The Fact of a Body: A Murder and a Memoir

by Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich

All of these possible causes are causes in fact. The causes in fact are endless. The idea of proximate cause is a solution. The job of the law is to figure out the source of the story, to assign responsibility. The proximate cause is the one the law says truly matters. The one that makes the story what it is.

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. Is what happens in a family the problem of the family, or the problem of the one most harmed by it? There is a cost to this kind of adversarial individualism.

And I understand that. I will prove myself by drinking the gross thing, doing the hard thing. It will be years before I understand the value of softness.

But I’ve made other friends here, idealists like me. They’re the reason I worry about what I’ll be asked during the job interview. Because after a year of law school and our late-night debate sessions, I am starting to understand that I really don’t believe my opposition to the death penalty—or anyone’s support of it—comes down to reason. It’s still that simple, basic conviction I’ve always had: that everyone is a person, no matter what they’ve done, and taking a human life is wrong.

This job will be my test. If I really oppose the death penalty, I must oppose it for men like him.

Ten years later, he’ll still be confessing, unable to stop telling this story different ways. He casts about for stories as if he’s casting about for an identity, trying to figure out who he is and who this means he’ll be.

His record, too, will make him a rarity. In two decades in the South, and after more than three hundred death penalty cases, Clive will lose only six clients to execution. For his efforts, he has an Order of the British Empire from the queen herself—a medallion he keeps strung around the neck of a plaster cast of Zeus, mounted on the burgundy wall of the home he and his wife, Emily, have made not in the well-heeled Garden District of New Orleans but in the Lower Ninth Ward. It is still years before Hurricane Katrina will ravage the area. The Ninth Ward is no longer the more rural side of the river it began as, no longer the place of backyard farms. Crack cocaine has flooded in, and with it gangs. The streets of the Ninth still lack functioning streetlamps. In a city with a famously high murder rate, the Ninth has the highest. In choosing to live in a place many are left to live in by circumstance, Clive is a man not just dedicated to his work, but defined by it.

Because of legal skirmishes, because of fights over motions and venues, because the swift wheels of justice are in fact creaky and slow and no one can identify whether they are justice at all, Ricky’s case will take years to resolve. Which gives me time to arrive in Louisiana.

“But Clive is still in Texas, being the awake lawyer in the sleeping lawyer case.” We laugh, a little awed. That case is famous right now, one in which a condemned man has appealed for a new trial because during the original, when he was sentenced to death, his lawyer actually fell asleep during the proceedings. All of us at the table are from northern schools. All of us at the table are from the North. Until now, that case has had the feel of a story from far away. But we’re actually here.

I came here to help save the man on the screen. I came to help save men like him. I came because my ideals and who I am exist separately from what happened in the past. They must. If they don’t, what will my life hold? 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.

But how could I fight for what I believed when as soon as a crime was personal to me, my feelings changed? Every crime was personal to someone.

Because it is not possible to let the past remain a haunting.

When my sisters gave birth to their children, each time it seemed a miracle that someone I had known for so many years had made something so new, so a part of them and at once so different. We’d grown up together but we’d had such different lives, such different troubles. The differences had long driven us apart, the way it had once been for Richard and Lorilei. But there, in each new baby, was a chance at a new beginning.

The week Dahmer was sentenced to life, Ricky killed Jeremy.

There were at least ten known sex offenders living around Iowa, ten whose names I will find in the records. Ten whose names the Louisiana parole officer actually gave Lucky and Dixon before she gave them Ricky’s name. It wasn’t as neat as the story was told. Of course it wasn’t. One of the ten actually showed up to help search for Jeremy. The cops turned him away—and meanwhile Ricky served coffee to the searchers and watched the children play in his bedroom, shooing them away from the closet door.

All across the nation it is like this. Laws passed in blusters of well-meaning. Laws failing, because so rarely do the notifications work and so much of the burden falls on already burdened parents. You could make yourself sick worrying about who was on the registry and who’d moved into your town, you could drum those people out of your town or under a highway overpass, and half the time you’d be worrying about someone who had gay sex a few years before it was legalized in an area, or someone who slept with his underage girlfriend when he was barely of age himself, or someone who did something awful thirty years ago and had been all right since. In some places even prepubescent children will end up on the registries, gone too far in schoolyard games of doctor. And even then you’d only be worrying about the people you knew to worry about. About those someone had called the law on. Not the coach, the best friend, the babysitter, the stepfather, the uncle. The grandfather. Twenty years after these laws begin, sexual abuse rates won’t have dropped at all.

The trial was about the murder, not the whole story. But is an act ever really only about itself? Does any element of this story occur in isolation?

It never quite worked. I could never get hold of the idea of her. She was gone, unimaginably gone. I was alone in my family. I couldn’t imagine myself being otherwise. But in Ricky’s story, I started to see her everywhere. In Cole’s growing up in Jeremy’s absence. In the trunk Bessie kept in her closet. In the photograph of Oscar that Ricky carried, making the boy into his imaginary friend. Oscar wasn’t imaginary. He has a grave. The fact of a body. But where? I decided I had to ask.

The next day, a defense psychologist describes everything Alcide would say to Ricky when he was angry. That Ricky was worthless. That he was queer. That Ricky molests children, the psychologist says, may be a sign that he was molested himself. Most pedophiles were molested. That isn’t true. It’s repeated a lot, but it isn’t true. Most pedophiles, like most other people, weren’t molested. And there’s no indication that people who were molested become pedophiles. What is true is that among pedophiles, a greater percentage were molested than the percentage of people in general who were molested—but even then, it’s not a huge increase. I want to argue with this so badly—but I know why I do. Because I was molested. How damned, how damaged, am I doomed to feel? My grandfather’s words come back to me: “When I was a child, it happened to me.”

Lorilei has said that she came to empathize with Ricky because she saw herself in Bessie. She couldn’t take away another woman’s son.

The question in Palsgraf, the dissenting judge said, isn’t really about knowledge of the fireworks. It’s where you want to start the causal chain. Once you decide that, you have decided the meaning of the whole story. Palsgraf is a civil case. Proximate cause, as a formal named concept, doesn’t exist in criminal law. Criminal law doesn’t care where the story began. But how you tell the story has everything to do with how you judge. Begin Ricky’s story with the murder—and it means one thing. Begin it with the crash—and it means another. Begin with what my grandfather did to me and my sister. Or begin when he was a boy, and someone did it to him.

What I fell in love with about the law so many years ago was the way that in making a story, in making a neat narrative of events, it finds a beginning, and therefore cause. But I didn’t understand then that the law doesn’t find the beginning any more than it finds the truth. It creates a story. That story has a beginning. That story simplifies, and we call it truth.

Whatever happened in the past, the story wrote right over it. The story became the truth. What you see in Ricky killing Jeremy, I have come to believe, depends as much on who you are and the life you’ve had as on what he did. But the legal narrative erases that step. It erases where it came from.

The verdict was a legal contradiction. So I thought that, faced with the question of whether Ricky should live or die, the jury had refused to decide. But I have realized that I am trying to rescue a place for the un-neatness of everything that happened. Lorilei didn’t forgive Ricky, but she still didn’t want him killed. My grandfather did everything he did, and he was still my grandfather. The law—with each side’s relentless pursuit of one story—has never known what to do with this complicated middle ground. But life is full of it. I see the jury’s verdict differently now. While the verdict the jury voted is legally incoherent, what strikes me now is its elegant, human beauty. It says what cannot be true in law, but can only be true in life: that Ricky is both responsible and not. The law the jurors were presented with didn’t have room for this middle ground. They created it, as though they opened up space in the law, inventing a category that doesn’t exist. Ricky.