Where Sadness Breathes

On this day, the front page story in the afternoon edition of the Antioch Daily Ledger was brief and careful with details. There were no names given, let alone how or why it happened. The paper simply reported that nine people — two entire families — had been found murdered in a farm house near Lodi. All had been shot, including two small children.

The location startled me. Lodi was less than an hour from where I lived and we had relatives there. As it was, just a week earlier we had driven over to visit an aunt and uncle, and there had been plenty of trips as a kid for big weekend get-togethers. As I read, I remembered muttering something about these being such crazy times, because Lodi was the last place on earth I would have ever expected anything like this to happen.

And it was at that moment when the phone rang. It was my mother, and although she usually waited until the weekend, for some reason the call didn’t seem out of place, except that she was crying.

“Jackie ...?” She always calls me that when she is upset. “Jackie, I have some very bad news.”

My heart sank. My father had been away on business. I was certain there must have been an accident, and so I braced myself. But before I could speak, she continued. “It’s your Uncle Richard ... and Aunt Wanda,” she sputtered. “Ricky and Debbie, too.”

And in that instant, it all fell into place; the newspaper story, the phone call, and now this sick, gut-wrenching feeling that indeed something horrible had happened. Mom told me all she knew, which was not much, including the obvious, Why?

Decades later, the images of that evening are still crystal clear in my mind. I remember hanging up the phone, trembling. I was barely 22, but a husband, and a father of a 3-year-old boy. What’s more, I had the same last name as my aunt and uncle, and what my Uncle Richard could have done to make someone angry enough to kill him, I had no idea. But I was terrified. Who knows? Maybe we were next! I double locked the windows and doors, gave my son and wife an extra kiss, and put a softball bat next to my bed. It all seems so crazy now, perhaps even a bit silly, but I never closed my eyes that night. To this day, it was the only time in my life I had wished I owned a gun.

We buried Richard, Wanda, Debbie and Ricky the following Monday, after which our families returned home with this vain attempt to sort it all out. Over the coming years, death took others, so we all found new reasons to mourn, and I’m sure for some of us, those few foggy days in November so many years before, simply faded away.

But not for me. I could never get it out of my head. I kept thinking back to that house on Orchard Road and all of those people; two entire families, plus a young man and woman with dreams of starting a family of their own. Men, women and children tied up and executed with not one bullet, but one after another, after another, after another, to a number unthinkable. I remember someone telling me that when they removed Debbie’s body, a Kleenex was clutched tightly in her hand. That last picture I had of her in my head drenched me in sadness, and I could not for one minute imagine the horror as they watched the one next to them die; a father,a son, a wife, a daughter, knowing that their turn was coming, knowing these were the final seconds of their lives.

It also haunted me, that while I knew my aunt, uncle and cousins so well, I knew nothing about the two men who, in the blink of an eye, changed everything forever. I remember thinking over that November weekend, when all this was swirling around us, that one day someone would have to explain it to me, because nothing made sense. There would have to be a book, a movie, or a story that would lay it all out so I could see it, touch it, and maybe somehow understand it. And so I waited.

But two decades passed and the story never came. There was never anything written that explained how or why it happened. There was never a big trial where the truth could be exposed, let alone a reasonable explanation given to satisfy this unsettling feeling of loss felt by so many.

And so it was that this murder of my family, along with 13 other people I never knew, tormented me for years, and honestly, the lives of the two men responsible troubled me equally as much. Then there came this winter day almost 20 years after the killings when I realized that if this story were to be told, it would be up to me to do it.