When Deirdre or I talk to other parents about the high school keg culture, we cite one possible outcome of letting your kid drink in the woods that's almost guaranteed to make people look at us as if we were Mr. & Mrs. Chicken Little incarnate.

Rape? Violence? Murder? C'mon. Maybe it will happen somewhere else once in a blue moon, but not to my kid, not around here. Our kids are smart enough to take care of each other. Besides, my child only goes for the socialization; she isn't a drinker.

It happens all too frequently, of course — here, there and everywhere. When I saw that a recent study out of Wales found that children between 11 and 16 who drank were not only more likely to be aggressive but also to be hit themselves, it seemed to me that research had once again confirmed common sense. Most of the violence ends with a bloody nose or a bruised ego, of course, but there's no telling when things will get out of control.

One particularly chilling example surfaced recently in a town a half-hour north of us. A man who was convicted of killing a 15-year-old girl in 1989 based on an evidently coerced confession was released from prison after another man's DNA was matched to semen found on the body.

Steven Cunningham was already serving a term for the murder of another women four years later. Confronted with the evidence, he confessed to the first rape and strangulation, saying, "Today, I'm a person that looks back on his life and sees how he ruined it, ruined other people's lives — destroyed them actually — tore them up, all because he wanted to enjoy a toke or smoke cocaine. Addiction to drugs is vicious. It's definitely a Dr. Jekyll-Mr. Hyde type of thing."

According the the Journal News report, Cunningham, then 29, was getting high at "The Pit," a popular hangout in the woods when he saw the young women for the first time. He said they talked for more than 20 minutes, and she said she was 21. The Journal News reporter writes:

There's a video of Cunningham's jailhouse confession on the Journal News site. I can't bring myself to watch it.