Mystery: Trashed
The mystery would prove irresistible to storytellers of all stripes, including the renowned Princeton writer Joyce Carol Oates. Oates’s short story “Landfill,” published in the New Yorker six months after Fiocco disappeared, featured an unsophisticated 19-year-old college student named Hector Jr. who, after a night of heavy drinking — March 25th, the same night Fiocco disappeared — is called “asshole, dickhead, fuckhead” by a group of racist meatheads who throw him down their frat house’s trash chute. Oates opens her story with a lingering description of Hector’s body once it’s been found in a landfill, “his mouth filled with trash,” his teeth “broken at the roots.” She then sends her narrator inside the dumpster with him:
Oates was taken aback by the condemnation her story drew from professors and students at TCNJ. Initially she struck a defiant tone, saying any connection to the Fiocco case was incidental, comparing the criticism to that heaped upon Salman Rushdie for The Satanic Verses. When the controversy refused to go away — registering notice by the New York Times — Oates had a change of heart. “In the matter of fiction and ‘reality,’ we must honor the emotions, raw and anguished at times, of ‘reality,’” she said in a written statement. “A literary principle is not a justification for upsetting anyone, even unintentionally.”
What Oates couldn’t — or didn’t — realize was that in the absence of any formal conclusion by the authorities, the scenario posited in her fiction had transmogrified into a sort of perceived fact. In the wake of the rampant, frequently erroneous speculation offered first by Nancy Grace and her ilk, it became impossible for anyone to approach Oates’s story as anything less than an explanation.
And for two years, Oates’s seemed likely to be the strange, unintentional last word.
Two years later, it turns out, there is more to the story.
BY NOON, THEY’D begun worrying.
Matt Owen and John Fiocco shared a cinder-blocked room on the fourth floor of Wolfe Hall, a 10-story, monolithic 1970s dormitory at the edge of the College of New Jersey’s otherwise stately, red-brick campus. On the walls hung movie posters from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and Requiem for a Dream; John, an art major, contributed Batman and Spider-Man paraphernalia, including drawings of his own. Matt awoke on the morning of Saturday, March 25th, turned over in his bed, and realized John wasn’t there.
The night before, John and some friends had drunk beer at the dorm before heading out to a party at the “Track House,” a ramshackle domicile where several members of the track team lived. The house was a destination for underage freshmen but wasn’t known for being particularly rowdy, and Friday night was no different. John and his friends drank liberally, perhaps indulged in a game of beer pong. Sometime after midnight, they headed back to campus.
