The Haunting Presence of the Inexplicable

One night, Patrick O’Hanlon and his wife, Dawn, stayed up till the early morning hours. Their daughter, April, had gone to bed hours earlier. O’Hanlon had suffered from chronic insomnia for months, such that he had taken to sometimes sleeping in April’s bedroom while she slept with her mother. He found this humiliating, but everything woke him: Dawn’s snoring, their cramped living conditions, stress from work. He had a long commute and was often so exhausted he’d fall asleep on the train. Once, Dawn had found him sleeping in a closet.

He’d retired from his career about a year earlier and the transition had been difficult. Only a handful of people knew that he was going through a hard time—Dawn, April, his mother, his boss. But no one realized how bad things had gotten. He suffered from severe depression—“major depressive disorder,” it would later be called—and he had begun to hear voices telling him there was “no way out” and he should “end it all.”1 He avoided any place where he might have to interact with strangers—elevators, for example. He repeatedly scoped out one of the railings at the apartment complex where his family was temporarily living to gauge whether it would hold his weight if he hanged himself. He imagined jumping off high places, driving into walls, swerving into oncoming traffic. He hoarded his medications. For weeks, Dawn had been calling her mother-in-law saying she was scared for her husband; Alice O’Hanlon began to call her son more and more frequently, worried that he might harm himself.

Suicide was everyone’s primary concern. No one knew the extent of his anguish until the night Patrick O’Hanlon went into his daughter’s room, where, as he suffocated her, he told her he was “sending her to Jesus.” She did not fight back. From there, he went into his own bedroom and bludgeoned Dawn before suffocating her as well. Then he drove around for a number of hours; he stopped at a convenience store. He stopped to buy a rope. He stopped to call a minister and tell him what he’d done.

Legally defined, familicide, or family annihilation, includes the killing of an intimate partner and at least one child. (Some researchers define it as killing the whole family.) As a crime, it is indisputably rare, though rarer still as an area of research for social scientists. I have found only a handful of researchers who even touched on it in their published work. One called it a mere “footnote” in violence studies.

The first known annihilation in the United States can be traced back to the mid-eighteenth century. Over the course of the next two centuries, such cases averaged three per decade. Then, in the 1990s, there were thirty-six cases. And between 2000 and 2007, sixty cases. And from 2008 through 2013, in research done by the Family Violence Institute, there were 163 cases of familicide that claimed a total of 435 victims. This did not include cases where children killed parents (patricide) or where a parent only killed children (filicide). From the time of the 2008 economic crash, we began averaging, says Neil Websdale, director of the Family Violence Institute and author of the book Familicidal Hearts, around three a month. In other words, while nearly all other forms of homicide steadily declined over the past several decades in the United States, familicide appears to be on the rise.

If batterer intervention programs are most often populated by working-class white men and minorities, and jails are overwhelmingly poor white and people of color, it is in familicide where white middle- and upper-middle class men dominate. The disparity between minorities and whites of course is most visible in prisons across the country, where minorities are disproportionately incarcerated for things that Caucasian men get away with all the time because they have the money or the connections or the education. Think Rob Porter, Eric Schneiderman, Donald Trump, and you’ll see white male privilege and economics at work. But in familicide, the reverse is true: the overwhelming majority of men who kill their entire families are white, middle or middle-upper class, often educated, often well-off, or well-off until just before the murders. Some of the better known incidents, like Scott Peterson, who’s on death row for killing his wife and unborn child, or Chris Watts, sentenced to life in prison in November 2018 for killing his wife, two daughters, and unborn son, dominate national headlines for months.2 Familicide is the one area of domestic violence homicide that often doesn’t seem to easily follow any of the other patterns. And perhaps because the crime is so unthinkable and so dark, and perpetrators almost always kill themselves as well, it is rarely studied by researchers. Websdale, in fact, who is also the director of the National Domestic Violence Fatality Review Initiative (NDVFRI), is perhaps the only researcher in the United States who targets his academic research at this act specifically.

Perhaps it’s obvious, but these are among the most difficult kinds of stories to report on. With both the darkness they inhabit and the emotional fortitude required for such reporting, it’s no wonder that stories of familicide are underreported. But the challenge is also simply practical: most perpetrators kill themselves. And those who do live tend not to want to talk to reporters.

Patrick O’Hanlon was that rare find for me: someone who lived after the act and was also willing to talk to me. I believe he had initially thought of our interviews as a way toward absolution, a way to try to explain himself to the world. He fit David Adams’s definition of narcissism in every way, even saying at several points how he believed the world was waiting for his words. But at some point, it must have become clear to him that absolution through me is impossible. He decided, after months of interviews, that he did not want to participate. We went back and forth on it. As a journalist, the ethics and practices are clear: one cannot go “off the record” once the record, as it were, is complete. I had maybe fourteen hours of interviews with him, several notebooks’ worth. I was within my rights to publish his story. At the same time, I am living and reporting in a country in which the media is deemed an “enemy of the people” by its commander in chief. We are insulted, threatened, sued (and, yes, even killed) for the work we do, and so such decisions cannot be made lightly. Admittedly, one also does not want to run afoul of a person who has killed his whole family.

So in the end, I felt my only option to explore the question of why these crimes are increasing was through his story, but heavily redacted. His name and the names of his family members have been changed, and other identifying information has been withheld. Much of the information I’ve included comes from court transcripts, police records, or other public documents.

Patrick O’Hanlon is an erect, wound-tight man with salted black hair; he wears jeans, a short-sleeved shirt, and work boots—the prison uniform. His glasses are held together by tape. He is clean-shaven and tucked in. O’Hanlon’s voice is quiet. Our talks take place in a windowless conference room at the prison where the walls are lined with inspirational posters of soaring eagles and fuchsia sunsets and waterfalls with messages to “believe” in the possibility of change, to never give up hope. Costco art. O’Hanlon does not wear shackles, but is accompanied by a guard, who remains in the room with us the entire time, along with the prison communications liaison and a videographer, who tapes every conversation. I interviewed O’Hanlon in five- and six-hour stints where he is serving two consecutive sentences for the murders of Dawn and April. O’Hanlon describes a small area, a kind of prison patio, where sometimes he can smell the countryside, occasionally see the tops of trees. “Prison’s not so bad,” he says. Compared to what? I wonder.

O’Hanlon’s father had had a small business that went bankrupt, so his mother supported the family. “He had to get money from my mom,” O’Hanlon says. “It was humiliating.” As a result O’Hanlon’s father drank too much and yelled too much and sometimes terrified his family with his outbursts. One time he pulled a knife on his family and threatened to use it on anyone who took a step toward him. O’Hanlon remembers standing up to his dad, until a neighbor came over and took his father away. (O’Hanlon’s mother claims not to remember the knife incident, and will say only that her husband yelled and sometimes threw things.) Still, O’Hanlon says, “I wouldn’t categorize my father as abusive, but loving.”

Like many children who grow up in homes with domestic violence—verbal or physical—O’Hanlon did not describe his father as violent. O’Hanlon fit the mold of the men I’d seen in David Adams’s group the night they discussed their fathers. He downplayed the violence of his father and talked more often about his mother’s behavior. “My mother was no angel,” he told me. “If she had been less provocative, more respectful of his position as a husband …”

I asked O’Hanlon one time what violence looked like to him. He described yelling and screaming, someone throwing furniture, the neighbors all hearing the ruckus. He cites the knife incident as proof that his father wasn’t abusive. “Another [more] violent man would have used that knife,” he says. O’Hanlon seemed not to realize that his house, to anyone outside, would have sounded just like his own description of violence.

The Family Violence Institute sits in a squat one-story building shared with the ROTC and a secondhand office furniture supply warehouse on the main campus of Flagstaff’s Northern Arizona University. The door stays locked with security cameras stationed outside because Neil Websdale has had death threats against him in the past, mostly from domestic violence abusers from cases he has consulted on as a criminologist.

Years ago, he began combing the archives for familicides in America for a course he was teaching when he came across the case of a man named William Beadle. Beadle had been a respected businessman who was facing bankruptcy in 1782, and subsequently killed his wife and four children with his hatchet. It piqued Websdale’s interest and so he began to comb through archives, finding more and more similar cases. “There seemed to be this link to these line of cases from the 1780s to straight through today,” Websdale said. Incidents where an otherwise upstanding man falls into extreme economic hardship and the only way out he can conceive of is to kill his family and then himself. Indeed, Beadle himself wrote of the humiliation of bankruptcy: “If a man who has once lived well, meant well and done well, falls by unavoidable accident in poverty, and then submits to be laughed at … he must become meaner than meanness itself.”

Websdale began to gather centuries of data from familicides all over the country, research that culminated in his 2010 book, Familicidal Hearts, in which he identifies two primary types of family killer: livid coercive, or those with long histories of domestic violence, and civil reputable, in which perpetrators are respectable members of society—like William Beadle—with no obvious histories of violence and who kill out of a warped sense of altruism. There is overlap between the two, but it is the latter that mystifies researchers. (Jacquelyn Campbell rejects these categories to some extent, arguing that domestic violence is always a shadowy background in cases of familicide, even if there’s a lack of evidence. She and Websdale have a friendly rivalry in which they often disagree with each other in the most polite way possible.) Civil reputable is the category most affected by, for example, an economic recession. It is certainly the category to which Patrick O’Hanlon belongs, the kind of well-respected, upstanding citizen who seems to just “snap” one day.

“What we miss in the ‘he just snaps’ theory is the accumulation of emotional repression,” Websdale says. Civil reputable killers tend to be middle or middle-upper class. Very often they are Caucasian. (Men make up 95% of all familicide perpetrators in the United States; Websdale’s research showed 154 men versus 7 women perpetrators between 2008 and 2013.) Their families tend to be traditionally gendered, which means the man is the primary support, while the woman takes care of the family and home. (This is not to say women don’t work, but rather they carry the emotional needs of the home.) Rocky Mosure is such an example. They’re often religious compared to the general population, with a fundamentalist outlook, and they can be rigidly constrained in their emotional range, all of which fit with Patrick O’Hanlon. Often they’re extremely socially isolated. Economics—loss of a job or rank or status, a pending bankruptcy—can be a catalyst for the final act of killing.

The altruism materializes with the idea that the family is being saved from a worse fate than the murder itself. A famous case from Florida in 2010, for example, involved an unemployed mortgage broker named Neal Jacobson, who killed his wife and twin sons on their seventh birthday; the family lived in a gated community in Wellington, Florida, and were on the verge of losing their home to bankruptcy. In another famous case, from Wales, Robert Mochrie killed his wife and four children and was facing bankruptcy. It appears that in both cases—and many others—the wives had no idea of the financial ruin facing their families. Such secrets are another hallmark of these killers, Websdale said. “I’m astounded at the level of secrecy in these men’s lives.”

David Adams rejects, to some extent, these categories of Websdale’s in part because he believes they frame the offender as “victim.” To Adams, the categories are less germane than his theory of narcissism. “If you have this outsized sense of yourself, and you suffer narcissistic injury, you’ll lash out,” Adams says. He’s speaking here, not simply of someone with a colossal sense of self-confidence, but with a recognized personality disorder. Such narcissists, Adams says, “live and die by their image.” When that image is compromised, say they’re discovered lying or a secret they’ve borne is discovered, they lash out and “impose” their solution on their partners and children. The solution, in extreme cases, is homicide.

The financial situations of many in Websdale’s civil reputable category suggest a link between what perpetrators perceive as economic catastrophe and the murder of their families. Indeed, in the 161 cases Websdale’s team identified between 2008 and 2013, 81 happened in 2009 and 2010. The Northeastern University criminologist Jack Levin looked at familicides in the first four months of 2008—seven cases—and found they had nearly doubled compared to the first four months of 2009—to twelve. (While we’re talking about small numbers here, we are also talking about extreme acts.) By then, the unemployment rate had also nearly doubled after the recession. “I think there is a definitely a relationship between unemployment and the DOW and the familicide rate, particularly with civil reputable offenders,” Websdale says. “I would describe it as a lag inverse relationship.”

James Gilligan, author of Violence: Reflections on a National Epidemic and the evaluator on RSVP at its inception, sees evidence of both homicide and suicide rates rising under economic duress in his research. “There’s a clear line,” he said. “If a man loses his job, he can feel castrated and emasculated and prone to suicide or homicide or both … It’s an apocalyptic mentality.” Richard Gelles, director of the Center for Research on Youth and Social Policy at the University of Pennsylvania, points to economic stressors as well, but warns that under our current social and political conditions things are likely to only get worse. “You can still play by the rules and lose your pension, lose your job, lose your house, and have 50K in college loans still to pay, and when you declare bankruptcy you still have to pay those loans,” he said. “It really is the perfect storm of screwing one section of the population.” The dissolution of the American middle class, he told me, is “a canary in a coal mine.”

There are others who find the economic angle more debatable. Marieke Liem, a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard who studies family violence, found a strong correlation between the unemployment rate and familicide from 1976–2007; but a second analysis covering 2000–2009 found the two only “weakly related.” Jacquelyn Campbell believes that economics and joblessness are “stressors” for all forms of domestic violence, but not stand-alone causes themselves.

After he graduated from high school, O’Hanlon applied to a prestigious university. He believed no one thought he could do it. His siblings didn’t take his aspirations seriously and sometimes ridiculed him. “I believed in God. I said, ‘If you’re real, help me.’ ” And God, he says, answered his prayer. He was accepted and he began his life with all the respect that bestowed on him.

Patrick O’Hanlon met his wife, Dawn, just after he’d graduated. He says she impressed him. She was ambitious, working full time while attending college at night, and she was desperately broke. O’Hanlon said it was love at first sight; he worried that she couldn’t pay her rent and felt he had a duty to help her. So he asked himself, “What would Jesus do?” And the answer he heard was to save her. The couple married shortly after they met. O’Hanlon says Dawn was always driven; she eventually earned her degree and got a job. After a few years, they had a daughter named April.

When they were still dating, O’Hanlon remembered how Dawn was often too busy to see him. One week she had a paper to write and O’Hanlon took the assignment and wrote the paper for her. He wanted to see her, he explained, and that paper was “getting in the way.” What about cheating? I asked him. He had often tried to insist that he was an honorable man. “As far as I’m concerned,” he said, waving away my question, “I’m not the one who handed it in.”

And then came September 11, 2001, the crash at the Pentagon. From the moment he learned of it, until later that same morning when he called Dawn, he says he doesn’t remember a thing. He walked about a mile and a half, but has no memory of the walk. He cites this as the moment “Patrick O’Hanlon began to lose his mind.”

Neil Websdale points to many possibilities for the increase in familicides. He says masculinity exacts a heavy burden on men who cannot accept feminism. Domestic violence theory points to an abuser’s need for power and control and asks why the victim doesn’t just leave. But Websdale argues that abusers are just as vulnerable in a sense by their own inability to live without that victim. “My question isn’t ‘Why doesn’t she leave?’ ” he says, “It’s ‘Why does he stay?’ Many of these men are terribly dependent on their female partners. They see them as a conduit to the world of feeling that they don’t inhabit, generally. Often these men have an inchoate sense of shame about their masculinity that they don’t understand.” Websdale calls it the great paradox of domestic violence, how an abuser can be both controlling over his or her partner, while simultaneously unable to control that dependency.

Gilligan agrees with Websdale’s assessment of changing gender roles. “Any time any major social change occurs—as happened with the civil rights movement when legal segregation ended—that produced a huge backlash, and I would say the changing sexual mores and gender roles is also producing a huge backlash. [We hear] some of the most bigoted, sexist, homophobic attitudes, even while the public in general is becoming more tolerant.” Gilligan believes violence should be approached as a public health problem, which in its most radical form means that he believes it is preventable. “We talk as if once people are grown up they should be able to deal with whatever happens,” he said, “but the fact is that human beings are so much more vulnerable and fragile than we recognize. Then we’re surprised when we see how vulnerable and fragile they are that they break.”

Certainly, we are living in an age in which progress and the attendant backlash that Gilligan cites are extreme. Plenty of men are spewing bigoted, racist, misogynistic rhetoric in manifestos before they kill—Dylann Roof, Elliot Rodger, Alek Minassian. At times our highest leaders in office today seem to normalize these killers’ brand of sexist and racist vitriol, their sense of entitlement. It’s hardly a secret that presidents from Thomas Jefferson to Ronald Reagan to Bill Clinton have all been accused of rape (in Jefferson’s case, of course, the accusations have long been confirmed). The difference to me compared to all of these other moments—from Jefferson’s pre-suffrage systemic rape to John Kennedy and Bill Clinton’s serial philandering and even to Donald Trump’s bleating misogyny—is not only that today’s heated rhetoric unleashes, in my view, extreme violence, mostly in the form of mass shootings—but also that such violence is happening at the same time the majority of women are very publicly and very vociferously demanding better. It is no longer assumed that we will endure harassment at work, or assaults on campus, or even endless womanizing from our partners. Women are fighting for more and better laws from our legislators, for more and better treatment from the judiciary and law enforcement. As I write this, thousands of women are marching on the steps of the Supreme Court after a white upper-class man accused of attempted rape has just ascended to the highest court in the country. Thousands of women are running for office, more than ever before, and historic numbers of women now serve in Congress. So are we living in an age in which progress will prevail as it has in other modern cultural and social movements? Ask me in twenty years. But I certainly hope James Gilligan’s theory—that progress follows moments of great social upheaval—is right.

Many researchers, including Websdale and Adams, also talk about the incendiary possibilities of extreme shame. In a now-famous TED talk called “Listening to Shame,” Brené Brown, who calls herself a “vulnerability researcher,” talked about the correlation of shame with violence, depression, and aggression, among others. She said shame is “organized by gender.” For women, it’s about a competing set of expectations around family, work, relationships; for men it’s simply, “do not be perceived as … weak.” Calling shame “an epidemic in our culture,” Brown cites the research of James Mahalik at Boston College, who studied what our ideas were of gender norms across American society. For women those norms involved “nice, thin, modest, and use all available resources for appearance.” For men, the norms included “show emotional control, work is first, pursue status, and violence.”

I called Mahalik for further context and he said it isn’t so much about individual men endorsing violence as it is about a general cultural response in the United States. He cited foreign policy and civil unrest and how our collective first response veers toward violence: police in riot gear in Ferguson, for example, or military action in the Middle East. Even in Hollywood’s portrayal of men, violence is “a prominent part of moviegoing,” he said. “Somehow we’ve equated violence with problem-solving.”

In O’Hanlon’s psychiatric records, shame comes up again and again. He is ashamed that he didn’t get promoted, ashamed that he’d been transferred to a job he felt ill-equipped to handle, ashamed that he couldn’t shake himself out of his despair. In one of his final therapy sessions before he retired, his treating psychologist wrote, He has learned that having a bit of humility is actually strengthening rather than weakening … Low risk for self-harm or harm to others.

If you ask O’Hanlon why he did it, he’ll say he does not know. If you ask him what advice he’d offer in terms of prevention, his answers vary. And I asked him every time I ever spoke to him. Here is a compilation of what he said over the course of our interviews: “Don’t take on too much. Don’t be prideful. Don’t be greedy for promotion, for financial gain. Don’t work so hard. Lower your expectations. Don’t be too ambitious. September 11th. We need to address how we treat mental illness in this country. We need to look at the medication they’re taking. Survivor’s guilt. I should have read the Book of Job. You don’t know how far I drive on my commute, what my life is like. Insomnia. When you have cancer, you can ask your friend for help. Not so with depression.”

The thing is, he’s not really wrong about any of this.

After September 11th, O’Hanlon worked in a supporting role for a federal organization. He also began to have trouble sleeping. O’Hanlon said the images of body bags3 and flag-draped coffins wouldn’t leave him. I asked him one time why he didn’t go overseas for his job and his normally placid demeanor erupted. “A lot of people ask me, ‘You’re a wimp. Why not go to Iraq? Afghanistan?’ ” he said, his voice suddenly loud in the conference room. “I was nineteen with arms pointed at us. I volunteered. The Berlin Wall was still up. I was out there with howitzers, tanks pointed at us in Germany. Don’t tell me I was a wimp. After 9/11 I was put on watch, on the highest level of security. All these men putting boots on the ground? They were supported by my office.”

O’Hanlon’s answer made it clear I’d tapped a sensitive area. When pressed, O’Hanlon later says no one called him a wimp to his face, but he sensed it. “A four-star general would say, ‘Don’t measure a soldier by the proximity of combat,’ ” O’Hanlon told me, adding, “Don’t tell me I’m not brave. I’m not a patriot.”

As O’Hanlon’s insomnia worsened, so too did his depression. He continued to see a psychiatrist, who prescribed many different types and doses of drugs, which O’Hanlon believes may have contributed to his stress. He also had cognitive behavioral therapy and attended general therapy on and off until he retired. On evaluation sheets from this time when asked if he was having suicidal thoughts, O’Hanlon always checked the “no” box, but he says that wasn’t true. He was having suicidal thoughts. But he didn’t want to mark that box, because he would have lost his security clearance and possibly his job. He couldn’t think how to support the family without his work. He knew he was sick, very sick, but he also knew in every practical sense that he couldn’t admit to it.

As his retirement approached, he says the stress began to weigh down on him. At the same time, April began rebelling. She felt stifled by her parents, overly controlled, always pushed to maintain her grades; she wasn’t allowed to sleep at friends’ houses or vice versa. One time, her parents caught her cheating and spanked her. Shortly after, the family moved to a small temporary apartment and put money down on a house that was still under construction.

Then O’Hanlon retired.

Sometimes the crime scene of a familicide shows a degree of care that is chilling and offers clues to the killer’s motivation. William Beadle collected the blood of his family in a receptacle so as to not make a mess, and then laid the bodies of his three daughters out on the floor, covering them with a blanket. Jacobson’s and Mochrie’s children were left lying in bed, covered up; Mochrie had mopped up the blood from his daughter’s wall and ingested weed killer before hanging himself. Another left gold coins on his family’s eyelids, presumably to help them on their journey into the next life. Websdale refers to this kind of symbolism as the emotional architecture of a case. “At the level of metaphor it speaks to the understanding of their plight that is misguided. This defies social science understanding; it requires a literary insight.” Instances where the use of a dumbbell as a murder weapon, for example, suggest to Websdale that a perpetrator is “killing with his masculinity. He may not mean to. It may be unintentional … an undeveloped understanding of what it means to be ashamed.”

In today’s interpretation of Christianity, God literally sacrifices his own son, the ultimate filicide, so that the world can be saved. The Romans may have committed the act of putting Jesus on the cross, but it was all part of God’s master plan. Other examples abound in the Bible. Abraham brought his son, Isaac, to the altar, prepared to sacrifice him, but God stopped him at the eleventh hour, the knife at Isaac’s throat, his arms and legs bound up. God said Abraham had passed the test, had proven his love. O’Hanlon refers to Isaiah 53:8–9: He was taken from prison and from judgment; and who shall declare his generation? For he was cut off out of the land of the living: for the transgression of my people was he stricken. And he made his grave with the wicked, and with the rich in his death; because he had done no violence, neither was any deceit in his mouth. In a religion in which family killing is not only rationalized, but also celebrated as the ultimate form of love, devotion, and faith, perhaps the connection is not a stretch today. O’Hanlon himself says it took three lives to save his: Jesus Christ, Dawn O’Hanlon, and April O’Hanlon.

He was, by his own admission, a “lukewarm” Christian until the murders. “I ask God, ‘Why? Why? Couldn’t there have been any other way?’ ” In his interpretation, the murders seemed to be a way for God to get O’Hanlon’s attention, to straighten up, to restore his faith in the Lord, to serve. He said God is working miracles through him, saving other prisoners. At several points he suggests I title this chapter “Triumph Over Tragedy.” Where is the triumph? I ask him. Because the tragedy part is clear. He says it hasn’t come yet, but it will. He tells me to research the pastor Rick Warren and his son’s suicide, or Creigh Deeds, the former congressman whose son stabbed him before killing himself. O’Hanlon sees mental illness and turning a negative into a positive as the link between himself and these others. But he also sees them all, himself included, as victims.

Why? I ask. I ask him this over and over. Why did you? He asks himself, too, fills in the blank for me sometimes. How could you? I ask even though I don’t expect O’Hanlon will ever be able to adequately answer. “God didn’t answer any of Job’s questions. He said, ‘Where were you when I created the world?’ God was redirecting Job’s sight toward the sovereign God that we can’t comprehend,” O’Hanlon says. “He’s telling me the same thing he told Job. Don’t focus on what happened; focus on what you can do for me.”

O’Hanlon says his insomnia worsened after he retired, and he began to have homicidal and suicidal thoughts. In a journal he kept from this time, his notes become increasingly desperate. Two months before the homicide, he wrote, Please help! five times. Two weeks later, Please spare my life. Please help. Lord help! Spare Dawn and April. In a psychiatric evaluation after the murder a forensic psychologist wrote, He described persistent, intrusive thoughts of killing himself, as well as killing his wife and daughter to spare them any further burdens and suffering. Mr. O’Hanlon believed he could overcome these thoughts on his own, and he did not want to speak them out loud lest they become more real.

For many men and women, retirement is a painful, difficult transition. And O’Hanlon took a menial job after retiring that he felt was beneath him. O’Hanlon himself once sent me a list of possible research areas—survivor’s guilt was one, suicide another—and his suggestions felt less manipulation than a man also in search of answers. Researchers use the term “multi-determined” to explain a situation in which there are potentially many causes for an event or action. Depression, insomnia, shame, loss of status. But Websdale rejects this term. “People think that if they can find enough variables they can do the odds ratio, put them into a formula, and spew out the cases where there’s very, very high risk, and I think that flies in the face of the complexity of the human condition,” he says. “At some level, we’re talking about the haunting presence of the inexplicable.”

O’Hanlon considered suicide, but the prospect filled him with shame and he could not envision leaving Dawn and April to live through the humiliation of such an act. Over the years, he had been prescribed medication: Ambien, Zoloft, Klonopin, Wellbutrin, Oleptro, Remeron, Paxil, Ativan, Lunesta. He admitted that sometimes he’d cut the doses and save half in a basket in his bathroom that Dawn didn’t know about. He couldn’t stand the mental haze that he felt when he took the drugs, and because, he said, “I knew I’d need them someday.”

He started to believe people were laughing at him. He didn’t go out. He sat in a chair at his house and stared at the ceiling, his head thrown back, his body limp. April would see him and say things like, “Cheer up, Daddy.” O’Hanlon’s mother told April to make her father feel better, and she tried. But every time she tried, he felt worse, guilty for making his problems—his delusions—her responsibility. He should have been strong enough; he was the man of the house. What was wrong with him?

The pressure increased. There was his daughter’s rebellion, his terrible commute to a new job he hated, his family crammed into a tiny living space, he no longer had professional status; the condo he and Dawn owned was underwater with the recession. At the same time, the builder on their new house was giving them trouble, not following the code, O’Hanlon said. They fought over the construction, and O’Hanlon says the builder eventually allowed them to pull out of the deal. Though O’Hanlon says they were financially solvent and the builder returned their down payment, court records state that he was tens of thousands of dollars in debt as a result. In the days before the murders, Dawn had taken to returning all the new furniture they’d purchased for their new home. “It was as if,” O’Hanlon says, “we were all doomed.”

O’Hanlon says he loved his family. Loved and loved them. “I did not hate them,” he says. “I had not one iota of hatred for my family the night before. No negative feelings, nada, nothing. I have no motive.” After the murders, O’Hanlon drove around with that rope looking for a place to hang himself, before realizing that he’d have to wait till nightfall. He swallowed more than a dozen Ambien before calling the pastor, who called the police. O’Hanlon was interrogated while he was so high on Ambien he holds no memory of it. (He was read his Miranda rights while under the influence of Ambien and maintains that his rights were violated.) After his arrest, he attempted suicide by hurling himself headfirst into the metal frame of his cell door. He passed out in a pool of his own blood, a six-inch gash in his head and a spinal injury that should have left him paralyzed. The fact of his survival—he required multiple surgeries—that he can move at all, in fact, is proof to O’Hanlon that God kept him alive for a reason. In a psychiatric consult at the time, O’Hanlon was reported to have rammed so hard into that doorframe that there could be no question about his intent. “If this isn’t mental illness, I don’t know what is,” the doctor wrote.

Each time I visited O’Hanlon, he sat down and stressed again that he was not the man, the murderer, he’d been painted to be. “As far as I am concerned,” he would say, “I have been corrected. Here I am at this correctional facility. And I have been corrected.” He has a radio in his cell. He is allowed thirteen books, and Amazon shipments are approved by the prison. There is a small track where he recently began running again after an ankle sprain finally healed. It takes him three minutes per lap; he does twelve laps. He calls himself a model inmate, by which he means that he does not get in fights and does not harass correctional officers. He leads a Bible study for his fellow inmates and often he helps them write letters and sends them to friends and family. He breaks the rules with his three-way calling, but this rule seems somehow not to count for him.

In O’Hanlon’s case, several experts point to mental health likely playing a role in his familicide, though a jury rejected his “not guilty by reason of insanity” defense. (Websdale’s team told me the familicides they’d found often used this defense strategy when the perpetrator lived, and it almost never worked; a fatality review team member also told me that she had yet to come across an investigation where there were not “unmet mental health needs.”) How much of this refusal to attribute O’Hanlon’s actions to mental health may or may not stem from mental health biases in this country? We tend to have easy empathy for people suffering mental health issues when they are universally beloved and when their actions affect only themselves (a Robin Williams, say), but our empathy falters, perhaps rightly so, when those actions affect the lives of others, such as what happened with O’Hanlon.

James Gilligan says we ought to treat people like O’Hanlon as research subjects. “We must be able to look horror in the face if we are ever to understand the causes of the human propensity toward violence well enough to prevent its most destructive manifestations,” he wrote in Violence. “Suicide is no solution to the problem of homicide; both forms of violence are equally lethal.”

One of the first questions I ever asked O’Hanlon was whether or not he thought he was going to heaven. “Absolutely,” he said. Dawn and April, of course, were already there.

Then he told me how God keeps a jar for all the crying we do in our lifetimes; our tears collected and held by Him. He paused a moment, then said, “I think when I go to heaven, I’ll be welcomed with open arms.”

Though he also believes his own grieving will never end. He says he still cannot look at pictures of April. Recently, he noted, she’d have graduated from high school. “As I’m jogging around the yard or eating, I pray I could be sitting down with my family, you know,” he tells me, but he begins to cry a little and he shifts in his seat and tries to right himself with his mantra: “I have a choice. I can go forward or back; I can be negative or positive, and I choose …” He cannot finish. He throws his head back violently, then sobs, his arms straight out in front of him, hands clenched in a prayer or a fist, I cannot tell. I do not interrupt him, but it is an unbearable sound, a sound I’ve never heard come from another human. He howls and howls, trying to hold it in, regain control, his body in an absolute visible war with itself. When our interview finishes that day, I sit in the stillness for a minute with the prison liaison and the videographer, and none of us speaks; it is as if we have been dragged to a place so dark and so full of misery that it will take no small effort to claw our way back into the daylight.

And it strikes me that this is why O’Hanlon agreed to talk to me at all, to try to find some way to live with himself in this world. The tutoring, the letter writing, the Bible studying. Clawing his own way out of the darkness just enough to get through each hour of each day. This is the state of purgatory in which he will reside in this life: trying to extricate his pain through a thousand small gestures and kindnesses and prayers from that one colossal, horrifying moment.

There is a narrative that emerges with Patrick O’Hanlon, of not giving up, of determination and persistence. It is a peculiarly American narrative of hard work and defying rejection before, finally at long last, the inevitable success that was promised all along. But what if the key to all this isn’t hard work, isn’t dogged determination, but rather resilience in one’s own failure, the grace to accept defeat and move on? What might have been had Patrick O’Hanlon chosen another path? Gone into real estate? Become a software engineer? It’s the kind of question most of us ask about our own lives. How decision X led to action Y. A chance encounter. A flip decision. A left rather than right and it might have all unfolded so, so differently.