LA GRANDE, Ore. — Ghost stories can cast long shadows in a small town. Locals forget exactly why a certain area once seemed so foreboding, but the old fears linger, dredged up by neighbors and repeated by children who have only a hazy sense of the details.

Residents of La Grande, in eastern Oregon, know this all too well. They’re still haunted by a homicide that happened 42 years ago, known as the Candy Cane Park killing.

A cast of regulars was drinking one Saturday night in February 1983 at a dive called My Wife’s Place. La Grande was — still is — a place where everybody knows everybody, nobody is ever too far from a cousin or a classmate, so people at the bar that night had history. Romances, breakups, feuds. Two of them flirted and then squabbled. Around 3 a.m., after a quick stop at

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