Something Love Can’t Conquer: Murder

His name was John and he was very big, long-legged and tall, and that’s what you would probably remember about him if you didn’t know him. He took up doorways, blocked out views.

He reminded me of that actor who, years ago, used a Caribbean accent to pitch the UnCola, 7-Up, on the tube.

I felt blessed for knowing John. He was a gentleman in the real sense; he was unfailingly kind.

John was murdered last week. My mother called to give me the news. It just didn’t fit in, not even in this world, certainly not in mine.

It was only after we had hung up the phone that I cried.

Senseless, of course, is a word that we journalists overuse. Dumbstruck by so much tragedy, we fall back on the cliched. It means that we can’t figure something out.

John’s violent death, at the age of 73, is something that will never have a why. Not for me, not for most. To find some logic here, I’d have to jump into somebody else’s mind, somebody with their circuits crossed, somebody who sane people should fear.

John’s murderers--a boy 17 and his friend, a year older--have been caught. They confessed. This is a footnote, really; it doesn’t count for much. I don’t care if these people live or die.

After the sick feeling, one feels numb.

John had been home alone when he was killed, in a town called Ft. Washington in Maryland, not that far from Washington, D.C. That’s where my family knew him. We go back more than 30 years.

John’s wife, Sybil, used to feed me chicken noodle soup when I was a child. She was a neighbor and a friend.

Sybil, who is 65, was taking a short trip to Maine when she left John at home. The two dogs and the cat were going with her too. She told John before she left that she felt uneasy, that something seemed wrong. She thought that she might get in an accident on the road. She put it aside, finally, and went on.

Somebody tried to break into the house that night. They were insistent, John told Sybil when she called on the phone. He’d taken out his shotgun, fired off a blast, and then the intruders went away. John didn’t know if he’d hit anyone.

Two nights later they returned, armed with a .38 that they’d stolen from a house down the road. They shot John and they beat him too. His face was far too battered to be recognized.

Then they dragged John’s body out onto the back porch. And they burned down the house.

One of the murderers had been slightly wounded by John’s shotgun blast from two nights before. Perhaps this justified something in the murderers’ minds. I don’t care to know.

Maybe as you are reading this, you are wondering about the point, about an angle that would make this story new. Crime, pain and presumably, punishment are the byproducts of human wrongs that fill the newspapers every day.

And John and Sybil weren’t famous, not in the fatuous, gossipy sense of the word.

“It seems like everybody knows somebody, or knows somebody who knows somebody, who’s been murdered,” my mother said over the phone. Then we didn’t say anything for a while as we let the weight of that drop to our toes.

John and Sybil were famous to me, of course. I knew them as human beings. And I’d been thinking about them a lot lately as I’d been reading the news.

Director Spike Lee has a new movie out, “Jungle Fever,” which I haven’t seen, but which I know takes on a taboo: intimate relationships between blacks and whites.

Many people who have seen this movie, about a black man and a white woman who have lots of sex, have written to magazines and newspapers to complain.

They said that the movie is stereotypical and worse. They said that if you’re trying to bust through a racial taboo, why not focus on a married couple, on people who love each other and happen not to share the same race?

What these people were saying to me was, “Why not focus on somebody like Sybil and John?”

John was black. Sybil is white. They had been married 31 years. My mother introduced them. John and his partner had come to our house, in the suburbs of Washington, D.C., to do some masonry work on our back porch. Sybil needed somebody to help with her basement. My mother made the match.

Sybil eventually left her husband, who was white, and married John. I was too young to appreciate the full scope of the scandal then. Now I marvel at the strength of their bond.

The only thing it couldn’t survive was two kids with a gun.