“My mother was very weak,” I said. “She was a nothing. She could have left him, but she didn’t.”
“Had he ever been violent with her?” Rebecca asked.
“No.”
“With any of you?”
“No, never,” I said. “He would sometimes get irritated. Especially with Jamie. But he never raised his hand against any of us.”
To my surprise, Rebecca didn’t ask any more questions. Instead, she simply handed me another envelope.
“This is the last one,” she said.
I took the envelope from her and read it quietly.
Hollis Donald Townsend. Age, forty-four.
On July 12, 1961, Hollis Townsend, a certified public accountant and avid foreign-stamp collector who lived and worked in Phoenix, Arizona, returned with his family from a two-week vacation at Yellowstone National Park. A neighbor, Sally Miller, who came out to welcome them back, placed the time at 3:35 P.M. For the next few minutes, while Hollis Town-send unpacked the car, she spoke to his wife, Mary Townsend, thirty-seven. During this brief time, as she later told police, the Townsend children, Karen, five, and Sheila, eight, had played with the family dog, a large collie named Samson.
Nearly nine hours later, at around midnight, Mrs. Miller was awakened by a single shot, followed rapidly by two others. She rose, walked to her window, glanced out, and saw Hollis Townsend as he stepped out of the house, turned left, and headed for the garage. He had a large suitcase, one which appeared to be very heavy, since Townsend needed both hands to drag, rather than carry, it across the lawn. He was dressed in the same beige trousers and short-sleeved knit shirt he’d been wearing earlier in the day, an indication that he had not gone to bed, although, as Mrs. Miller told police, all the lights in the house had been off for more than two hours.
What had he done in that darkness?
Rebecca’s summation gave a short but graphic answer. For one thing, he’d written several letters, all of which he’d eventually thrown into the kitchen wastebasket. The letters, written in Townsend’s pinched script, alluded to an “inadequacy” which he had to face, the inadequacy, as he put it, “of life, of what I can’t find in it somehow.”
At some other point during the night, Townsend had poured gasoline in every room in the house, drenching carpets and furniture, and leaving a trail which began in the kitchen, then led through the rooms on the ground floor before heading up the stairs to where his family lay sleeping obliviously. At the last moment, however, he had not lit a match, but had simply dragged his enormous suitcase out across the lawn, leaving the house intact behind him, the bodies of his wife and two children still lying in their own beds.
Each had been shot one time. Karen and Sheila had been shot in the back of the head, Mary through the forehead, presumably because, unlike her daughters, she slept on her back rather than her stomach.
Only two photographs were attached. The first showed Hollis Townsend beside the family swimming pool. He was wearing only a bathing suit, and he appeared to be beating his breasts comically, in a mocking imitation of Tarzan.
The second photograph was of Mary Townsend. She was kneeling down, her arms around her small daughters. It was a picture that had undoubtedly been taken during the family vacation at Yellowstone. Old Faithful, the park’s most famous geyser, could be seen exploding from a cloud of steam behind them.
Without comment, I returned the summation and photographs to their envelope and handed it to Rebecca. She took them from my hand, placed them in her briefcase.
“I think that’s enough for tonight,” she said abruptly.
I was surprised. “I have more time,” I told her.
She began to gather her things together. “I’d rather start fresh next time,” she said. The questions I want to ask you would take a long time to answer, and I’d rather not go into them now.” She closed the briefcase and started to rise.
I touched her hand. “Why my father?” I asked. “Why did you pick him?”
She drew her hand away from mine, leaned back slightly, and gave me her reasons so smoothly and matter-of- factly that she seemed to be quoting a long passage she’d written beforehand.
“Well, all the cases you’ve read about have a few things in common,” she said. “None of them had serious money problems. None of them had medical problems. None of them had lovers. There were no ‘other women’ in their lives. All of them committed their murders in their family homes. All of them had planned the murders before- hand. Nothing about them was sudden or impulsive. These were not acts of rage. The killings were quick and clean.”
She paused, as if waiting for a question, then went on when I simply watched her silently.
“And last, these men all tried to escape,” she said. They didn’t kill themselves, as some family murderers do. They tried to get away instead, to escape. None of them succeeded, except, of course, your father.”
As if in a sudden vision, I saw him. Through the rain, his hat pulled down, water dripping from its sagging brim, I saw my father move toward the family car, saw him as Mrs. Hamilton must have seen him, her eyes peering toward the street from behind the blue curtains that hung from her living room window.
“Yes, he did succeed in that,” I said. I smiled ironically. “He would be an old man now.”
Rebecca nodded, a small green leaf brushing against the side of her face.
“An old man,” I repeated, though without emphasis, a simple mathematical determination. The others swam into my mind, Fuller, Stringer, and the rest.
“What are you looking for in these men?” I asked.
The question appeared to sink into her face like a dye.
