When Your Truth Is Shattered

As I arrived home from a baseball game, my wife Connie turned on the porch light and came out the front door. “Didn’t they page you at the game?” She clutched her bare shoulders as if it were cold out. “I called and asked them to page you.”

I was standing on the sidewalk. I couldn’t tell if she was angry or worried.

“Why? What is it?”

“I didn’t know what to do. I kept waiting and waiting for you to call.” Connie sobbed and covered her face with her hands. I ran up the steps and put my arms around her.

“Tell me,” I said.

“It’s Eileen. She’s dead.”

Eileen, my sister. It was just words for an instant, an abstraction. As if I were suddenly living in a world without cats or trees. A world without Eileen.

“How?”

“She killed herself.”

“No. She wouldn’t.”

Tears rolled down Connie’s face. “With a gun,” she said.

I let out a howl of grief and rage and disbelief, a guttural sound I’d never made before—or since.

Connie looked frightened, helpless.

“Did she leave a note?” I said.

“I’m not sure. I don’t think your mom knows much yet. Your dad’s still at work. She said she was going to wait for him to get home before she told him.”

I felt a sudden pang of conscience, trying to remember the last time I’d called Eileen or written her a letter. I hadn’t seen her in nearly four years.

“I better go call,” I said.

A year younger than me, Eileen was 27. She had been working as a secretary in San Bernardino, California and was married to her high school sweetheart, Vic (not his real name), a police officer. They had no children. I had always known her as a happy, bubbly girl, the brightest smile in the room. But when I went home to Pittsburgh for the funeral, I learned that her storybook marriage was not what it seemed. She and Vic had been separated for several months, and she had been deeply depressed. Details about her death were sketchy, nothing much more than the fact that she had died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the chest.

But we knew that Vic was in the house when the fatal shot was fired, and I wondered how we could be certain that she had committed suicide and that Vic had nothing to do with her death. My parents, who were nearly catatonic with grief, asked me to talk to him. I had known Vic since he was 16 years old. His mother was my mother’s best friend. When he arrived in Pittsburgh for Eileen’s funeral, the two of us sat down in my parents’ kitchen and talked.

The story he told me was long and sad, but the gist was fairly simple—Eileen had been having an affair with her boss, and when that fact was revealed, she shot herself in a fit of remorse. Vic met my eyes openly, his face filled with bewilderment and grief. He answered all my questions, never stumbling or contradicting himself. In short, I believed him. I told my family what he had told me, and we got on with our lives as best we could.

***

By the time I was 46, my entire family—mother, father, sister and brother—were dead. My mother was the last to go, adrift in a gentle fog of senility that seemed to spare her the heartache of outliving two of her three children. She and I were close and I missed her terribly, but as the years rolled by it was Eileen’s suicide that kept nagging at me. In 2001, I decided to try to write a novel about her, hoping my imagination could fill in the blanks of her story. What had the final months of her life been like? Why hadn’t she told me about her troubled marriage? What other demons had she been battling? As the story progressed, I began to realize that I didn’t want to write a fictionalized account of Eileen’s life; I wanted to understand what had really happened to my sister.

I contacted a private investigator in California named Darryl Carlson and asked him to help me find out more. According to reports from the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department, a week before she died, Eileen and Vic went to her boss’s house to discuss the alleged affair. Things quickly became heated and the police were called. When a cop asked Vic if there was going to be any more trouble, Vic said, “Not really, but in a half hour you can come pick her up off the lawn, and you can take me to jail.” A few days later, Eileen and Vic agreed to reconcile, and he moved back into their house. They went to a marriage counselor to help them sort things out, but the next day all hell broke loose. She tried to swallow a bunch of aspirin tablets, and Vic grabbed her to make her spit them out. The argument continued in their bedroom; then Vic went into another room to make a phone call. Moments later, a shot rang out. He rushed back to the bedroom and saw Eileen kneeling next to the bed.

This was the story Vic told to the detectives. It was not much different from the story he’d told me years before in my parents’ kitchen, but new details emerged that rocked Darryl and me to the core. The most significant was the fact that Eileen was babysitting a two-year-old boy, who was present as Vic and Eileen raged through the house and may have been in the room when the fatal shot was fired. Would Eileen have shot herself in front of a child? That seemed impossible for me to believe. Also, critically, the detective had asked Vic if his wife had ever tried to commit suicide before, and Vic had said yes, “…this was on an occasion when he tore her clothes off, beat her, and called her a whore,” the report continued.

Darryl and I were aghast as we pored over the reports.

Eileen had spoken to two women on the telephone in the last hour of her life, but the detective never interviewed either of these women to find out what she’d said. Eileen’s boss gave the detective conflicting information in two separate conversations—one in which he admitted to the affair and another in which he denied it—but the detective did not attempt to resolve the discrepancies. One report said there had been four bullets in the gun while another said there were five. Moreover, the gunshot was not a contact wound, but no tests were done to determine how far the gun had been from her chest.

Suddenly, all my old truths seemed like lies.

We’ve all seen TV dramas where an investigator becomes so obsessed with a case that nothing else in his life seems to matter. As compelling as such a story can be—the tension mounting as the detective descends deeper and deeper down the proverbial rabbit hole—it’s one thing to watch it unfold, quite another to live it.

I remember sitting at the kitchen table at three in the morning, poring over a book about gunshot wounds and writing feverishly in my journal, my wife awakening and trying to convince me to get some sleep. We’d go out to dinner with friends, and I would completely dominate the conversation, leaving people with their mouths agape as I described the case in shocking detail, only to withdraw into a shell when some other topic came up. It was kind of like falling in love, I suppose. I was obsessed and couldn’t think about anything else. At one point my wife said, “Do you have any idea what a drag it is to live with you?”

Yes, I did know, but I couldn’t stop. I didn’t want to stop. I was convinced that discovering the truth about my sister’s death was the reason that I was the only one in my family who was still alive and that this was something I was born to do.

Darryl and I investigated the case for two years, becoming like brothers in the process. We met with several of Eileen’s old friends, who confirmed that she had been abused and wondered aloud why the police had never bothered to interview them. Although we were deeply wary of the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department, we reached a point when we knew we had to get them involved. When a sergeant looked at the case, he said it was one of sloppiest investigations he had ever seen. The day the police reopened the case as a homicide investigation was one of the most fulfilling days of my life.

That said, it took another two years for the sheriff’s department to complete their work. Unfortunately, all the physical evidence had been destroyed. There were no results from any forensic tests and no photographs of the crime scene—nothing but a single grainy black-and-white photograph of Eileen lying on a coroner’s table. The sheriff’s department interviewed a number of witnesses, including Vic, and eventually closed the case, concluding that they did not believe a homicide had been committed.

***

Still, there were many unanswered questions, and I needed more closure. Judging from the police interview it seemed as if Vic might feel the same. Darryl contacted him, and he agreed to meet with us, along with his third wife, at a restaurant in Seattle.

Darryl had said we should go to the meeting empty-handed, no briefcase or notebooks—no hidden recording device—and I agreed. The only exception was a copy of Eileen’s letter in my shirt pocket, one she wrote to our parents on the day she died. I was certain Vic did not know the letter existed, and I wanted to see the look on his face when he read it.

Darryl put his hand on my shoulder. “We’ve come a long way, Jim. You’re gonna be fine. Just take it nice and slow.”

As we walked toward the restaurant in the chilly night air, my feet felt sluggish while my mind rushed ahead. I caught a glimpse of Vic the moment I stepped through the door. He was standing alone near the hostess station. He turned and saw me and lifted his chin in recognition. As I walked toward him, he gave me a wary smile. More than 30 years after Eileen’s death my journey had come full circle, taking me back to its beginning—I, a jury of one, trying to decide if the hand he held out to me was the hand that held the gun.

That evening was incredibly cathartic for me. The first time around I’d somehow spent less time digging into the circumstances of my sister’s death than I had buying a used car. Now I’d tracked down every lead and document I could find, trying to reconstruct the last days of Eileen’s life. Meanwhile, Vic seemed to have suppressed those events so completely that he did not remember that there had been a little boy in the house, nor did he know which gun had fired the fatal bullet. I had offered to give him copies of the police reports, but he demurred.

In the car on the way back to the motel, I said to Darryl, “How could he have forgotten so much? It’s as if there’s this deep dark hole in his past, but he’s afraid to crawl down in it.”

“Yeah, he doesn’t even want to peek over the edge.”

There were moments when Vic’s amnesia about that day filled me with rage. This was one of the most consequential moments in his life. How could he be so blind? But he had moved on from the tragedy, and I understood the impulse all too well. For years, I had suppressed almost everything about Eileen until she was little more than a few stories and a bunch of faded photographs. Who was I to admonish him?

I still have doubts about what happened to my sister on that fateful day and Vic’s possible role in the tragedy, but I try to weed them out as best I can. My search for the truth about Eileen’s death was the most profound and intense experience of my life. It was deeply troubling to learn that I may have gotten things so wrong the first time around, and there were times when I felt as if the undertaking was almost too much for me to handle. Hard as it was, I am deeply grateful for the chance to reconnect with Eileen and the rest of my family, and I believe they would be proud of me for undertaking this journey.

This is a story about acceptance, about coming to terms with things you can never know. What I do know for certain is that my quest wasn’t just about finding the truth; it was about paying attention, which is the most essential expression of love.

James Whitfield Thomson is the author of A Better Ending.