The Fact of a Body: A Murder and a Memoir

by Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich

This is the logic I will never find an answer to, the way in my family a hurt will always be your hurt or my hurt, one to be set against the other and weighed, never the family’s hurt.

I’m too aware that I watched him touch her in our bedroom. Too aware that he touched me. The knowledge crawls across my skin. I can’t even use the bathroom without thinking of his hands around himself there, the motion I didn’t understand. But I know I’m not allowed to say that, just like I’m not allowed to tell my friends at school what happened. My mother has said that I will hurt

my father’s political career if I do so. My father has said that I will hurt my mother. Both of them forbid me from telling my grandmother, because it would hurt her, and my brother. He’s close to my grandfather and, as the only boy in a house of girls, needs him. So the hurt feels like it’s just mine to carry.

If we acknowledge only the happy things, maybe that’s all there will be.

Around me, mingling with carols from the speakers, rose the voices of people I’ve known my whole life. And above them, holding court, a single voice: my father’s. I heard him tell a group of people that I was writing a book about something that

happened in the past. “But if you ever hear about it, don’t worry,” he said, his words a little slurred by drink. “Alexandria’s the only one who remembers it.” On the stairs, I froze. My family had always been silent about the abuse. But no one had ever implied that it hadn’t happened. My father kept talking. This moment that had changed everything inside me had changed nothing for him.

A person can be angry and still feel shame. A person can burn with hate at his mama and still love her enough to want to be something that will make her proud. A person can feel overwhelmed by all he wants to be and see no way to get there.

Like so much else, these years before the murder come down to what it always comes down to with Ricky: What do you see in him? Do you believe that he’s trying? Is his the story of a man who tries over and over again to get treatment, trying to change and take his changed self back into the world and live a new life, who tries and tries but is ultimately undone by the bulwark fact of who he is? Or is his the story of a man who leaves treatment over and over again, who never really tries but always runs?

The man at the center of this trial, endlessly discussed and debated, endlessly documented and dissected in what will turn out to be nearly thirty thousand pages of documents, will remain an enigma in this way. What you see in Ricky may depend more on who you are than on who he is.

The Kansas sunrise is like nothing I’ve ever seen, a dappled spew of lavender and pink that reaches to the heavens and seemingly beyond, exploding the earth into an almost obscene show of beauty. I am nearly dumbstruck by it and by the thought that the people in the buildings we are speeding past have this beauty before them every day. How many different kinds of lives there are. The buildings, too, surprise me.

I am sick, I realize, and if I do not find a way to make myself better, I am going to end up married younger than I want to be and living somewhere I do not want to because the truth is right now I do need someone to take care of me.

He begins to dig and learns that the jurors at the trial took a Bible into the jury room and prayed together before deciding to sentence Ricky to death. That’s unconstitutional, but in Louisiana it’ll be a tough sell for appeal. Instead he has Ricky’s conviction and death sentence overturned on grounds never before raised in the state: Though Ricky is white, he was entitled to have blacks on his jury, and there were none. The state supreme court justices who rule in his favor practically hold their noses as they do so.

But I look at the man on the screen, I feel my grandfather’s hands on me, and I know. Despite what I’ve trained for, despite what I’ve come here to work for, despite what I believe. I want Ricky to die.

When summer ended, I returned to Boston. I finished law school. And then I left the law—how could I become a lawyer, after wanting the man to die? My opposition to the death penalty had helped drive me to law school. And I still opposed it—or thought I did. But how could I fight for what I believed when as soon as a crime was personal to me, my feelings changed?

But still I thought often of the boy the man had killed, Jeremy, and of that boy’s mother, Lorilei. That she’d testified for his killer stirred complicated feelings in me: admiration but also anger. Yet I’d run from that complexity, I knew. I was a coward and I still couldn’t remember the man’s name.

So it was the 2003 retrial—the one at which Lorilei had testified for Ricky, and that had concluded right before I arrived in Louisiana—that decided his fate. Why, then, had there been another trial after that, the third? He’d committed the murder. Who would have pushed for it? And how had Lorilei been able to fight for him when he’d killed her son—while I, despite my opposition to the death penalty, had been unable to? I hoped the court record would answer my questions. I hoped it would help me understand. But reading it, I soon realized that what I needed was everything that hadn’t made it into the words of the record I’d read. The emotions. The memories. The story. The past.