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By Root 464 0

wanted to make a peace with what remained of the family there. Years before, during the events that surrounded Gary, I had judged these people harshly and probably unfairly. I held them responsible for much of what happened, but then, that was an awful time, and it was as easy for me to come to bad judgments as it was for everybody else. I now understood that my uncle and aunt and cousins had done the best they knew how with a horrible, bigger-than-life situation. They had not asked Gary to come into their world and turn it upside down, to murder their neighbors and then go out in a self-appointed blaze of glory. He had ruined many lives during those few months. The time had come for me to remember that these people were family too.

Frank and I traveled separately. He wanted to stop and see some friends along the way, and I wanted to drive straight through. Shortly after midnight one night in July, I pulled into Ogden, Utah, and checked into a motel. I turned on the TV to catch up with the news as I was unpacking, just in time to hear a reporter say: “The execution went off smoothly, without any hitches, without any scenes.” I sat down on the bed, dumbfounded. William Andrews, one of the two men who had been known in the state as the Hi-Fi Killers (because they had tortured and murdered people in a stereo store), and who had been on death row at the same time that Gary was there, had been put to death by lethal injection. I had not known that his execution was planned, or I would not have come to Utah. I’ve become like my mother that way: When executions happen now, I run and hide. I can’t stand knowing about them.

Well, I’m truly back in Utah, I thought, and then went in the bathroom and threw up.

IF I REMEMBER RIGHT, I ALSO THREW UP THE NEXT NIGHT. I had driven down to Orem—the town right next to my mother’s birthplace, Provo—to visit the Sinclair service station where Gary had committed his first murder. The old station has been long since torn down, and in its place is a self-serve facility, with a cashier’s booth, a couple of islands of gas tanks, and a rest room building. I was relieved to see this—it meant I wouldn’t have to stand in the actual tiny lavatory where my brother had forced the young Max Jensen down on the floor and fired two bullets into the back of his head. Still, I found something haunting and unbearable about the place. It was one of those spots where history had ended up spilling onto the earth and taking lives. I sat in my car, studying the place, thinking what my mother had thought all those years before: How could you, Gary? How could you have done this to that man? I think I understand well enough what ruined my brother, what made him murderous, but I have never been able to make a certain leap—to imagine putting a stranger with a kind face on a cold floor and shooting him.

I sat there and thought about it until I couldn’t think about it anymore. I felt all the old shame and all the old shock. I drove into Provo and found a place that served good stiff drinks—which is not an easy thing to find in Provo. Then I went back to my motel and threw up.

A DAY OR TWO LATER I MET UP WITH FRANK and we went to see our Uncle Vernon at his home outside Provo. We also saw his daughters, Brenda and Toni. Ida had died years before, and Vernon was now remarried, to a gracious and caring Mormon woman. Brenda had lost her mate as well: John had died of cancer some time ago and was buried next to Ida in the Provo cemetery, not far from where my grandparents and George and Alta lie buried.

For me, the visit was like getting to discover people—people I had never really been close to before, whom I had not really spent any time with since the time I’d visited the farm when my mother brought me back to Utah for her father’s funeral. For Frank, though, it was something else. He knew these people well. He had grown up with them. Watching him talk with Brenda and Toni, I realized that he felt toward them as if they were his sisters. All these people liked each other, and I was glad to see it.

Afterward, driving