Family Murders: A Thriller (6 page)

"Gabe," Angela said under her breath.

There was no question he was the boy in the locket, but he looked so different now. It was the eyes, she thought. In the newspaper picture he was being pushed toward the open back door of a boxy sedan. There was a caption underneath:
Eric Fallows, the primary suspect in the rape and murder of his younger sister, Gabby Fallows.

"Jesus Christ." Whatever she had expected—an accident, negligence, coincidence—an incestuous pedophile sex murder wasn't it. Somehow she had thought the locket and its owner would be just the first clue in a long line of clues, part of a chain. But here was the connection, immediate and plain as day.

Eric Fallows. Gabe had never seemed like the right name, but this explanation was far worse than she could have ever imagined. Masculinizing and taking his own dead sister's name, the seven-year-old sister he had raped and murdered, seemed inexplicably sick. The thought of Julie sitting alone with him on a soccer field made her want to throw up.

The coverage was extensive. She had never heard of the case, but she wasn't from here. This was Ted's home town. They'd met while Angela was still in college and had moved back after Julie was born. Ted thought a small town was the right place to grow up. He'd never mentioned anything about this, but ten years ago would have been just around the time he had left himself. It was good he'd held back—knowing it now was hard enough.

For just a second, it seemed like enough. This was what she'd come for, to confirm or deny the lead that dropped into her gut every time she conjured up his smiling face. And here it was: confirmation. He was everything she thought he could be and more. Much, much more.

"I could leave now," she thought, and almost did.

Instead, she started reading. She read for a very long time.

8

November 11th, 1980, was a Tuesday. At just before four in the afternoon a call to 911 was placed by a person, later determined to be eighteen-year-old Eric Fallows, reporting the discovery of a body. Even then the town was small, and with nothing so big as a child murder to attend to, having not seen a murder in the previous ten years, the police—all of them—came as quickly as they could.

They found Eric Fallows covered in blood and catatonic, cradling his sister's body and sitting in a rocking chair on the front porch of his house. In early stories the details of the actual crime were sketchy, presumably the result of a small town's police force attempting to preserve the dignity of its citizens. It was reported that some veteran officers refused or were unable to approach Eric on the porch in his condition. Some threw up.

Eric was sent to the hospital, riding in an ambulance along with his sister's body. He started talking during the ride, insisting that he be taken to the police station so he could tell them who killed his sister. Officers met him at the hospital's front door, then took him to the station. Despite their strong advice that Eric wait until they got there to tell his story, both patrolmen heard it twice during the car ride. Eric was starting in on a third telling as they arrived. Once in an interview room he repeated the same story again and again—for detectives, for lawyers, into microphones, to anyone who asked, for anyone who would listen. He would repeat it for the last time at his trial.

The evidence against him was strong. A cursory search of the house turned up the murder weapon, a filet knife sitting in plain sight on the kitchen counter. It was part of a set that belonged to the house, and the blood on it was Gabby's. Two fingerprints were recovered, and they corresponded to Eric's right index finger and thumb. As far as detectives could tell, she had been assaulted and killed in her own room, then dragged down the stairs and out onto the porch. Some of the wounds were deep and violent enough to suggest the strength of a larger male. But if Eric had the power to carry the body then he could have inflicted the damage too. He had access to the knife and he had touched it, and he had been all alone in the house with his sister. It was clear means and opportunity.

As far as motive was concerned, semen recovered during the autopsy told detectives all they needed to know. Once it was typed and found to be the same blood type as the victim's brother, most of the police working the case started closing up shop, calling it a day. In the span of twelve hours Eric Fallows moved from potential witness to suspect to certain murderer.

As it turned out, there were no witnesses. The Fallows lived on a farm. The whole area was rural, but their piece of land particularly so, with a half-mile gravel drive and a house shielded on all sides by poplar and birch. Only Eric's word stood against the damning facts of the case: the blood; the murder weapon; the body. Besides, he was the only suspect. There was some speculation about why then he would call 911 on himself, but the average response from both government officials and the writers of editorials amounted to this: if you're crazy enough to rape and murder your own sister, then you're crazy enough to do a lot of things.

There was rampant speculation at trial about psychopathy and sociopathy and many other pathologies, including the influence of the horror genre and movies like John Carpenter's Halloween, which had come out only two years ago at the time. Whatever the spin, everyone agreed he was crazy. No one would say it in court—people were hoping for an execution—but there seemed no other explanation.

Two things counted toward a conclusion of sanity.

One, a lot of people had know Eric Fallows for a long time. He had always been considered a shy boy, but upstanding. By all accounts he had been devoted to his sister. The father was a lush, the mother long gone, and in many ways Gabby was the only family the boy had ever had. Though there seemed no other explanation for her death, most God-fearing local people prided themselves on being able to recognize evil, and resented the idea of being hoodwinked all these years by one of their own. Some flat-out refused to believe it.

And two, Eric Fallows never once wavered in his story. In all the tellings he gave of it—and between the cops and the lawyers and the press there may have been hundreds—details, small details, were always the same. Perhaps he had spent his supposed catatonia constructing a tale that would exonerate him, but to be unhinged enough to commit the crime and yet collected enough to fabricate the story seemed almost too terrible to contemplate. It implied a person who knew exactly what he was doing, while he was doing it, a man who enjoyed his work. Certainly he enjoyed the murder (in later articles it was described as a "sexual frenzy") and now he was putting as much flair and theatricality into his defense, joyfully pulling the wool down over they eyes of an entire town.

His story was this: the elder Fallows had been out of town for some time. Everyone described this as less than unusual. Gabby was in second grade, and every day she would be dropped off at the end of the driveway by a school bus at around two-thirty in the afternoon. Her routine was that she would walk the last half-mile to the house and then take care of herself for between ninety minutes and two hours, depending on when Eric would get home. He worked part-time as a welder and would usually be back by four-thirty at the latest.

On Monday, November the 10th, one day before the murder, a small gas leak was discovered in the welding shop where Eric worked. The shop was cleared out and the foreman started questioning employees because a gas leak would cause problems with permits. The facts pointed to one veteran employee, who insisted the work in question had been performed by the new guy, the kid, and pointed to Eric. Words between Eric and the foreman became heated. He wouldn't admit any fault, said some things he shouldn't have, got fired. Later, after the case was under way, the veteran employee admitted it had been his fault while being questioned by detectives. Eric had been telling the truth.

Those events added up to Eric walking home just like on any other day, only about two hours earlier. He walked home and was at the end of his driveway by two forty-five, half-expecting to run into Gabby there. In fact he did run into her, but she wasn't alone. In Eric's story, someone else was there too.

Eric said he had turned the corner and seen a cherry-red, two-door Dodge Challenger, idling, sitting halfway between him and the house. It was pointed down towards the street, and as he got closer Eric could see Gabby through the windscreen. She was sitting low, nearly swallowed up by the leather of the passenger seat, but he could see her face. She looked scared. Then came the soft grind of gears meshing as the transmission fell into first.

There's no way to tell what might have happened in a given situation, only what did happen. Eric was always adamant the car was about to take off. He was sure it was about to drive away with his sister, so he started to run. The driveway was narrow and he kept to the center of it, leaving no room for a vehicle to pass. He said he was sure the car would hit him, but in the end it braked hard. Standing with his hands spread on the hood, staring his sister in the face, the engine cut off. The driver's door swept open and a man in a leather jacket climbed out, a man Eric had never seen before.

The man looked at him. After the sprint and the certainty that something was wrong, now he wasn't sure. This guy looked so…normal. Could be be one of Dad's friends or something? Eric wasn't sure what to say, and so he had defaulted to a weakly mustered "What are you doing?"

"Just going for a drive."

"Do I know you?" Eric said. "Do you know my Dad?"

"Yeah."

But he was only about five or eight years older than Eric himself. It still felt wrong. "Get out of the car, Gabby."

"Stay in the car, Gabby." The man had his arm extended in an authoritative point. Eric's eyes followed the line, and once again he realized how scared Gabby looked.

"Hey, who are you?"

"I don't think she wants to get out," he said. "I think she wants to go for a drive. Have some fun." His face lit up in a wide smile.

"Look, I don't know you. I'm sure you think you're making a little girl's day."

"Okay, okay, I get it." He turned and walked around the trunk, hooked back to the passenger door, opened it and held it open. "Guess we can't go for a ride today."

Gabby took a tentative step out and looked up at the man, who shrugged. Seeing he wouldn't stop her, she ran around the corner of the door and right at Eric. In any other situation he might have crouched for the inevitable hug, but right now it felt too vulnerable to do anything other than stand tall. Gabby clung to his leg instead.

"I'm sorry, Eric." She started to cry. "I didn't mean to go in the car. I just wanted these. He said I could have them."

With her face still buried in the thigh of his grimy canvas work pants, she pushed her arm up at Eric, palm turned up, displaying a pair of pink plastic sunglasses. She started to shake.

"What happened?" Eric's kept his eyes on the man, who grinned and shrugged again.

"He said he was taking me on a trip," Gabby said. "He we would travel together. Forever. He said we would always be together and I would never have to come home. But I want to go home, Eric!"

Eric's face darkened. "Give me those." He took the sunglasses. "And run up to the house now. You didn't do anything wrong."

In a few moments the two of them were alone. Gabby was headed like a bullet for the house, still seemingly unable to move at anything less than a run. The man turned and shut the passenger door. Didn't say anything.

"What the fuck do you think you're doing?"

"The girl wanted to ride. Just giving her what she wants." He grinned again.

Eric took a few steps forward. "Here," he tossed the sunglasses, "take these and get off my property. Don't come back."

"Oh no, won't do that. I promise. But hey, it's a big world, right? Maybe I'll run into your sister out in it. Eric."

"If I see you anywhere near my sister, I'll—"

"You'll what?" The stranger cut him off and stepped forward. They were the same height, but Eric had never been a heavyweight.

"You'll do shit, that's what. The girl wanted to ride, Eric. She wanted it—that's what you have to get used to. They all want it. If I don't give it to them someone else will. It's not me you should be afraid of. I'm not the problem."

"You piece of shit. You come to my house—"

"She wanted it, Eric." He grinned again.

"—and talk to my sister—"

"She wanted to ride." He started to laugh. "They all want to ride." He threw back his head and let loose a kind of howl. "And there's nothing you can do about that."

But there was. Eric felt sure of that. Some piece inside of him sagged and gave way, soft and gentle as a sheet coming unclipped and fluttering to the ground. He hit him. Right as his laughter dimmed and his head dropped down on the level, Eric hit him right on the button, as hard as he could.

There was surprise in the man's face before he hit the ground. Eric knew the type, the kind of person who came from some bit of money, from the kind of family with time-outs instead of belts. He was the kind of guy that threatens to fight, but never does. He'd probably never been hit in his whole life.

Eric didn't come from that type of place. He hated people who did. You fire me from my job, you fuck with my sister, you come here, to my house—Eric realized he was kneeling over guy, hitting him again and again. The man was curled in fetal position. Eric kept hitting. He was crawling away towards his car. Eric grabbed an ankle and dragged him across the gravel, picked up a big rock, and stopped. Enough, he thought. Enough.

"Get the fuck out of here." Eric leaned down and picked up the plastic sunglasses lying in the dirt and tossed them through the car window. "Don't let me see you around here again." He turned and walked toward the house. He didn't turn around.

Later, after the engine had started and the car had sped away, there was a lingering afterimage on his retina: the man on the ground, arms crossed and extended in front of him, protecting against the coming blow. There was fear on his face. But there was also something more, a hybrid of hatred and shame—shame that he was laying in the dirt taking a beating. Shame that he had been reduced in stature, and hatred for the person who had put him in his place.