But the stories about Betty never went away. During a later renovation, its facade was covered with bricks. So many teenagers made the late-night pilgrimage to see Betty that the high school deemed it prudent to paint over the windows of the school auditorium. Her boyfriend, who was a varsity football player, had shot her onstage during a play. But the facts of her death had been muddled with time, and each story was as apocryphal as the last: She had fallen off a ladder in the auditorium and broken her neck, students said. The real Betty, it was said, had attended Odessa High decades before and had acted in a number of plays on the auditorium’s stage.

According to legend, she would appear at the windows of the school auditorium at midnight-provided that students flashed their headlights three times or honked their horn and called out her name. When football season ended and there was nothing much to do on Friday nights except drink beer and stare up at the wide-open sky, teenagers used to park their pickups across the street from Odessa High School and wait to see the ghost they called Betty.

Read more here about our archive digitization project. We have left it as it was originally published, without updating, to maintain a clear historical record. Soon there will be no baby - and perhaps no Dorothy either.Ī Kiss before Dying, Levin's first novel, earned him the 1954 Edgar Award for Best First Novel and is regarded as a modern classic.This story is from Texas Monthly ’s archives. So the young man provides his bride to be with some pills that will solve the problem. They are to be married and her life will be blissful but Dorothy is pregnant and her fiancé's plans are ruined, for Dorothy would be disinherited if her father discovered the truth. Ira Levin's award-winning first novel, from the author of Rosemary's Baby and The Stepford Wives.ĭorothy meets a handsome young man with an eye for her inheritance while she is in her sophomore year.

A kiss before dying author