In Tim’s room, the bed was neatly made, the pillow placed squarely in the centre of the headboard. Had he tidied up before or after the murders? She scanned the police report. It must have been before as no blood was found in his room. Blood from the mother was found on the stairs and in the sisters’ room, but the police couldn’t determine if it had been tracked in before or after the girls were dead. Tim could have suffocated them first, dispatched the mother, then returned to his sisters’ room to slice their throats.
Why? She closed her eyes. What type of paranoid delusion would have driven Tim to massacre his family? Psychosis of such violence couldn’t possibly have sprung from a void. To commit such bloodshed, a tidal wave of fear and paranoia must have roared through his veins.
She shut her eyes, but the photo of Doris Stern, soaking in a pool of blood, remained fixed in her mind. The air in the flat was stifling and she leapt up, knocking against the coffee table and banging her knee. Dizzy with fatigue, she opened the window to let in some air.
Across the alley, the light was on and a shadow drifted past the closed blinds. In the stillness, the rhythmic sound of chopping came through the open window. Root vegetables, chicken bones? Or was her mysterious neighbour dispatching a hapless hitchhiker he’d picked up on the motorway? She chided herself for the gruesome nature of her thoughts, closed the window and yanked the curtains shut. Enough crime scene photos for today. Sleep would not come easily tonight. She stuffed the photos, yellowed with age, back into the plastic folder, and turned her attention to the police report.
According to the coroner’s assessment, the victims had died sometime between eleven that night and two in the morning. Tim’s father had taken a hotel room down the coast in Portland, in order to meet with a client early the next day. On Saturday morning, a neighbour called the police just after ten to report the crime. The Stern’s dog had been barking for hours, so she’d gone over to investigate. Other than the barking, the house was quiet. When she peeked in the front window, it was to find the furniture tipped over and the walls smeared with blood. After running home in a panic to call the police, she barricaded herself in her house, terrified that a maniac was on the loose.
Doris Stern’s car, a blue Pontiac sedan, was parked in the driveway. The police made numerous attempts to contact Mr Stern, though, at the time, nobody knew where he was. When he pulled up to the house, shortly before noon, he found his home cordoned off with yellow crime-scene tape and a female officer waiting to deliver the terrible news. They questioned him about Tim. When had he last seen him? Was he known to use drugs?
As for Stern, he was exactly where he claimed to be, in Portland for a business meeting. It all checked out. A woman, whose name was later redacted from the police report, had provided an alibi for the evening before. Two people remembered seeing him in the hotel at breakfast, and an attendant at a Texaco station in Portland confirmed that Stern stopped to fill up his car just after eleven on Saturday morning.
When Stern was asked to identify the bodies, he refused, saying he couldn’t bear to see his daughters laid out in the morgue. An old family friend, who lived in Boston, volunteered for the grisly task. Just the daughters. It wasn’t his wife who Stern couldn’t bear to see. Erin scribbled that down.
Three days later, on the Monday afternoon, Tim was picked up just over the New York state line. A motorist spotted him wandering down a rural road cutting through the forest, his T-shirt and jeans stained with dried blood. When questioned by police, he claimed to have no idea how he’d got there or where the blood came from. The officer at the scene would later report that Tim didn’t bat an eye when informed his family was dead. He’d merely stared at the wall with a vacant expression. When he finally spoke, he said, ‘Even my dad?’
Throughout the arrest and trial, Tim repeatedly claimed he had no memory of the murders, or how he ended up so far from home. He had no drugs on him and his bloodwork was clean. A preliminary diagnosis of dissociative disorder, with possible amnesia or fugue state, was made by the court-appointed psychiatrist. Later changed, after further assessment, to paranoid schizophrenia. Following a brief trial, Tim was declared not guilty for the deaths of his mother and sisters by reason of insanity. Stern did not testify or appear in court. Nor did he see Tim before he was sent to Greenlake for an indefinite period of incarceration.
Erin’s back ached. As she stood and paced the floor, a thought came to her. Was there a police record of the suspected arson attack on the house? She rummaged through the box. But it wouldn’t be there, of course. The house had burned down after Tim was in custody. With Tim on a locked ward, and the family home destroyed by fire, the case was closed. End of story.
Except it wasn’t. At least not to someone like her, pervaded by a floating sense of dread, and the sensation of ‘what if?’ woven into her bones. She circled the room, paging through Tim’s file. But little in those old records had any bearing on his current mental state. Agonising over old police reports and digging for clues would not give her the answer she wanted: what had made Tim snap? Were there drugs involved? Had he argued with his father – or mother – one too many times? Or was it simply a case of garden-variety psychosis, a break from reality with no inciting event, and no real answer? Her
