Newtown: An American Tragedy

by Matthew Lysiak

  “He’s fine,” she said reassuringly. “Just so long as he has his computer and his video games, he can keep himself occupied.”

  In 2012, Nancy Lanza also learned that her father had a secret life in Ohio and that she had a half sister she had previously not known about. On October 6, 2012, she emailed her sister-in-law Marsha Lanza about recently reconnecting with a long-lost family member, Cheryl.

  “I discovered I have a half sister in Ohio, so I have to get there to meet her soon!”

  “Ha! Yes, indeed . . . definitely part gypsy.”

  “Yah . . . that’s what I thought too but apparently my father was married previously and actually lived in Ohio . . . secret life and all. Weird. Cincinnati . . . Story TOO long to text off my little I Phone . . . But yes, life is funny and strange.

  “Lies people tell and try to live in those lies. Sad. She seems nice and I would like to meet her. I feel sorry that my parents turned their backs on her at such a young age. No one is talking so I don’t know the real story.

  “As for Cheryl . . . she had no clue what happened. Her mother is dead, our father is dead, and my mother won’t say. It’s a mystery. We will never have answers . . . just have to deal with what is.

  “Ryan works in Manhattan . . . Adam still at home. Yes, they do grow up too fast. I am off to bed . . . SO good to hear from you. Let’s keep in touch! Maybe I can visit you when I visit my sister . . . I’ll be halfway there.”

  The last communication from Marsha to Nancy came on December 14, 2012, when she sent one last message that was never returned. “Hi Nancy, Just checking in to see if you are OK and what you might know about the school shooting. Isn’t this the town you live in? not sure. Drop me a line when you get a chance. My prayers go out to all.”

  The second week of December 2012, Nancy dropped by My Place Pizza & Restaurant, and Dennis Durant greeted her with a beer and chatted with her for half an hour or so, as they did two to three days a week. She was her usual bubbly self; there wasn’t the slightest indication that anything could be wrong until halfway through her third draft.

  “I don’t know what else I can do for him,” she confided to Durant. “I’m running out of answers.”

  Nancy did not have to say “his” name. Adam was sick and getting sicker. Her twenty-year-old son had been acting out more over the past few months, throwing temper tantrums triggered by the mere mention of the future. Any break from his routine made him hysterical. He would often stomp and scream, and then not speak to her for days.

  Over the years Nancy had grown to accept such episodes. She could deal with temper tantrums. But as she sipped her beer, she told Durant it was the severe bouts of isolation coupled with a growing obsession with the military that had her worried.

  As a kid, Adam hoped to follow in the footsteps of his uncle James, a Green Beret, and join the military. He admired his uncle, often telling family members when he was little, “I’m going to be just like Uncle Jim.” At first Nancy encouraged Adam’s desire to follow in his uncle’s footsteps, thinking the discipline of the armed forces would give him structure and help channel his nervous energy. Yet she soon realized that the deteriorating state of his mental health would adversely affect his future plans.

  Nancy had always looked up to her brother, too. “I don’t know if there is a name for the kind of training the Green Berets get . . . they are simply trained to kill,” Nancy emailed a friend back in the late 1990s. “He taught me two moves that even someone my size can use . . . although I have never had the chance to test them, I am sure they are effective.”

  Nancy had been the victim of a physical assault in the early 1980s on the Boston Common and the incident had shaken her to her core. The physical confrontation happened in broad daylight and in front of onlookers and she had feared her attacker would follow her back to Kingston and victimize her again at home.

  “Nancy was nervous about that. She felt that her life was in danger,” an official from the Kingston Police Department recalled.

  While the self-defense lessons from her brother were helpful, in another email she wrote, “I really miss having my brother right next to me. I always felt so safe that way. No one messes with you if your brother is a cop . . . I never fully appreciated how wonderful that was.” As much as Nancy enjoyed her firearms for recreational use, without her brother around they also gave her a much-needed sense of security. Over the years she amassed an impressive collection of weaponry, including eleven knives, a starter pistol, a bayonet, three samurai swords, several firearms, and more than 1,600 rounds of ammunition.

  Adam had at least four of his own guns that he’d picked out himself after researching them online and that he kept in a safe in his bedroom upstairs. Nancy told Durant that she exposed him to the firearms as a way to help him learn responsibility. Durant later said she shouldered the blame for her son’s obsession. Target shooting and their mutual love of firearms had given her a way to connect with her children, especially Adam.

  Nancy recalled a conversation she’d had with her son just a few weeks earlier when telling Durant about Adam’s medical conditions crushing his dream of joining the armed forces: “I told Adam, in as gentle terms as possible, that he will never be a marine, that he’s just not cut out for it and that life has something different planned for him. How can you be a marine if you won’t let people touch you?”

  But Adam took the news harder than even his mother expected. Instead of exploring other options for his future, he became more and more obsessed with the military. The basement, which Nancy had remodeled into a game room for Adam, now looked more like a military compound. Nearly every inch of the Sheetrock walls were covered with posters of weaponry and old tanks from World War II. Pictures of submarines, military equipment, and depictions of battle were proudly displayed.

  In another room of the house, which she had originally designated as a space for exercise, Adam, often dressed from head to toe in military garb, had created an indoor shooting range where he used his pellet gun to shoot at paper and cardboard targets he had set up on a clothesline.

  Nancy also told Durant about Adam’s other obsession with violent video games. He would sit in front of the screen for hours, “zoned out,” she explained. On the rare occasion that she watched him play, Nancy said she found the images downright disturbing. She told Durant she had begun to notice that lately her son rarely ventured outside his compound. “He’s like a zombie in front of the screen,” she said, noting that Adam sometimes sat playing the game well into the night and slept most of the day. He had no friends, and now, no future ambitions. His life revolved increasingly around the game of war.

  He owned a Sony PlayStation 2, an X-Box 360, and hundreds of games, most of them war games that he had meticulously lined up in alphabetical order against his wall. He spent his waking hours acting out fantasies he learned from the violent video games. Nancy told Durant she was baffled by her normally restless son’s unwavering focus on the screen.

  Still, she noticed that the increasing amount of time Adam spent playing violent video games coincided with his growing aversion for affection. He had always hated human touch, but Nancy had been the exception. Now when she reached for him, Adam physically recoiled. Nancy was worried and wanted answers. She had recently decided to take a peek inside his upstairs bedroom.

  After a few minutes of searching, she found a disturbing number of drawings stashed underneath Adam’s nightstand. Most were pictures of guns, “normal teenage boy crap,” she called it. But other sketches were gruesome depictions of death, images of mutilated corpses. One drawing she described was of a bloodied woman clutching a rosary as bullets ripped through her spine. Another sketch depicted a large rolling grassy field lined with the corpses of young children. In the drawing, the faces of the children were severely mutilated and couldn’t be recognized. One sketch appeared to be a self-portrait of a younger Adam with blood gushing from a large hole in his forehead and his arms stretched upward to the sky in a posture
of triumph.

  Adam had found several more graphic images online, printed them out, and kept them in a manila folder. Like his sketches, most depicted death.

  One of the pictures showed a gunman dressed all in black taking aim at a man on his knees. The man appeared to be begging for his life in the clearing of a forest with the gunman’s rifle pointed at his head. The two were surrounded by dozens of dead bodies covered in blood.

  The picture that disturbed Nancy the most showed a naked woman covered in transparent plastic wrap. Her hands were bound behind her back and her face had been contorted to give her the appearance of a smile. Lipstick had been sloppily painted on her face.

  “It gives me the chills to even think about it,” she told Durant.

  Nancy had always respected her son’s space and she felt conflicted about going through his personal belongings but was horrified by the discovery. Durant said she decided it was best for the time being not to approach Adam about the images. She feared he might further shut her out if he discovered this breach of his space.

  “That would be it. He would never get over it if he knew I went through his things,” she told Durant. “He would be lost forever.”

  Nancy expressed hope that a change of scenery might help him. She told friends she was preparing to move with Adam to Washington state and had already started looking into colleges in the Northwest. Perhaps he could channel his passion for the armed forces into a degree in military history, she said. At first Adam seemed receptive, even scrolling through online college catalogs with her. But in the last few days he had become unresponsive to the idea and had “shut down.”

  She had researched his condition and read several books in the hope of understanding how to help. Switching doctors, medications, and his schools had all failed. Nancy now felt as if she was running out of options.

  “It’s as if he’s stuck so far deep down inside himself that he has lost touch with the world,” she explained. “I’m worried I’ve lost him.”

  Her cell phone rang. Nancy excused herself to take the call. Durant overheard her rambling on to a friend about an upcoming antiques show. No, she would not be going; she would be out of town. The conversation had lasted less than ten minutes before she casually put her phone away and returned to the table. Then, just like that, Nancy Lanza was back to her normal, bubbly self. She smiled reassuringly. “Sorry to be a buzz kill. I’m sure everything will be fine. Really.”

  Durant tried to reassure Nancy that everything with Adam would be all right. It was no use. Nancy wasn’t looking for advice. She just wanted to vent. He sensed that there was more she wanted to say, but he thought, Another time. She looked exhausted. Tonight was not the night.

  The stress over Adam’s increasingly odd behavior had evidently been taking its toll on Nancy’s physical health. She was suffering from debilitating migraines, throbbing joint pain, and insomnia from the incessant worrying. Before she left My Place that evening, she confided in Durant that Adam wasn’t the only one who was sick. Nancy had recently found out that she had an incurable autoimmune disease and if she didn’t find a way to relax, her health would wane. He was taken aback. At the age of fifty-two, Nancy appeared the perfect picture of health.

  Before parting ways in the parking lot that night, Nancy mentioned to Durant that she had booked two nights at a luxury spa resort in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire. She said she needed the rest. “I’ll be back Wednesday night sometime,” Nancy said as she walked toward her car. “Let’s talk Thursday.”

  “I need a change of scenery, I think we both do,” Nancy texted a friend on December 10, 2012, right before her trip to the spa, referring to herself and Adam. “We can all use a good cleansing of mind and soul from time to time!”

  This change of scenery would be Nancy’s second trip away from home in the past month, and her fourteenth that year. She had tried to get Adam to join her on these getaways before, but it was always a struggle. So she was not surprised when he turned down yet another opportunity to leave town.

  When asked earlier that year by a friend if her son would be going with her when she went to New Orleans to see a concert, “No,” she replied, “Adam doesn’t like to go anywhere.”

  Eventually, Nancy stopped asking. But she desperately needed the steady stream of vacations for her own sanity and well-being. Not only that, but she was concerned about how much time she had left before her illness would limit her mobility. Nancy believed she had multiple sclerosis.

  Nancy first noticed symptoms of MS in the late 1990s. In an email thread dating back to late 1999, she first revealed her grave health fears to a friend: “I am carrying the gene for this type of self-destruct,” she wrote. “My diagnosis was not good. I was going under the premise that I had a limited time left . . . about enough to get the boys settled in . . . At one point I was trying to deal with the time frame of about 12 months.”

  In another email from the same time period, she wrote: “They found another lesion on my brain. I just spent the last two weeks having tests . . . some excruciatingly painful. Any hope I had that things were going to be OK or that I could be in any kind of a permanent remission are gone. There is this mad scurry to find out if anything can be done. I look at my boys and think about what will happen to them. I have put on this big brave face to my family, but I am terrified.”

  But the diagnosis hardly seemed to slow Nancy down. She appeared to be full of energy and rarely complained about her health. Most of her friends and family continued to believe she was the picture of health.

  But in December 2012, she wrote another dramatic email about her deteriorating health to a close friend: “I’ve been living with a ticking time bomb inside of me for several years now and I fear it is about to go off. My grandfather suffered from the same condition. It wasn’t pretty. It comes on very sudden and when it does there is nothing left to do.”

  MS was taking its toll on Nancy’s body as much as Adam’s condition was taking a toll on her mind. She hoped a few days’ respite at the luxury Omni Mount Washington Resort would provide precisely the temporary relief she needed before Christmas. She checked into the New Hampshire hotel on Tuesday, December 11, at 12:10 P.M. and headed straight for the 25,000-square-foot spa room, purchasing a $450 deluxe package that included a manicure, a fifty-minute facial, a fifty-minute body treatment, and a fifty-minute massage.

  Between the scent of aromatic candles and the scenic views of the White Mountain National Forest, Nancy finally found some peace. When a friend inquired as to how her trip was going, she messaged back with one word: “heavenly.”

  After spending the day in the spa, Nancy ate dinner in the hotel’s restaurant with its menu chockful of New England “farm to plate specialties.” Clearly enjoying her brief getaway, she sent a message to a friend on Facebook from the restaurant, describing the finely dressed tattooed couple sitting nearby.

  “A shimmery evening dress looks less formal with daggers and skulls poking out,” Nancy quipped, always one to invoke a bit of humor when the opportunity presented itself.

  “Be forewarned,” she added. “Tattoo girl has talked me into a dragon tattoo.”

  Later that night she called home to check on Adam. As she expected, he did not answer. She probably figured he was in the basement playing video games as usual. When he was gaming, Adam was in his own world and wouldn’t pick up the phone, answer the door, or even take his eyes off the screen in front of him.

  It didn’t matter. She would be home the next day.

  At 12:27 P.M. on Thursday, December 13, Nancy checked out of the Omni and began the five-hour trek back to Newtown. Normally she arrived home from trips to find the house virtually unchanged. Rarely was there even a dirty plate in the sink. The only real sign of life in the house would be a pile of soiled clothes in the hamper.

  “Adam is like a ghost,” she once told Durant. “He doesn’t even leave footprints.”

  In a message to a friend in September 2012, Nancy had mentioned an ominous
dream that now reads like more of a premonition. It began with her outside with her son enjoying a flawless blue-sky day when suddenly the clouds grew dark and a large gust of wind began lifting Adam up into the sky.

  “All of a sudden he was being lifted up into the air and I was grabbing on to his ankles with both hands trying to keep him connected to the ground, but the harder I pulled the harder the wind kept blowing him away from me,” she wrote. “Suddenly I couldn’t hold on anymore and he lifted up into the sky. I stood there helplessly and watched as he got smaller and smaller.”

  She felt hopeless. Her whole life, Nancy had always felt the pressure to protect her son against the world, but in recent months her life’s work, raising her son, felt like a lost cause.

  “Sometimes I feel like I’m the only thing that anchors him to reality and without me he would be gone, gone gone.”

  CHAPTER 7

  THE PUBLIC SERVANTS

  It was a typical Friday morning on Primrose Street. As December 14 kicked into gear, the smell of coffee wafted through the spacious hallways of the Newtown Town Hall and the offices bustled with the sound of small-town government hard at work.

  Situated in a large majestic building that was formerly Bridgeport Hall, part of Fairfield Hills State Hospital, the town hall had become a one-stop gathering place for locals to pay bills, apply for permits, and visit their highest-ranking public official, Newtown First Selectman Patricia Llodra.

  It had been a long winding path that had turned the seventy-one-year-old grandmother into one of the most prominent public figures in Newtown. Growing up with seven siblings at her family farm in South Hadley, Massachusetts, Patricia first became interested in civic duty when she went traveling during the summers of 1958 and 1959. In Jackson, Michigan, she worked beside her uncle, Carl M. Saunders, who was editor of the town’s local newspaper, the Jackson Citizen Patriot.