In The Neighborhood

by Peter Lovenheim

  Emily cried, “Don’t! Don’t!”

  Renan backed away.

  He fired three times.

  Bob, perhaps already hearing the sirens of police cars as they raced toward Sandringham, ran back down to the basement.

  Emily ran to the attic to her brother’s room.

  “Daddy shot Mommy!” she cried.

  “No, he didn’t,” said Peter. “He wouldn’t do that!”

  “Yes, he did! We have to go!”

  She meant next door, to the home of an older couple, Jean and Ken DeHaven. Renan once had advised her children that if anything bad happened, they should go to the DeHavens’ and call the police.

  The children came down from Peter’s room, but at the second-floor landing, Peter stopped and went into the bathroom to see if his mother really had been shot. He turned her over, and then he and his sister ran from the house.

  The first police officers to arrive saw two children running down the driveway in pajamas, screaming. They asked what happened.

  “Daddy shot Mommy!” cried Peter. “Mom is dead!”

  It was 10:33 p.m.

  THAT night’s television news reports were sketchy, but the next day’s reports told the rest of the story:

  “When the officers arrived, there was the body of a woman on the second floor of the house dead of a gunshot wound,” said an on-air reporter, “and a male occupant at the foot of the basement stairs also deceased from an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound.”

  The camera showed emergency medical technicians wheeling a body bag on a gurney down the Willses’ driveway to a waiting ambulance.

  “As detectives canvassed the three-story home for clues,” the reporter continued, “the couple’s children were taken care of by next-door neighbors until out-of-town relatives arrived.”

  The relatives were Ertem and Robert Beckman, Renan’s parents. After getting a call, they drove from Point Chautauqua and arrived in Rochester around one in the morning.

  The TV camera then panned across the front of the Willses’ redbrick home, showing the front yard and front door sealed off with yellow police tape.

  “All the commotion on this quiet suburban street,” continued the reporter, “lured neighbors outside to find out what happened.”

  They showed a blond woman, identified as a Sandringham neighbor—I’d never seen her before—standing on the front lawn of her house.

  “In the summer they’d be jogging together,” said the neighbor, speaking of Renan and Bob. “They just seemed so—everything seemed fine. It just goes to show, you never know what’s happening in someone else’s life.”

  MANY Sandringham residents responded generously after the shootings. The DeHavens, the couple next door to whom Emily and Peter had run that night, sheltered not only the children but also Renan’s parents. Renan’s two brothers, Peter and Orhan, and their wives, Kendall and Marcia, stayed with the Arringtons, the neighbors on the other side. Both neighbors, older couples without children at home, housed Renan’s family for a week or more. A woman active in the neighborhood association coordinated meals prepared by volunteers.

  The first time I met Ertem Beckman and her husband, Robert, was a couple of days after Renan’s murder, when Marie and I made a condolence call at the DeHavens’. The Beckmans sat next to each other on a sofa. Both seemed weighted by a burden so heavy that even if they had wanted to stand, they couldn’t. I introduced myself, said how sorry I was, but then couldn’t think of much else to say; I hadn’t, after all, known their daughter well.

  At that time, my marriage was strained, so Marie and I went separately to the Willses’ funerals; she went to Renan’s and I went to Bob’s. I chose Bob’s, as I recall, not only out of some strange sense of gender loyalty, but because I figured a lot of people would show up for Renan’s but few for his, and anyway, I was curious what would be said at the funeral of a man who had killed his wife and then himself. As it turned out, a lot of people went to Bob’s; maybe everyone was curious. The eulogies focused on Bob’s youth and professional life, and his love for his children; little was said about his marriage and nothing about its ending. Emily was there, surrounded by school friends. She told a relative she decided to go because she didn’t want people to think she didn’t love her father. Her parents, I thought, must have done something right to raise a child who could say that at such a tough moment.

  IT was a year or two later when Ayesha Mayadas invited me to her and her husband, Bill Kenny’s, home. They lived in the city, a ten- or fifteen- minute drive from Sandringham Road. When I arrived, it was late afternoon.

  In the kitchen, Ayesha poured us Indian tea. Born in Calcutta, Ayesha emigrated to the United States with her family in her teens. Now in her forties, she was a petite, attractive woman with wavy, salt-and-pepper hair.

  As we carried our tea into the dining room, I noticed two answering machines, side by side. To my question of why she had two, Ayesha said one was the one they currently used and the other was the one that recorded Renan’s messages the night she was killed. “I don’t know what to do with it,” she said in her clipped, British-Indian accent.

  With Ayesha’s permission, I approached the old machine and pushed the “play” button. We both remained standing.

  “You have three new messages,” said a prerecorded female voice. “First new message: ‘Hi, Ayesha. It’s Renan.’” Ayesha backed away from the machine. Renan’s voice was low-pitched, firm, and calm. The message continued. “It’s early. I guess you guys are already out, though. My battery’s dead. I think Bob ran it down or something. I don’t know if he’ll help me start it. Maybe he will, though. Here he comes.”

  Ayesha and I stood without speaking as the machine played the other two messages. When they were over, for a few moments neither of us spoke. Could she remember how she’d felt, I asked, when she first heard those messages?

  “I sensed Renan having a frantic need to get hold of me,” she said, recalling that she’d been out of town that day on business. Ayesha came home in mid-evening to find the light on the answering machine flashing. “She must have felt so isolated, just frantically trying to reach me. I sensed something was up, but I still had no idea to what extent—that Bob would be capable of that degree of violence.”

  Ayesha called Renan back and was able to speak to her, and sensed that her friend was panicked. Then around 11:30 p.m., another friend called to say there’d been a story on the TV news about “something going on on Sandringham.”

  “We drove there,” recalled Ayesha, “parked at the end of the street, and tried to walk up to the house, but the police wouldn’t let us pass. Bill asked. ‘Is anybody dead?’ But the officer wouldn’t say anything. We asked if the problem was at number fifty- two. We told him we knew the family and there were kids in the house, but he still wouldn’t give us any details. Finally, Bill got hold of a captain and told our story and they asked us to come to the police station.”

  The police put Ayesha and Bill in separate rooms and asked them both to give sworn statements. In their accounts, they described the history of their relationship with Bob and Renan Wills. Later, they filled in some of the details for me.

  Ayesha and Renan had met at a private tennis club in Brighton where both had taken up the game, in part as an outlet from shaky marriages. “There were a lot of women in their early to mid-forties going through relationship issues,” she explained. “It was a big escape.” Later the husbands met, and the four got on well. They went out often, each couple aware of the other’s marital problems and trying to be of help. They went to restaurants, museum openings, and parties. In the summers they dined at the Willses’ home and swam in their backyard pool. Once, they all went to a charity ball: Bob Wills rented a limo for the evening; the men wore black tie, the women wore gowns.

  Ayesha’s husband, Bill, later recalled, “Renan could seem at times a little awkward socially, sort of stiff with forced smiles and laughs. It was awkward, but kind of charming, too. I mean, you’re
an MD, you’re studying your whole life, so where’s the time to learn to socialize? Bob, on the other hand, was really a hyper guy. You’d be talking and he’d sit a little too close and look you right in the eye and repeat what you’d just said. He had this constant intensity; he’d never quite chill out—and he was aware of it, too. Once we went hiking at his family’s condo in Vail—just him and me—and he said to me, ‘Spending three or four days with me—I got to hand it to you, because I’m a hard guy to be around.’”

  At around 3 a.m. in the police station, an officer brought Ayesha and Bill together and told them what had happened. “An officer reached over and grabbed my hand,” remembered Ayesha. “He said the kids were okay and at a neighbor’s. Then we just went home.”

  Later, after the funerals, Ertem Beckman gave some of Renan’s dresses and tennis outfits to Ayesha, and the rest to Goodwill. As we sat at the dining room table with our tea, I asked Ayesha if she still had any of Renan’s clothes. She excused herself to go upstairs and a couple of minutes later came down carrying a sweater and two dresses on hangers. She said she had more of Renan’s clothes upstairs, including the tennis dresses.

  Before laying the clothes on the table, Ayesha pressed them to her face. “They still smell of Renan—perfume-y,” she said. There was a sweater Ayesha said she’d worn twice, and two dresses, which she hadn’t worn at all. “I can’t throw them out, though. They’re like the answering machine; I don’t know what to do with them.”

  We talked some more, and eventually I put to Ayesha the question I had been wondering about: if Renan had had a close friend in the neighborhood, might she have found shelter that night?

  “It’s possible, yes,” she said, “although that person might have been put at risk. But I didn’t get the sense she knew anyone in the neighborhood.” Ayesha referred to the many times she had been to Renan’s house, especially in the summer at their backyard pool. “I never saw any neighbors. I don’t think she knew anyone much beyond saying ‘hello.’ As far as I could tell, the relationship of Renan and the neighbors was nothing, it was nonexistent.”

  THOUGH Sandra Arrington had lived on Sandringham Road for twenty-eight years and I for ten, we’d never met. So when we did meet, as planned, one afternoon at a bookstore café, our initial hello was tentative as we made sure we were both indeed meeting the right person.

  I wanted to talk with Sandra because she and her husband had been Renan and Bob Wills’s next-door neighbors.

  At sixty, Sandra was a slender woman with brown curly hair. She told me she hadn’t been close to the Willses, had known them only “in passing.” When the Willses had moved in next door, she recalled, she had “tried to initiate conversation” with Renan, but didn’t sense any inclination on Renan’s part “to know us as neighbors.”

  “I say that as an observation, not a judgment,” she said.

  Sipping coffee, she continued, “I’m a friendly person, but if I don’t get an overly warm reception, it remains a “hi-bye” relationship. Anyway, when Renan told me she was an MD, I began making assumptions about how busy she was.”

  Nevertheless, from her kitchen, which faced the Willses’ garage, Sandra became familiar with their schedules. “When Renan or Bob left the house, I’d see their cars going in and out. I knew the rhythm of their lives.” Sometimes she’d see Bob and Renan out in front, near where a tall hedge separated the two houses. “Renan was always complimenting Bob about the hedge he took care of,” she recalled. “ ‘ Nice job on the hedges, honey!’ It seemed excessive when I overhead it.” She also could see them in the back, at their pool. “We knew they spent a lot of time in their pool,” she recalled. “On the weekends, it seemed like they were in the pool morning till night.”

  I asked Sandra if she had seen the police car at the Willses’ house on the night several weeks before the murder when Bob threatened suicide and Renan called 911. She said she had not.

  On the day of the murder, however, she did see something: “Between four and five p.m., I saw Bob race out of his driveway. The speed was unbelievable. A red flag went up for me; I thought something was wrong.”

  That would have been about the time Renan, who earlier that afternoon had picked up Emily and Peter from school, was at her lawyer’s office. Apparently, Bob had stopped home while she was out.

  Later that night, Sandra saw the aftermath of the shootings.

  “I looked out the window,” she recalled, “and saw lots of lights [and] fire trucks, and called my husband to look out with me. Later, we saw the body bags go out.”

  I asked how, after the shootings, she and her husband had decided so generously to open their home to Renan’s family. “When somebody dies,” she said, “you tend to feel helpless. There’s only so many things you can do. We have a large house”—the Arringtons’ three children were grown and living on their own—“and we consider ourselves hospitable, so when the family began to arrive, it seemed natural to offer them a place to stay.”

  As it turned out, Sandra Arrington would also have another role to play.

  In midlife, Sandra had made the decision to enter the clergy. Though raised a Catholic, she eventually found her way to the Episcopal Church and, at the time of the shootings, was Senior Associate Rector at a church in Rochester—the same church, coincidentally, to which the Willses belonged. “They were parishioners,” she said, “although what I would call ‘marginal’ members—they only came at Christmas—so I didn’t know them as members of the church.”

  Sandra conducted the memorial service for Renan; the pastor later conducted Bob’s.

  Though by that time she had six years’ experience in the clergy, Sandra had never officiated at a service following a homicide. The Book of Common Prayer, she found, had two services, but “they in no way addressed a murder.” Given also that Renan’s mother, Ertem Beckman, was nominally a Muslim, Sandra decided to look elsewhere for a text. It was in a prayer book from New Zealand that she found what she considered an appropriate liturgy: rites and rituals for a “hard” death.

  I wondered, if she were to give a sermon on neighborliness, what would she say?

  “Well,” she began, “it means to be responsible for each other. You have to say, ‘You’re my neighbor and I’ll do anything to help you,’ not just in times of crisis, but every day, and to affirmatively offer that help. And you have to reach out to know your neighbor, to know the rhythm of your neighbor’s life enough to know when something is wrong.”

  She paused, and then added, “However, I’m not sure these days many people are interested in knowing another person that well.”

  Sandra’s comment, coming as it did in the bookstore café, reminded me of something I’d been hearing lately from a number of people: that public space today has largely been privatized. That is, private commercial spaces, like video stores, supermarkets, and chain bookstores are the new “public spaces,” and if you want to meet people, that’s where you tend to go.

  Yet looking around the café that day, I couldn’t help but think that if that was the new public space, it was—at least in one important respect—a weak substitute for the neighborhood park, commons, or corner store of old. True, seated nearby were a dozen or more people reading, talking, or working on computers, and some of them seemed interesting enough. Were I bold enough to strike up a conversation, the best outcome might be a new friend. But that new friend was unlikely to be a neighbor—not in the way Sandra had defined it: a relationship of reciprocal responsibility based on physical closeness and the potential need for mutual aid. Making a new friend at a bookstore—remote as that possibility actually was—would not create the kind of close- at-hand support nor the pleasure of casual, daily social contact that only a neighbor can provide. And as for Sandra’s question about whether “people are interested in knowing another person that well” these days, the irony was that if anyone here in the chain bookstore was likely ever to “know me” in a meaningful sense, it was the store itself. Through its record of my p
urchases on its store discount card, the chain knew more about me, what books I read, what music I listened to, even what beverages and cakes I liked—indeed, even the “rhythm of my comings and goings”—than any actual person I was likely to meet there.

  Before we finished, I had one more question for Sandra: Despite everything she and her husband had done after-the-fact, did she feel any opportunities had been missed in dealing with the Willses’ situation?

  “No,” she said. “I don’t feel that I missed an opportunity. It was a classic case of people being secret. We had no idea what went on inside their home. But when the opportunity presented itself, I think I played my role.

  “Now,” she continued, “if you’re asking had Renan known anyone better, could she have run over to them? Yes, things would have been different. If she’d called me and said, ‘Bob’s going off his rocker and I need a place to go to,’ then of course I would have taken her and the kids in. She might have gone to the DeHavens’, too. It’s obvious it all could have been prevented. If she’d come over and said, ‘I’m afraid,’ I would have said, ‘Stay here.’ I might have insisted.”

  JEAN DeHaven and her husband, Ken, were in the early stages of cleaning out their house when later I came to visit. Empty nesters, they would soon be leaving Sandringham to move to a town house. Framed family photos and paintings were stacked near the front door, although many others—including oil portraits of their son and daughter—still hung on the wall over the main stairway.

  Jean sat in the living room on a plain sofa that she said had been the first purchase she and her husband had made nearly thirty years ago when they married. She was dressed casually, and her hair, short and graying, fell to the top of her wire- rim eyeglasses. Her unpretentiousness distinguished her from many of the women on Sandringham. Perhaps it reflected her upbringing in southern Ohio, where she grew up on a farm.