THE MURDERS

Beloved reader, I have a story to tell you. it is a story of change, of seeds being planted and growing, of wind blowing away debris and changing the landscape, of the impossible becoming possible.

The story is born of tragedy, of the evil, senseless taking of human lives I held most dear. My first response to that tragedy was to seal a stone over my heart, to take a rock in my hand to throw at the perpetrator, guilty as he was.

This is the story of how God rolled away that stone, loosened the fingers that gripped that rock, till it thudded in the dirt — and grew in its stead the green shoots of transformation and new life, renewal and change.

It is my story, but it is also yours, because God who loves us all and wrought this miracle in my life has the power to transform yours as well, to lead you into places you never dreamed you would go.

The story begins with a family straight out of an American fairy tale: A happy house on a tree-lined street with two parents and three girls, Jennifer, Jeanne, and Nancy. Jennifer was the oldest, I was the middle, and Nancy was the youngest. She was the bright, sunny one, the girl who loved to joke and dance and sing and tease. She was the girly one, the one who loved to cook and decorate and make crafty things. She was adored — by our parents, her sisters, her friends — because she was adorable. When Nancy was a senior at New Trier High School in Winnetka, Illinois, a school known for its theater and music programs, she landed the role of Maria in West Side Story. She was barely acting when she sang, "I feel charming! Oh, so charming! It's alarming how charming I feel!" She was right, after all: she was charming, and funny, and loving, and often deeply wise.

One of the people Nancy charmed was a Catholic boy from the South Side of Chicago, Richard Langert, the youngest of four boys. They had caught each other's eye when Richard was working for a company associated with my father's business. They ended up working together at the same company, Gloria Jean's Coffee Beans, Rich managing the warehouse and Nancy working in the office.

Richard courted and married her when she was young. They fit together like two pieces of a puzzle. He was a jock, a six-foot-three, 230-pound baseball and football player, the Gentle Giant, as he was nicknamed. She was the music and theater geek whose skin was as soft and pale as his was hard and tanned. He was strong and silent; she was the comedienne. He basked in the radiant glow she cast; she leaned on him for support.

They reveled in each other's company. Richard often had to work weekend nights at the warehouse, so Nancy made sure that Sunday mornings were always sacred — their time together. If you walked by their bedroom on a Sunday morning, as I happened to do one day when they were staying at my parents' home, you would hear the sound of their laughter floating through the door. Laughter was a familiar sound around them.

On the Friday nights when Richard was away at work, I would take the train from downtown Chicago to Nancy and Richard's cozy apartment on Tower Road in Winnetka, a few blocks from the Hubbard Woods train stop. Nancy and I would put on sweats and climb under a blanket on their couch, our backs resting on either end and our feet meeting in the middle, sharing a bowl of popcorn and a Hitchcock movie.

Their set point was happy. Their tastes were simple. I got to travel with them once, on a trip to Scotland not long before they were killed. The theaters and sights and restaurants of Edinburgh were fun, but what Nancy and Richard truly loved was small and quiet: the tiny northern town of Pitlochry. The stone walls and rosebushes, the churches nestled in the hills — a bit of Nancy's and Richard's hearts stayed there when we left. When we returned home, she showed me a photo she had taken of the town: "This is what heaven will look like," she said.

Nancy had no lofty career goals; what she wanted more than anything was to be a wife and a mom. She wanted a house with a white picket fence, literally. After their wedding, Nancy and Richard set out right away to have a baby.

She devoted herself to the project: she shunned junk food, avoided cigarette smoke, took vitamins, wished and prayed. When Nancy found out she was pregnant, she was over the moon. She rushed out to buy baby bottles, arranging them in a neat row on a kitchen shelf. She was twenty-five years old.

To celebrate the pregnancy, I gathered with Nancy, Richard, and my mother and father on the night before Palm Sunday in 1990 at a cozy Italian restaurant on Chicago's North Side. It was the perfect place — warm and fragrant; a big table set with candlelight; pasta, wine, and laughter. Nancy joked happily about gaining baby weight. My parents beamed contentedly; the grandchild they had longed for was at last to come. I gave Nancy a baby gift, a soft, hand-knitted baby sweater I had picked up on a recent trip. As we hugged our good-byes in the parking lot in back of the restaurant, I talked with Nancy about coming over the next day, after church. "See you tomorrow," I said as we parted. It is a phrase I have never spoken since: those words now seem to me a tempter of fate, a foretelling of doom. I had no idea as I said them to her, hugging her warm body and smelling the perfume she loved to wear, that it was her last night on earth.

After we left the restaurant, I returned alone to my apartment near the Chicago lakefront. My parents went back to their large suburban home. Nancy and Richard drove back to the townhouse they were staying in, owned by my parents, in one of the safest and most affluent communities in America, the North Shore enclave of Winnetka.

At that same moment, an intruder was using a glass cutter to break through the sliding glass back door of Nancy and Richard's home. Dressed in black and wearing gloves, he silently stacked the pieces of glass he had shorn away on the ground; he knew that smashing the glass would alert the neighbors, who might call the police. He entered the townhouse and looked around. He positioned a chair in the middle of the living room so that he could see every entrance to the townhouse: the front door, the side door, the back.

Then he sat down and waited.

When Nancy and Richard returned to the townhouse, their killer had a loaded gun in his hand: a .357 Magnum revolver he had stolen just two days earlier. Richard immediately began bargaining for their lives. He told the intruder that Nancy was pregnant. Richard offered whatever they had in the townhouse: jewelry, electronics, $500 in cash Nancy had gotten when she'd cashed a paycheck at the bank earlier that day. Police evidence technicians later found the money strewn on the ground, as if it had been tossed there.

Nancy and Richard's dog, a cocker spaniel named Pepsi, suddenly ran into the room and startled the intruder; nervously, he squeezed the trigger of the gun and fired a bullet into the living room wall. "All right," Richard told the gunman, "someone is going to hear that and call the police. Why don't you lock us in the basement and leave?" The killer appeared to assent. Gun still pointed at them, he handcuffed Richard and ordered the couple into the basement.

But he didn't lock them in and go; instead, he put the gun to the back of Richard's head and fired once, killing him instantly. Nancy watched in horror as her husband slumped to the floor. Then the killer turned the gun on her. She huddled in a corner, protecting her head with her arms. He fired two shots into her side and abdomen, the bullets ripping into her pregnant belly. Then he fled, leaving Nancy to die along with her husband and the child she was carrying.

A coroner estimated that Nancy lived for about fifteen minutes after that. Marks on her body and the evidence at the crime scene tell the story of what she did in her last moments.

Bruises and scrapes on her elbows and a trail of her blood marked her course: she dragged herself to a basement shelf and banged on it with a heavy tool, in a desperate call for help. The shelf was riddled with indentations. At some point, she must have realized that no help would come, that she was dying. Nancy dragged herself by her elbows again, to where her husband lay dead. Next to his body she wrote a message of love in her own blood: the shape of a heart and the letter u.

Love you.

It was the way she had signed letters to Richard over the years. She died there next to him.

The next day was Palm Sunday. I was suited up in my choir robe, unaware of what had happened the night before, holding a palm branch and a folder full of music in the back of Fourth Presbyterian Church of Chicago. I loved the church; it reminded me of the Presbyterian churches I had grown up in: big congregation, intellectually challenging preaching, glorious music. I was about to walk up the center aisle for the opening hymn.

Just as I was about to go in, I felt a gentle hand on my arm. Startled, I turned to see the church secretary.

"You have a phone call," she said.

"Sorry?" I replied. It made no sense; who would be calling me at church? "Um, could you take a message?"

"No," she replied firmly. "You need to come with me."

My heart started to pound. This was something serious. My mind raced: could it be my father? A heart attack, maybe?

The secretary led me to her office, where the receiver of her telephone was off the hook and sitting on her desk, waiting for me. I stood in front of the desk and reached for the phone.

"You need to sit down," the secretary said.

"I'm OK, really," I answered.

"Sit down," she told me. I obeyed.

My heart pounding, I pulled the receiver to my ear and managed a tentative "Hello?" My father replied, "Jeanne?" I breathed out with relief. It wasn't him.

But then my next thought was, if it wasn't him, who was it? My mom?

I wasn't prepared for the words my father spoke next: "Nancy and Richard have been killed."

Those words hung in the air as I tried to absorb them. Nancy and Richard have been killed.

"What?" I exclaimed. My body froze. "What do you mean, they have been killed?" It seemed impossible. They were young, in their twenties, full of life. How could they be dead? An image flashed into my mind: Nancy and Richard in their small car, swerving on the highway to avoid a semitrailer truck bearing down on them, smashing into an embankment.

"Someone killed them," my father said.

My reeling mind tried to collect and process what he was saying: found in their basement ... blood everywhere. ... Nancy and Richard were so good, so innocent. They had so much to live for. The thought that anyone would deliberately take their lives was inconceivable to me. How could anyone look into Nancy's shining eyes and mercilessly snuff out the light in them?

My dad told me to stay there at the church; Dr. Gilbert Bowen, the pastor of his church in Kenilworth, where Nancy and Richard were married, was coming to pick me up. He would take me to meet my family where they were gathered at the Winnetka police station.

I hung up the phone, stunned. Then I leaned back on the couch in the church office and started to cry. The secretary silently handed me tissues. We didn't speak; I couldn't. For the next forty-five minutes as I sat there and sobbed, waiting for Dr. Bowen to get me, my heart raged: Why? Why, God? Why them? She was only twenty-five years old. By the time he arrived, I had built up a steam of anger and indignation at God for allowing this sense- less slaughter. I got into Dr. Bowen's car and let loose a barrage of insistent questions. Where was Nancy now? I knew where her body was, lying in the townhouse, a crime scene roped off with yellow police tape. But where was she, her spirit? She must have been praying when she encountered her killer; why hadn't God heard her prayers to be spared, for her husband and baby to be spared? How could God let her life end before she had gotten to fulfill her dream of being a mom?

I don't remember what Dr. Bowen said in response. It could have been the wisest counsel in the world; I wouldn't have heard it. I remember only this: him waiting in the car outside my apartment on Chestnut Street, a few blocks from the church. We stopped there so I could get some belongings — toothbrush, pajamas, clothes — since I knew I'd need to stay with my family at my parents' home in Winnetka. I blindly parted some hangers in my closet and pulled out a dress. As soon as I took it in my hand, I burst into tears again. I was holding a black dress. I am picking out a dress for my sister's funeral, I thought.

Dr. Bowen took me to the police station, where I found my parents waiting. They were ashen-faced. My mother's eyes were wide with shock. She spoke slowly, in a voice that sounded as if it were coming from a distant cave; she moved as if she were under water.

The police came in and told us the cause of Nancy and Richard's death, which hadn't been certain until that moment: they had been shot. I pictured someone breaking into their home, maybe two men, pointing a gun in the dark and firing. I tried to fathom it, tried to understand what would cause someone to do such a horrible thing. As I did, I spoke for the first time since arriving at the station. It wasn't a thought I had formulated; it just emerged. I heard myself saying these words to the assembled group: "I don't want to hate anyone."

It startled even me: I don't want to hate anyone. I think I grasped at that moment that evil had intruded into our lives. I could not ignore it. It was too vast and terrible not to change me. It required a response. I knew, even then, that I could not allow that response to be hatred. That would take me away from who Nancy was, someone who loved, and move me closer to who the killer was, someone who could snuff out the life of another human being with the squeeze of a trigger. Whoever he was, I would not hate him.

The act was evil: how could he have looked into her bright eyes, heard her sweet voice, and fired the bullets that would put out that light, still that voice forever? And yet, I knew that if I regarded the person who committed that act as evil, if I let that person turn me to bitterness toward him, I would drift unmoored into an endless ocean of hate. Nancy was about love and life. She was carrying life within her body when she died. She would never have wanted hatred and vengeance to be her memorial. I clung to the thought of her, not the one who had killed her.

We left the police station and were allowed to go see Nancy's body at the townhouse. We were not allowed to see Richard — maybe because of the ghastly damage done by the bullet to his head. I identified his body later at the county morgue, not in person but via a photo. His face was almost unrecognizable. The morgue gave me some of Nancy's and Richard's belongings before I left, including the glasses Richard was wearing the night he was killed. They were covered in blood.

When we got to the townhouse, Nancy was lying on a gurney inside a dark plastic body bag. A police officer unzipped the top of the bag so we could see her face. It was frozen in death. Her eyes were open, looking upward; her lips were parted slightly. I could see dried blood in her mouth. I touched her body through the bag. It was not the soft, warm body I had hugged close the night before; it was hard, immobile.

My heart fell like a stone in water. Nevermore. Nevermore to see the light on her hair or smell her perfumed sweaters or touch her warm skin. Nevermore to hear her footsteps as she walked through a door. She was gone.

I had no thought of God in that moment; there was no God here, only emptiness, the terrifying void of death where life once was. I stared at Nancy's body, numb with disbelief. You could have sliced my flesh open with a knife; I would not have flinched, or even felt it.

We walked out of the townhouse into a night lit by the blinding glare of the media. News trucks encircled the house. Our every movement was being recorded as we left the place where Nancy and Richard took their last breaths. We were on the nightly news that night, and for many nights to come.

The next few days were a fog of grief. I didn't sleep that first night: when I closed the door to the guest bedroom in my parents' house, the darkness was too dark. It is like a tomb, I thought. Like being buried in a grave. I got up in the morning, looked in the bathroom mirror, and picked up a toothbrush, only to stop and hold it in midair. Why should I brush my teeth? I thought. Put on makeup, get dressed? I can never be happy again. I will never smile again.

In those first few hours I remember being less angry at whoever had killed Nancy than I was at God. I understood that people have free will to choose evil, that there are those among us who make that choice. I knew Nancy was a Christian; she would have been praying from the moment she walked in her home and saw a gun pointed at her. God, help me, she must have begged. Save me. Save my husband; save our baby. How could God have ignored that prayer, have let her die? It made a mockery of psalms like the ones I had grown up with, about how God is an ever-present help in trouble (Ps. 46:1), a refuge and fortress (Ps. 91). That seemed a cruel lie.