When a Killer Strikes Too Close to Home

My sister and her family live in a town that they like to call Mayberry, U.S.A. The couple who live next door, getting on in years, is fond of making fresh fruit pies. They always bake an extra one to deliver to my sister’s door.

Other neighbors, too, are big on stopping by. Bounty from orchards and gardens is shared. The neighbor around the corner raises llamas, quite the attraction for out-of-town guests.

So it seems natural, the way things ought to be, that there’s never been much news around this place--or at least not of the sordid variety that fills the newspapers closer to where I live.

Except now that is changing, sadly, and depending on your perspective, maybe inevitably as well. There’s been a killing--or was it a suicide, as the victim’s husband claimed?--just a short hop from my sister’s house.

My sister called the other day with fascination, revulsion and sadness in her tone. She’d hardly slept the night before.

“She was the type of mother who would fall asleep with her children,” my sister said. This was shorthand that we both understood: Good mom, a woman who adored her kids.

My sister knew this mother, of course, as did the women at the hair salon, where it was revealed that she had her hair done the day before she was killed. Moreover, the guy who’s been doing masonry work at my sister’s house knew the husband’s family and, well, it all kind of figures, he said.

My sister would relay more updates in short.

The other mothers from the preschool were all having their say, as was the friend who noted that the victim signed her daughter up for dance classes on the same afternoon that she went in for her hair. Her rabbi said she’d just volunteered to play the flute at the synagogue too.

And catch this: She’d planned a surprise party for her husband’s 40th birthday, but died three days before. Does this sound like a woman who was thinking of taking her own life?

Long before the police have decided what it all means, it seems everybody in town agrees that the possibility of suicide must be dismissed out of hand, never mind about the multiple gunshot wounds to the victim’s face.

Sure there was idle talk about reflexes and about how, just maybe, she could have done it herself. But this was the devil’s advocate position, offered up just because. The bottom line was something else:

No good mother would abandon her children to a life of wondering why she was gone. This was not a mother who was sick. Her little girl is 4 and her son just 18 months. Plus, women just don’t take to guns. Drug overdoses are a lady’s way out.

And what of her stepsons, ages 11 and 14, who ran screaming from the house that early morning with their conflicting tales? One said his dad had shot his mom, the other that his mom had killed herself. The reigning sentiment around town: those poor kids.

Naturally, all sorts of other details have since come out, by fast moving word of mouth that is relentlessly shrinking any potential jury pool. Mayberry has never seen anything quite like this.

The locals even called in a big city pathologist to do the autopsy, although, uncharacteristically, the police have been mum on the results.

But . . . everybody knows the husband was depressed. His business wasn’t going well. He’d lost a bundle in Las Vegas not long ago. The family’s big Victorian house, which was tastefully decorated for Halloween, has been on the market for too long.

The real estate agent predicts that, now, it will never sell.

No, I don’t know these people, but I am clearly fascinated as well. Violent death in small-town America is much bigger news. The shock runs deeper and the implications seem more ominous too. There is a sense of no turning back.

In the business I’m in, I hear a lot of complaints about what passes for news. Too much blood and heartache in the papers and on TV, people say. It’s depressing. Breeds on itself. Gives the criminally-inclined all sorts of ideas.

It’s all true, of course, but it’s too simple a view. Killing another is the ultimate taboo. We are intrigued, safely, from a distance, when we read the reports of life snapped off. It terrifies, and enlightens as well.

We peep into the lives of others who have crossed a boundary we never hope to tread. And life is nothing if not a search for clues.