Killed first, made to look like suicide

ROSEMARY HARRIS: I was at a tennis match a few weeks back when I got an email with the above subject line Killed First, Made to Look Like Suicide. I showed it to my friend and we agreed that Killed First would make a good book title (unfortunately not for my WIP.) Even before I read the posts - which may have been on a SINC listserv -I knew to what they wewre referring.

Following is a pastiche of a few articles that ran in newspapers this summer concerning the death of a southern California woman.

San Diego area authorities have concluded that the July hanging death of the girlfriend of the CEO of drug maker Medicis Pharmaceutical Corp. was a suicide.
At a news conference, San Diego County Sheriff Bill Gore said Rebecca Zahau, who lived with Medicis Chief Executive Jonah Shacknai in Coronado, Calif., died by suicide, not by homicide. The 32-year-old woman was found July 13 hanging naked from a small bedroom balcony at their home with her feet and hands bound.


Her death was all the more shocking because it happened just two days after Shacknai's 6-year-old son, Max, suffered fatal injuries in a fall down a set of stairs at the home.

I don't pretend to know more than the Sheriff and at the risk of sounding heartless, I think if I handed in a story like this to my agent or editor I'd be told it was wildly implausible.

Wouldn't there be some drugs at the home of a pharmaceutical executive that could get the job done in less dramatic fashion?

Naked? What woman over thirty wants the entire planet to see her naked body - especially after the effects of a hanging which I gather from movies is not particularly pretty or tidy. Hands and feet bound? Let me put on this noose (made of sheets, I believe)tie my hands and feet and hop over the balcony?

This doesn't strike me as someone overcome with remorse over the accidental death of a child in her care who - if I were writing the story would probably take a bottle of pills with a bottle of vodka and simply slip away.


RHYS BOWEN: I'm always fascinated by real crimes and how completely dumb and clueless the real police departments can be. How do they think the order of this death went? Strips. Binds feet. Hops across to balcony. Puts noose of bedsheets round neck before binding hands. Hops off balcony?? Just not possible and so stupid too. Of course it was a homicide and one designed to deliver a strong message to her boyfriend who hasn't been supplying drugs to the right people etc. Death of son should also be investigated as homicide. What they need is a team of smart mystery writers, ready to travel around the country to help out clueless sherriffs departments!

HALLIE EPHRON: This news story so unbearably sad. I can't even imagine the level of despair that would lead someone to kill herself in this way, but losing my six-year-old son could do it. True stories are often so sad and incomprehensible that they make lousy fiction.

RO: The death of any child is heartbreaking ..although this was her boyfriend's son not her own and there's been the suggestion that she was at fault and perhaps her death was in retribution. I hadn't read about the possibility of drug dealers being involved.

What do you folks think? Would you write this story? Have you already?

In Her Wake---A Memoir and A Mystery

“A fearless memoir of loss and grief….veering between ‘being a detective and... a realist.
Publishers Weekly Starred Review

HANK: A delivery announcement on elegant paper stamped with the date of a daughter's birth; a tarnished silver baby cup, dented at the rim; a lovingly hand-knitted sweater; a school committee flyer; hurried grocery lists. This is all Nancy Rappaport had left to remember her mother--a woman defined by her absence.

In 1963, Nancy Rappaport's mother took a fatal overdose after a bitter public divorce and custody battle. Nancy was just four years old and the youngest of six children. Growing up in a blended family of eleven children after her father remarried, Nancy was bewildered about why her mother took her own life and left her behind.

Years later, encouraged by her own children's curiosity about their grandmother, and fortified by her training as a child psychiatrist, Nancy began to investigate her mother's life and the mysteries surrounding her death.

Nancy Rappaport, a child psychiatrist, is an assistant professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and Director of School Programs at Cambridge Health Alliance. Her new book is In Her Wake: A Child Psychiatrist Explores the Mystery of Her Mother's Suicide. She says about her memoir, "Like any good mystery, this was a story that needed to be told. It was larger than me. It had a momentum to it . It's the most meticulous, painstaking, most important thing I've done."

Nancy and I met at a booksigning..and after I heard her story, I instantly wanted you all to hear it, too. Although its non-fiction, it's about as mysterious as life (and death) can get. Turns out: she had a haunting mystery in her own life--and as it turned out, it was one she was brave enough to try to solve. And where did the clues come from? That's what she'll reveal today.

NANCY: One morning during breakfast Phyllis, my father’s wife, phoned me. She told me that she was taking on a difficult initiative of her own making, which was to do the right thing, and she wanted to distribute some of my mother’s things to me and my siblings. She suggested that I might be too busy to come over on such short notice. But I had never even seen my mother’s handwriting before.

When I arrived, Phyllis had a blue trunk with brass hinges open and was meticulously organizing its contents into different boxes for each of my siblings—photographs, drawings, letters, all kinds of materials that my mother had saved. Seeing these objects stunned me.

“Where did the trunk come from?” I asked. Phyllis could see how momentous this was for me, but she focused on the task at hand. She explained that my mother’s friend Peggy Melgard had dropped it off at my father’s office several years ago when she moved from Boston to Florida.

I learned later from Peggy that for almost forty years Peggy herself had guarded the trunk. Alex, my mother’s new husband at the time of her death, had asked Peggy to keep some of their possessions. But Peggy never heard from Alex again, and she began to have the nagging feeling that my mother’s children would want the trunk. Peggy had known my parents before they were married and they saw each other socially as a couple for many years. After my father and mother divorced, she became an even closer friend of my mother.

Here was evidence of a life I did not know—small calendars with handscrawled appointments, a high-school yearbook, report cards, school awards, newspaper clippings, and chatty letters from her friends.

A photo of my mother cradling me as a baby in her arms. A photo of my mother and father, their eyes filled with laughter. Her handwriting—big and full. I sat down on the floor and picked up a letter that Phyllis had placed to the side of the trunk. It was from Peggy.

To the Rappaport Children:
Your mother cherished these photos, cards, notes, and drawings. I thought you would like to have them. Also, in the trunk, is a novel Nancy was in the process of writing at the time of her death.
The notes from those of you old enough to write at the time of her death show how much you loved her. I hope you still hold happy memories of her in your hearts as I certainly do.

Fondly,
Peggy

I looked up at Phyllis. “Where is the novel?” I asked, worried. She burst into tears and confided that she was reading the novel. She wasn’t exactly sure what to do with it, but she thought she would give it to my sister Judy, whom she considered the family historian. Finally, she sighed heavily and trudged up the staircase. A few minutes later, Phyllis came down not only with the novel, which she explained was over 400 typewritten pages on legal paper with my mother’s handwritten corrections in the margins, but also with a few of my mother’s thin journals.

As she handed me four bulky black folders stuffed with legal-sized paper, I sensed that she was relieved. She told me that she had a deep and abiding relationship with my father, and she wanted me never to use the material in any way that would hurt Dad. Not knowing what I was promising, quietly resenting that I was being asked to be honorable, and worried that the novel might be destroyed, I quickly agreed. It was an irresistible chance to know my mother’s mind. At that moment, I would have agreed to almost anything.

(Nancy's website--with some of the photos--is http://www.inherwake.com/ )