CHARACTER
The Life we Buryby Allen Eskens

Crystal Marie Hagen

Crystal Marie Hagen Character Analysis

Quick Facts

  • Role: Fourteen-year-old murder victim whose cold case anchors the novel’s mystery and moral core
  • First appearance: Freshman yearbook photo and posthumous diary entries
  • Key relationships: Stepbrother Dan “DJ” Lockwood; stepfather Douglas Lockwood; boyfriend Andrew Fisher; neighbor Carl Iverson; mother Danielle Hagen
  • Narrative connection: Her case is reopened when college student Joe Talbert investigates the man convicted of her murder

Who They Are

At once vivid and distant, Crystal Marie Hagen exists for readers as a haunting absence made present through photos, memories, and a coded diary. Her smiling school portrait—blonde hair feathered, eyes bright with mischief—collides with the brutality of autopsy images, making her the novel’s stark emblem of innocence imperiled. Crystal’s hidden life is the “life we bury”: a past suppressed by shame, family hypocrisy, and the town’s eagerness to believe a convenient story. Unearthing the truth transforms other characters and drives the book’s twin preoccupations with Truth, Lies, and Buried Pasts and Guilt and Redemption.

Personality & Traits

Crystal’s voice, preserved in a diary, reveals a teenager in motion—first buoyant, then cornered, and finally courageous. The tonal swing in her entries charts how external pressures redraw an identity: from cheer practice and crushes to code, fear, and resolve. Her private reckoning becomes a counter-narrative to the public myths built about her.

  • Vivacious, ordinary, and hopeful: Early entries pulse with freshman-year excitement—cheerleading, friends, and a new boyfriend (Andrew). Her yearbook photo reinforces the glow of early adolescence.
  • Fearful and secretive: After she and Andy crash her stepfather’s car, she hides the mistake and becomes trapped by escalating blackmail. She records her trauma in a code only she understands, a child’s attempt to seize control where none exists.
  • Perceptive yet fallible: She dubs her neighbor “Creepy Carl” in a snap judgment that the prosecution later weaponizes. The diary captures a teen’s misread of adult behavior—and how easily adults exploit that misread.
  • Resilient and brave: A meeting with her school counselor reframes her experience as rape, not guilt. Her final entry resolves to end the abuse, a decisive turn from secrecy to action despite mortal risk.

Character Journey

Crystal’s arc is reconstructed from fragments: a lively freshman’s single reckless joyride detonates into coercion and assault when her stepbrother learns of the crash. Her diary darkens as intimidation becomes routine; code replaces open confession. A counselor finally gives her language and law for what’s been done to her, restoring a sense of agency. She chooses confrontation—an act of moral clarity that costs her life but eventually releases another captive of the same lies, Carl. Decades later, the truth she tried to speak becomes the catalyst for accountability in her family, exoneration for Carl, and growth for Joe, who learns that facing one buried past can expose and heal others.

Key Relationships

  • Dan “DJ” Lockwood: Crystal’s stepbrother is the diary’s “DJ,” the predator who discovers the car crash and turns it into leverage for repeated assaults. Crystal’s decision to confront him is a bid to reclaim her narrative; his murder of her is a brutal assertion of control—and the crime buried beneath a false conviction.

  • Douglas Lockwood: A rigid, performatively religious stepfather who becomes a natural suspect. While not the rapist, he enables the true one: he lies, covers for Dan, and lets a neighbor carry the blame. His complicity shows how image and authority can shield abusers and silence victims.

  • Andrew Fisher: Her boyfriend embodies the ordinary adolescence Crystal deserved. Their crashed joyride plants the lens that exposes her secret; Andy’s silence is a different kind of failure—cowardice born of fear—that haunts him for decades and props up the wrongful narrative about Carl.

  • Carl Iverson: The neighbor Crystal calls “Creepy Carl” becomes the prosecution’s convenient monster. Her offhand diary line helps recast a dying veteran into a community scapegoat. Crystal’s true story—once decoded—becomes the key to freeing the man her misperception inadvertently helped condemn.

  • Danielle Hagen: A grieving mother portrayed as unaware of abuse in her own home. Danielle’s distance underscores the novel’s critique of domestic blind spots: love that looks, but does not see.

Defining Moments

Crystal’s life is marked by pivots where choice and chance collide. Each moment reframes her from “perfect victim” or “reckless teen” into a complex girl navigating terror with flashes of defiance.

  • The GTO car crash

    • What happens: Crystal and Andy joyride in her stepfather’s GTO and crash it, leaving behind a lens from her glasses.
    • Why it matters: The overlooked lens becomes the hook for blackmail—proof that chains her to her abuser and sets the tragedy in motion.

  • The coded diary

    • What happens: Crystal records abuse and fear in a private cipher. Years later, Joe, Lila Nash, and Jeremy Talbert decipher it.
    • Why it matters: The code protects Crystal in life and vindicates her in death, revealing “DJ” as Dan and collapsing the fabrication used to convict Carl.

  • The conversation with Mrs. Tate

    • What happens: A school counselor names the abuse as rape and explains Crystal’s legal power.
    • Why it matters: Language unlocks agency. Crystal moves from isolation to intent—she decides to end it.

  • The confrontation and murder

    • What happens: Crystal confronts Dan. He strangles her and burns her body in Carl’s shed to destroy evidence.
    • Why it matters: The murder completes the cover-up and frames an innocent man, entombing the truth for thirty years until her words surface.

Essential Quotes

It stops today. I am so happy.

Her final diary entry is both victory and dirge: it captures the moment she claims her life back and foreshadows the lethal retaliation that follows. The simple, declarative joy makes her death feel not inevitable but stolen at the threshold of change.

I was practicing in the back yard and saw Creepy Carl watching me from his window. I flipped him off and he just stood there. What a pervo.

This teenage snap judgment becomes evidentiary gold for the prosecution. The line illustrates how a private, immature read of an adult can be ripped from context and used to paper over investigative gaps and implicit biases.

Last year, Crystal Hagen was a happy, vivacious, fourteen-year-old girl, a beautiful child, loved by her family and excited to be on the cheerleading squad at Edison High School.

The prosecutor’s portrait constructs a sainted victim to amplify outrage and secure a conviction—while flattening Crystal into a symbol. The novel then complicates that image, insisting on Crystal’s full, messy humanity and the hard truth of what really happened to her.