASK ALICE has sold nearly six million copies, and is often bundled for sale with Jay’s Journal. Most new copies of Jay also contain a five-page sample of Go Ask Alice, and in 2006, Simon & Schuster produced a special slipcase version, packaging Jay and Alice in a single, elegant box.
In 2012, Simon & Schuster launched Anonymous Diaries—a new line of books “in the tradition of Go Ask Alice.” Each book tells a cautionary tale in diary form, complete with grim, third-person epilogues (“Teen Found Dead of Accidental Overdose, Coroner Rules”) and punchy, Alice-esque taglines (“Lucy was a good girl, living a good life. One night, one party, changed everything”). Each cover mimics Alice’s layout, with a similar font and half-shadowed face. By 2021, the series contained seven titles, including Lucy in the Sky, The Book of David . . . and Jay’s Journal.
As of this writing, the Library of Congress has four separate entries for Go Ask Alice. No two are the same, and only one of the entries agrees with itself. (The entry for Avon’s paperback edition says both “fiction” and “autobiography.”)
In December 2020, Simon & Schuster released a fiftieth-anniversary edition of Go Ask Alice. Its inside copyright page says “fiction,” but its Library of Congress entry says “not fiction.”
The National Library of Medicine, which is operated by the National Institutes of Health and is the world’s largest collection of medical books, specifically lists Go Ask Alice as “not fiction.”
BEATRICE RUBY MATHEWS SPARKS died in her sleep on May 25, 2012. She was ninety-five years old.
Sparks’s grudge against Alleen Pace Nilsen proved literally unkillable. Arriving at Sparks’s funeral, Nilsen discovered that Sparks—whom Nilsen had not seen in thirty-three years—had left instructions barring her from the ceremony. Undeterred, Nilsen sent her daughter, Nicolette, who sat in the back and made copious notes.
In the course of her life, Beatrice Sparks claimed to have attended at least five colleges. Only one—Brigham Young University—has any record of her enrollment: five months in 1989. The university confirms that Sparks did not graduate.*
Yet even in death, Sparks continues to shape her own image. Asked about the alleged PhD, a researcher at BYU replied that Sparks “apparently attended UCLA.” When I asked where that info came from, the researcher said, “Wikipedia,” then noted, “[BYU] wrote the Wikipedia page for her, so that information would have come from our collection of materials.”
Sparks left numerous unfinished projects, including Out of the Dark (which, according to its summary, would draw from audiotaped sessions with Sparks’s “patients”) and How to Be Happy, a self-help book for adults. Though never completed, How to Be Happy already had ringing endorsements . . . from two nonexistent doctors.
Beatrice Sparks is buried next to LaVorn in Orem City Cemetery—just a short distance from the apartment where Marcella Barrett spent her final years.
Sparks’s headstone reads, “Families are Forever.”
* A.S. Ross, “Police Believe in Violent Cults,” San Francisco Examiner, September 29, 1986.
* The seven opposing states were Florida, Kentucky, Mississippi, Nevada, New Mexico, North Dakota, and Utah.
* Life is long, and anything is possible; proof of a PhD (or master’s, or BA, or whatever) may eventually surface. But a crate of diplomas wouldn’t offset Sparks’s gut-level cruelties, or reconcile her other deceptions. If anything, it might reveal them as far more deliberate, and Sparks herself as even more villainous.
We project our own paranoia onto the young. They are the dark and confused result of what we have failed to be.
—Art Linkletter, Drugs at My Doorstep, 1973