Marsh Road

On a stretch of Marsh Road east of San Jose, the story goes that you stop your car on the bridge at night, turn off your headlights, and watch the rear-view mirror. A girl is supposed to appear in the reflection. Locals say she haunts couples, that you can hear screams on the road with nothing there to make them. Milpitas teenagers have been driving out to look for her for years. One alt-weekly called it "almost a rite of passage for Milpitas high school kids."

Her name was Marcy Renee Conrad, and unlike most roadside ghosts, she was real.

She was 14, a freshman at Milpitas High, when she was raped and strangled on November 3, 1981. Her killer was Anthony Jacques Broussard, a 16-year-old at the same school. He moved her body out of his house and into the hills above town, and left it in a tree-lined ravine near Calaveras Reservoir.

Then he started telling people. Over the next two days, Broussard led at least 10 classmates up the hills to look at the body. Some of them came and went. No one called the police. When investigators later asked the students why they hadn't reported it, the answer was that they "did not want to get in trouble." The body wasn't found until November 5, two days after she died.

Broussard was sentenced to 25 years to life, and was paroled in 2023. An accomplice who kicked leaves over the body got three years in a juvenile facility. The case became national news, and in 1986 it loosely seeded a film, *River's Edge*, with Keanu Reeves and Crispin Glover — studied since as a portrait of teenage nihilism.

The stretch of Marsh Road where the legend lives has long been closed off by law enforcement, after years of vandals and ghost hunters. The bridge in the story isn't the ravine where she was actually found. But the kids still drive out to the bridge anyway, headlights off, watching the mirror for a 14-year-old who was real.