Table of Contents
For Robin: my true friend, my blood, my laugh-maker. And for Julie: my sunshine, my awe-inspirer, my soul-waker.
May God grant us the strength and wisdom
to do your lives a sliver of justice in the telling.
We love you always and miss you every day.
Kisses and Revolution.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
There are a number of people without whom, it is no stretch to say, this book might never have happened. To the following people, I want to express my most heartfelt thanks:
To all my friends, colleagues, mos, pokeys and extended New York family for keeping my daily life fun and (sometimes) sane.
To Dan Slater for your early wisdom. Your sensitivity and encouragement helped me more than you know. To Kara and Claire for seeing the potential in a rough, rough draft.
And to Laura for the incredible insight to spin that roughness into a polish I can feel truly proud of; you made me see things I would never have accepted without your clarity.
To Frank Carlson, Frank Fabbri, and Nels Moss for taking the time to read the manuscript and share your invaluable advice (both legal and personal) with me. And more importantly, for the things you have all done for my brother.
To Nikki for being the best live-in therapist a girl ever had. (And to Noel for getting her out of the house in between our sessions so that I could write).
To Evelyne for talking me down from the ledge time after time despite the ocean usually separating us.
To Joe for chasing the very notion of complacency right out of my life. You are, quite simply, my backbone.
To the Dorks of the Round Table, Anton and Carolyn for teaching me how to be humble and proud all at the same time. You two are almost as responsible for this book as I am. (Okay, maybe more than almost.) I very seriously could not have done this without you.
To the best damn sales force in the industry you guys have been absolutely brimming with confidence and enthusiasm from day one, and I wouldnt want anybody else behind me. I am the luckiest author ever. To Norman and Trish for becoming my mentors and for teaching me that whats really important in business is the people surrounding you. Norman, you believed in me, and because of that, my dreams are happening. Thank you.
To my family (way too many to name here: all Cumminses, Matthewses, and married variations thereof ) it sounds corny, but its true: I come from good stock. The strength and love I have witnessed within our family over the years takes my breath away. I am proud to belong to you.
To Jamie you are the most dignified and courageous young lady I have ever known. You have an amazing willingness to be fully engaged in life, and it is truly an honor to call you my cousin and my friend.
To Ginna words cannot express what you have done for me. Your daughters planted action in me, but it was your faith and strength that made me unafraid. In my wildest dreams, I could not imagine a more compassionate or generous soul than you have been to me.
To Mom and Dad for being unconditionally loving and supportive (even when I choose to live in hostile foreign territories). For raising me to keep my feet on the ground and my head in the clouds. And for always believing in me, and reminding me of that when I floundered. I hope to make you proud.
To Kathy what can I say? You will always be my emotional partner in life. We grew up on the same day, and no one will ever understand who I am quite as well as you do. Eres la mejor hermanita en todo el mundo.
And to Tom its been one hell of a journey, and you have been mostly a pain in the ass. But I love you even more now than I did when we started this dream on Grandmas and Grandpas back porch all those years ago. Tom, you are my hero.
AUTHORS NOTE
This is a work of nonfiction. My research materials included court documents, police records, and electronic and print media, as well as interviews I conducted with people who appear in this book. Additionally, because I am part of the story, I used my own personal memories of certain events.
I chose to write the book from a third-person omniscient point of view so that readers could gain an intimate knowledge of each facet of the story. Some supposition was necessary in writing dialogue, though the interactions are all based on real conversations and contain many direct quotes.
Certain family members have requested to be omitted from the book for personal reasons, and I have honored those requests. Apart from these alterations, I have endeavored to maintain the factual and quintessential integrity of both the people and the events related herein.
The river moans and sighs
Swallows my memories
And spits back currents of regret
To drown careless swimmers
Neath onions shield
She sheds saltless tears
Howling at the moon
The bridge has long since collapsed
And now the river boasts her danger
For fear of drowning
I no longer cross to meet you
I stand on muddy banks waving
But cant see you clearly
My dreams take me down
To rocks and the cold current below
And I have lost myself
In the waters wailing drone
That lulls me to sleep.
Julie Kerry
PROLOGUE
In 1991, I was a sixteen-year-old high-school kid living on the outskirts of the nations capital and I thought I was invincible. I thought I was tough. Washington, D.C., was the homicide capital of the United States. Roughly one out of every twelve hundred people living there that year was murdered. Our mayor sat in jail after he and a prostitute were caught on video smoking crack in a motel room. But behind this curtain of corruption, D.C. was a shiny, whitewashed city whose streets were lined with world-famous museums, government buildings, and busloads of tourists sporting matching T-shirts and Kodak Discs. This city that was my home thrived in the face of scandal, drew its life-breath from the mayhem.
So when my parents packed my brother, my sister, and me into the family van and drove us to Missouri for spring break, we brought our East Coast attitudes and our entirely imagined city-hardness with us. We drove through two days worth of sunshiny American cornfields to get from Maryland to St. Louis, and we were sure we would die from a particularly Midwestern brand of boredom before we even crossed the Mississippi.
The hard truth that we were about to learn was that, in fact, we werent tough kids at all. In reality, we were fairly sheltered, comfortably angst-ridden, suburban teenagers and we had no idea what tough was all about. We lived in the early nineties, during a time when youthful violence still had the ability to shock. Even in the homicide capital of the country, there was nothing that felt commonplace about violence, nothing normal about the metal detectors they began installing in our schools in an effort to quell that violence. We were still several years nave of Columbine and the kind of terror that a tragedy of that magnitude can inspire.
As my family bumped our blue van westward through the heartland of America, we imagined we were leaving urban dangers behind us in the East. We never dreamed of the kind of brutality we were about to encounter, the kind of tragedy that would destroy our lives in a single night. D.C. had not prepared us for anything. Nothing could prepare us for this.
