by Gil Reavill
The world shifted. I was badly frightened. To my ten-year-old eyes the light off the river appeared somehow altered, to become lowering, starker, more menacing. When Truman Capote published In Cold Blood two years later, and when I got old enough to read it, I related precisely to the way he described the yellow flare of the flashlights and the blue muzzle-blaze of the shotgun, as they illuminated the deaths of the Clutter family. The light that shows murder shines very strangely, because it is filtered through fear.
On Tuesday evening, the day after the attack, sheriff’s deputies cornered the former mental patient, twenty-one-year-old Terry Caspersen, in a woodlot that was, because this was Wisconsin, near a cheese factory. He was “dirty and bedraggled,” police said, from sleeping the night in the woods. Caspersen, who had spent the year previous in and out of Winnebago State Hospital (aka the Northern Asylum for the Insane), had a rock in his hand when he confronted Deputy John Luebbe.
“What’s that rock for?” Luebbe shouted, drawing his service pistol.
“I want you fellows to kill me,” Caspersen answered. Then he dropped the rock and went meekly.
Caspersen had spent his childhood morbidly shy, so fearful of criticism that he failed third grade after an offhand remark from a teacher devastated him. He became a car thief and a firebug, inserting kerosene-soaked rags beneath the asphalt shingles of houses and lighting them up. In Duluth, where he lived for a period, he burned down seventy buildings, most of them occupied residences, but managed to kill no one.
While in custody, Caspersen heard the jail radio announce the death of Eleanor Kaatz, and the blood drained from his face.
He gave police an account of the killing. He went to Dog Island, he said, in order to end his life. He felt depressed that Monday. Homicide, the shrinks tell us, is misdirected suicide, and Caspersen’s impulses morphed. He concealed himself in the brush beside the bridge. He let an elderly woman trudge by. Then came Kaatz, heading downtown for lunch with a friend. He emerged from the woods and grabbed her.
“I know who you are,” Kaatz said coolly, and in fact the two lived nine blocks away from one another, though Caspersen told police he had never seen Kaatz before. Caspersen herded her ahead of him across the bridge and into the swampy brush of the island. He then tripped her from behind and began to “pound away at her with a knife” in the memorable words of a local newspaper account.
After the frenzied assault, Caspersen left the scene. He then remembered that Kaatz had a transistor radio in her purse and went back for it, but fearing a fingerprint ID tossed both the radio and the murder weapon into the river. He spent the rest of the day making calculated appearances in various parts of town, attempting to establish an alibi. But after a little more than twenty-four hours on the lam (“running,” he called it, although he didn’t run too far), he encountered Deputy Luebbe, and lost their impromptu game of rock-paper-scissors-gun.
A murder occurs down the street from your house. Your brain goes into overdrive, and a hundred images flash through your mind—the blood, the knife, the scene of the crime. A couple of these images get stuck in your head forever.
Why? What makes murder memorable? The most obvious reason is the threat, the fright, the close call, however imaginary. The antelope always remembers the hot breath of the lion. But more broadly, murder is a very big deal. In Star Wars terms, it is a disturbance in the Force, in a way that defines the whole idea of a disturbance in the Force. Why does Hamlet hesitate? Isn’t it obvious? Murder is huge. It isn’t a simple decision. Premeditated killing is enough to make even a moody, broody Dane balk and think twice.
I don’t remember the name of my fourth-grade teacher, a woman I spent almost every day with for nine months when I was ten years old. I don’t remember my birthday party that year, or what presents I got for Christmas. But I remember my first murder, and the image of the girl in the bloody gingham dress sitting by the riverside.
Perhaps it was the evil eye of Ed Gein, or the lingering influence of Terry Caspersen, but when I started writing, I started writing crime. It became, for me, the literary equivalent of worrying a bad tooth. I gravitated toward my fears, which were manifold.
Not until I wrote about the Susan Smith murders in Union, South Carolina, did I grapple directly with how my obsessions might affect others around me, particularly my wife and family. It would be difficult for anyone not around for those days in October 1994 to grasp how completely the Smith saga grabbed the country. Susan Smith murdered her children, allowing her Mazda Protegé to sink into John D. Long Lake with three-year-old Michael and fourteen-month-old Alex strapped to their car seats inside. Then she lied about it, conjuring up a story of an African-American carjacker who stole her Mazda and her babies.
A year after the event, my wife and I helped Susan Smith’s estranged husband, David Smith, Michael and Alex’s father, write a book. We found David to be a straightforward young southerner who had been blindsided by an absolute shit-storm of grief and celebrity. I was convinced that if anything remotely similar happened to me, I would not be able to face it with the kind of forbearance that David Smith demonstrated. In fact, David’s stoic dignity gave me a good feeling about the American character itself. If a South Carolina grocery clerk could hold up that well in a white-hot emotional crucible, then maybe not all was lost.
Doing research for David’s book, we sifted through a storage locker’s worth of letters, mementos, and gifts sent to him from all over the world. They were heartbreaking. Many of them used the tragedy of Michael and Alex to reopen old wounds of the writer’s own. Last July my own daughter drownded…. I made it through and I pray you do too.
“Listen to this,” David said to us one afternoon, while we were interviewing him in his apartment. He slotted a tape into his cassette deck. The quavering voice of an old blues singer came out of the speakers, singing a self-penned murder ballad about Susan, Michael, and Alex.
Oh, the mother, in the darkness
Oh, the mother, in the darkness
With her children by the lake as deep as hell.
“That guy sounds like a million years old,” David said. His tastes ran more to Elton John.
Our daughter was still an infant when we began working with David Smith. We would fly down to Union, spend a few days interviewing him about the horror of infanticide, then fly back home and rush to check on our baby. I felt guilty. Maybe my flirtation with the dark side would somehow bring darkness into our own lives, into the life of my innocent daughter. Who knew what forces could be unleashed? A crime writer ought to be a lone wolf, responsible for no one’s emotional demons but his own.
Or so I quite grandly thought. Where the experience of delving into Union’s seamy underside prompted me to question my own morality, it served to fix the high moral compass of my wife. “That poor guy,” she said repeatedly. “Those poor babies.” Compassion, empathy. These are the only proper confessable responses to the pain and tragedy of others.
In his book of crime scene photographs, Evidence, Luc Sante expressed the compromised status of the crime writer, when he wrote of the photos: “I cannot mitigate the act of disrespect that is implicit in the act of looking at them.” There didn’t seem to be any way of getting around it. Examination of people’s lives in extremis inherently violated the integrity of those lives.
I searched for solid ground in all this. Was I just feeding the milling hordes who waited outside the Union courthouse for a glimpse of Susan Smith in prison orange? Was the voyeur always culpable? If he was, then as a culture we were embarking upon a morally fraught course. Via television we had become a nation of voyeurs, and increasingly, the object of our fascination had drifted from sex to death. The more graphic, the better.
As recently as the nineteen eighties, an obscure cult “shocku-mentary” called Faces of Death marked the far edge of popular entertainment. The video series, serving up real and re-created footage of autopsies, beheadings, and violent death, maintained a furtive profile, marketing itself st
rictly among horror aficionados. Now, of course, the spectacles displayed in Faces of Death have gone mainstream and prime-time, courtesy of CSI and other forensic-oriented programs.
Was the whole culture becoming more and more inured to death? The Moral Compass didn’t think that was exactly the main point. “People used to have a lot more intimate experience with dead people,” my wife, the history writer, told me. “They used to dress their own dead in their own households. So maybe we are just coming back to where we once were.”
In parts of the world, people still dress their dead themselves. And in some other places the ancient intimacy with death and the new technology mesh in gruesome ways. On jihadi videos, a staple of some Islamic communities, executions by the Taliban, beheadings and hangings, are the main draw. Bodiless faces of death.
In the course of working with David Smith, I tried to find my way out of the voyeur-as-perpetrator dilemma. I came to put my faith in the need most people feel to have their stories told. Many times it went beyond a need to an obsession, really. David Smith had solemnly promised Katie Couric on national television that he never wanted to make a penny off the death of his sons. Yet here he was, writing a book. His urge to sift the chaos that had engulfed him and extract meaning from it was just too strong.
I noticed the same urge again and again as I went on to write a series of simple four-thousand-word crime stories for Maxim. Humans are the storytelling animal. During an interview with an incarcerated parricide in an upstate New York county jail, I could not help but conclude that, rationally, this person should not be talking to me or any member of the press. It was not in his best interest to do so. Yet he blathered. He was compelled to do so by an inner urge to extract order from the chaos of his biography. I could feel him searching, as we talked, for some concatenation of words that would give his story shape.
“There is no agony,” said the poet Maya Angelou, “like bearing an untold story inside of you.” It’s an anguish that trumps even deep grief.
Aftermath serves the same function, in a physical sense, that a crime writer serves in the literary sense. Chris and Tim are gatekeepers. They assist in the transfer between two worlds. One world is the crazed, anarchic, abnormal world of violent crime and tragedy. What Aftermath does is take that world and cleanse it of chaos, gradually transferring it back into tamer, more approachable reality.
A crime writer seeks to do the same thing. From the messy, random, loose-strings-untied world of violence, I always try to tease out a narrative. Order from disorder.
A Grateful Dead song called “Ripple” contained lyrics that Tim sometimes quoted in late-night bull sessions in the aftermath of Aftermath, when the physical element of the work was done. “Ripple in still water,” went the simple refrain, “when there is no pebble tossed, nor wind to blow…”
That’s what Chris and Tim think about their jobs, not the rock tossed into the water itself—since by the time they get there the rock has often completely disappeared into the murky depths—but the ripples left behind. Robert Hunter and Jerry Garcia’s song might be about the hand of God passing through our lives. But human hands leave ripples as well. Chris and Tim encounter victims but never see them. They only experience the fact of their absence.
A good metaphor for this is the chalk outline that police sometimes draw (though not as often as TV crime dramas would suggest), silhouetting the position of a homicide victim. Indeed, getting “chalked” is street slang for getting murdered. Aftermath techs never get to meet the living, breathing human. They experience only the outline, the halo, the empty space that the victim’s leaving had left in the world.
From Ed Gein to Terry Caspersen to David Smith and Maxim. And finally my murder biography led me to Aftermath.
The job Greg and Greg took at the end of July that year was one nobody wanted. They arrived at the site, a duplex located just four blocks across the state line in Dyer, Indiana, on a blisteringly hot day. They met a relative who opened the house for them, and entered into a grisly, week-old double murder crime scene. Blood had spilled in both the dining area, off the kitchen, and the carpeted living room. But blood spatter trailed through the whole house, in the family room, kitchen, front hallway, and garage.
The blood spatter, by that time long dried and considerably blackened, served as a mute record of the crime. Greg and Greg could follow as the murderer chased a victim through the house, starting in the garage, through the hallway, into the kitchen. Most disturbingly, four-inch handprints on the dining area cabinet, and somewhat larger ones on the wall of the hallway, indicated the youth of the deceased. The victims were children.
The killer was their mother. Greg and Greg had only unwillingly taken the job because it had already received a lot of play in the press, and because Greg Sundberg had just become a new father.
“The strangest thing about Dyer was that you could play the whole killing in your mind just by following the trail of blood,” Sundberg told me. “It was like you were there.”
“Those fucking handprints,” Banach said. “That’s what got to me.”
By most accounts thirty-year-old Magdalena “Maggie” Lopez doted on her two sons. Erik, a toddler, still wore diapers at age two, but his big brother, Antonio, who was also called Anthony, was about to celebrate his tenth birthday. His father, Robert, and he planned to watch Antonio’s beloved Cubs at Wrigley Field. The two Lopez boys wore matching white cowboy hats as Antonio chased a shrieking Erik around the duplex’s yard.
The Lopez marriage hit rough patches. Maggie had filed for divorce twice, Robert once, but they always reconciled. Police showed up at the house in 2001, summoned by Maggie during a high-decibel argument, but no action was taken after Robert agreed to spend the night away from home. Not totally smooth, but not entirely rocky either. Most of the time the Lopezes appeared to be a happy, well-adjusted family.
A half year after Erik’s birth, in mid-2004, Maggie suffered a miscarriage that triggered a change in her personality. At times she became moody and mercurial. Other times, when she was home alone with the boys, she would retreat to a corner of the living room and sit there, immobile. Erik didn’t understand. He wasn’t old enough to be disturbed by his mother’s strange behavior. Antonio, though, was badly frightened.
At the beginning of 2005 Robert’s mother, Irene, took her daughter-in-law to a series of doctors for tests. Postpartum depression, one said. Another diagnosed bipolar disorder. They wrote prescriptions for psychoactive medications, Prozac and Xyprexa. The drugs seemed to smooth out Maggie’s edges, calming her somewhat.
On the night of Tuesday, July 19, the very thing the drugs were designed to prevent occurred: Maggie experienced a break with reality. She would tell police later that she felt compelled to do what she did, that she could no longer take care of her children and that she needed to send them to a better place.
Grasping a ten-pound free-weight barbell, she attacked Antonio in the garage first. He ran from her, seeking refuge inside the house. She caught him once again in the front hallway, and finally administered a fatal blow as her son collapsed on the living room floor. Then she turned to the baby, howling in the kitchen.
At 10:59 that evening, Maggie placed a call to 911, telling the dispatcher she had harmed her sons. Officers arrived to find her walking barefoot out of the front door of her house, blood on her blouse and slacks.
“I wanted to send them to heaven,” Maggie told detectives. “They needed to be saved. I was sick and couldn’t take care of them anymore.”
Strictly speaking, and although they are commonly used interchangeably, murder and homicide have different meanings. The word homicide makes no judgment, and merely describes the fact of one person killing another. Such an event does not become “murder” until it is judged so in a court of law. A homicide can become many different things in court: manslaughter, justifiable killing (mostly self-defense), negligence. Murder is a legal term that invokes a strict set of conditions, such as premeditation and intent.
The law requires mens rea, a guilty mind, which requirement allows all sorts of judicial mischief. It is why psychologists so often find themselves testifying in court.
There were 806,316 homicides in the U.S. between 1965 and 2004, averaging out to around 20,000 per year. About fifteen percent of reported homicides were deemed by the courts to be something other than murder. The U.S. murder rate—the number of murders per 100,000 people—has undergone a recent decline, attaining levels not seen since the early sixties: 5.5 in 2004, which represents 16,137 total murders. By contrast, England and Wales experienced 1,045 murders in 2002, a number that includes manslaughter and infanticide, for a rate of 1.41 per 100,000 of population.*
At the other end of the spectrum, neither the U.S. nor the UK rate comes anywhere near the predations of the Gebusi tribe of New Guinea. If we can believe the anthropologists, the Gebusi have the highest murder rate on the planet, an astonishing 568 per 100,000. Source of the trouble? Warring over biologically viable females.
Murder is overwhelmingly a male purlieu—men who murder outnumber women who do so by a factor of around nine to one, and murder is the tenth leading cause of death for males. Among young males in some sectors of the inner city populace, it is the leading cause of death.
But we are not alone. Murder is not solely a human endeavor. Researchers in Africa have witnessed chimpanzee murders, with cooperating gangs carrying out preplanned (and thus, premeditated) killing rampages against individual rivals. The favored chimp method is skull crushing, with pulling off the fingers of victims as a preliminary tactic. Infanticide, too, is not unheard of, not only in the chimp world, but in many fiefs of the animal kingdom.