he was going. I mean, it was absurd. But that was it. The first week of spring, ten years ago. We never heard another word from him. Can you believe it? Selfish, thoughtless bastard! Kim was devastated. More so than she’d been by the divorce two years earlier.
“You see some significance in the timing?”
“No, no, I don’t mean to suggest that there’s any connection between the Good Shepherd case and Emilio’s disappearance. How could there be? It’s just that both events happened the same month-March of 2000. Maybe part of the reason Kim feels as strongly as she does about the pain of those families at losing someone is that she lost her own father at the same time.”
Now Gurney understood. “And the shared lack of closure-”
“Yes. The Good Shepherd murders were never fully resolved, because the murderer was never caught. And Kim hasn’t been able to close the door on her father’s disappearance, because she could never find out what really happened to him. When she talks about the families of murder victims suffering from an ongoing misery, I think she’s talking about herself.”
After concluding his conversation with Connie, Gurney sat for a long while at the table, trying to digest the implications of Emilio Corazon’s departure from Kim’s life.
He gradually became aware of Madeleine’s knitting needles clicking softly and steadily. She was sitting in a pool of yellow lamplight, a ball of sage-colored yarn at her side in the armchair, a sage-colored sweater taking shape in her lap.
He opened the blue folder to the section devoted to the Good Shepherd’s “Memorandum of Intent.” On a page of background information at the beginning of the section, someone, presumably Kim, had indicated that the original document had been delivered by express mail in a nine-by-twelve manila envelope, addressed to “The Director, New York State Police, Bureau of Criminal Investigation.” The delivery date was March 22, 2000-the Wednesday following the weekend of the first two shootings.
Gurney turned the page and began to read the text of the memorandum itself. It began abruptly, with a summary statement consisting of numbered sentences:
The next nineteen pages reiterated these sentiments at length, the manifesto drifting back and forth in its tone from prophetic to academic. The rational aspects of the argument were supported by extensive wealth-distribution data, purporting to demonstrate the unfairness of America’s economic structure-complete with trend statistics showing the nation’s drift toward a Third World economy of extremes, in which enormous wealth is concentrated at the very top, poverty is expanding, and the middle class is shrinking.
The main body of the document concluded:
The document was signed, “The Good Shepherd.”
In a separate note, clipped to the final page, the writer had included information on the precise times and locations of the two preceding attacks.
Since these facts had not yet been released to the public, they provided support for the writer’s claim to be the killer. A postscript to the note indicated that copies of the entire document had been simultaneously delivered to a long list of national and local news organizations.
Gurney went through it all again. When he put the folder down half an hour later, he understood why the case had achieved its iconic status in criminology-and why it had replaced the earlier Unabomber case as the academic archetype for societal-mission-driven murders.
The document was clearer and less digressive than the Unabomber’s manifesto. The logical nexus between the stated problem and the murderous solution was more direct than Ted Kaczynski’s messy letter bombs to victims whose relevance to the issue was questionable at best.
The Good Shepherd had neatly summed up his approach in the first two numbered statements in his memorandum: “1. If the love of money, which is greed, is the root of all evil, then it follows that the greatest good will be achieved by its eradication. 2. Since greed does not exist in a vacuum but exists in its human carriers, it follows that the way to eradicate greed is to eradicate its carriers.”
What could be more direct than that?
And the Good Shepherd murder spree was inherently memorable. It had the elements of riveting theater: a simple premise, a concentrated time frame, high suspense, a vivid threat, a dramatic assault on wealth and privilege, easily defined victims, horrific moments of confrontation. It was the stuff of legend, and it occupied a natural place in people’s minds. In fact, it occupied at least two natural places: To those who felt threatened by an attack on wealth, the Good Shepherd was the incarnation of the bomb-throwing revolutionary, intent on bringing down the structure of history’s greatest society. To those who viewed the rich as pigs, the Good Shepherd was an idealist, a Robin Hood, rectifying the worst injustice of an unjust world.
It made sense that the case had over the years become a favorite in psychology and criminology classes. Professors would enjoy presenting it, because it made the points they wanted to make about a certain kind of murderer and-a rare blessing in the soft sciences-it made those points unambiguously. Students would enjoy hearing about it, because, like many simple horrors, it was grotesquely entertaining. Even the killer’s escape into the night became a plus-giving the affair an open-ended
As Gurney closed the folder, pondering the visceral power of the case narrative, he found himself with mixed feelings.
“Problem?”
He looked up, saw Madeleine gazing across the room at him, her knitting needles resting in her lap.
He shook his head. “Probably just my constitutional crankiness.”
She was still looking at him. He knew she was waiting for a better answer.
“Kim’s documentary is all about the Good Shepherd case.”
Madeleine frowned. “Hasn’t that been done to death? Back when it happened, it was pretty much the only thing on television.”
“She has her own angle on it. Back then it was all about the manifesto and the hunt for the killer and theories about his hypothetical background, hypothetical education, where he might be hiding, violence in America, lax gun laws, blah, blah, blah. But Kim is ignoring all that and zeroing in on the permanent damage to the victims’ families- how their lives were changed.”
Madeleine looked interested, then frowned again. “So what’s the problem?”
“Nothing I can put my finger on. Maybe it’s just me. Like I said, I’m not in a great mood.”
Chapter 7
