Prior to Morgan’s crime, Waukesha was considered one of the best places for children to grow up. Crime there was minimal. Less than one murder occurred per year. In the weeks leading up to the stabbing, residents phoned the police to report the following emergencies:
• A loud stomping noise in an apartment.
• The theft of one bicycle, which had been replaced with another bicycle.
• A broken “accent light” for an American flag.
• The discovery of a suspicious amount of dried blood (the caller was specifically concerned that there were not any animal carcasses nearby), which turned out to be dried paint.
Downtown, Germanic architecture dominated Main Street. Ten-foot-tall fiberglass sculptures of guitars painted by local artists commemorated guitarist Les Paul, Waukesha’s most famous former resident. Across from the Joke Shop, described by its owners as “Good, Clean, Family Fun! Jokes, Pranks & Magic For All Ages! Gospel Magic & Christian Entertainment!” sat the Little Swiss Clock Shop. The city’s total population hovered at seventy thousand. The median salary was $67,000. Most people worked in health care, education, or government—or at Husco International, a manufacturing plant—and could afford to buy their own home.
Growing up, Morgan took hikes with her dad through the nearby Kettle Moraine National Forest. Matt climbed Lapham Peak with her on his shoulders. When they rested at the public picnic tables, Morgan served him make-believe lunches. Back home, they crossed the street from their condo to David’s Park. Morgan played on the swings. She ran around the open fields. She loved the outdoors. Sometimes she wrapped her arms around tree trunks and squeezed. Matt called her a “tree hugger.”
When it was warm enough, Matt and Morgan sat on the beach at Minooka Park and built sand castles. On Halloween, they went to “Spooka Minooka”—where the park was transformed with fake spider-webs and jack-o’-lanterns—and stood in line for the haunted house, but whenever it was their turn to go inside, Morgan shrank back into the long queue of people and found some excuse to turn back.
One Halloween, an elderly Spooka Minooka volunteer saw Morgan bouncing in and out of line for the haunted house and asked if Morgan wanted to peek behind the scenes. She led Morgan and Matt under the haunted house, where the employees made their spooky entrances through trapdoors. “That werewolf is my grandson,” the volunteer said. “And over here is my husband—at the end in the big witches’ cauldron. This is where he crouches down. We had to put a stool in here a few years ago for him.” She hoped to convince Morgan that werewolves and witches were fake. But Morgan wasn’t so sure. She pulled Matt away to look at the Halloween decorations. Fake spider-webs that looked like gray cotton candy. Tiny plastic skeletons hanging from trees. Smiling jack-o’-lanterns and friendly-looking witches. All of it was just pretend.
At home, Morgan waited on the couch while Matt slipped outside to smoke a cigarette under the moon. She asked him where he was going, knowing he wouldn’t answer except to say, “I’ll be right back.” It seemed important to him that the cigarettes be kept a secret from her. So for his sake, she pretended not to know.
But Morgan knew her dad was different from other dads. He took good care of her, and she loved him. But he cried a lot, and sometimes he looked scared.
“What’s wrong with you?” she sometimes asked.
“I’ll tell you when you’re sixteen,” he promised.
“It was like an arbitrary number,” Morgan said later. “Sixteen this, sixteen that. I guess when I turned sixteen they were planning to dump it all on me.” She bowed her head. “Obviously it didn’t work like that.”
In Waukesha, summers were breezy and warm, all green grass and morning dew. Autumn crept through the trees like a fire, turning leaves bright yellow, orange, and red. Winters averaged two feet of snow, with temperatures plummeting as low as –30 degrees Fahrenheit with the windchill. But it was worth it for spring, when cranes nibbled the melting snow and badgers emerged clumsily from their river dens.
Matt was born and raised in Waukesha. His family believed firmly in the healing powers of Jesus. But after he received a schizophrenia diagnosis as a teenager, Matt’s mental illness occasionally became so debilitating that his parents supplemented God’s love with periodic visits to the psych ward. At the time, antipsychotics were crude, blunt instruments that left many schizophrenia patients unable to perform daily functions. When Matt’s mother came to see him in the hospital, her visit sparked about as much emotion in Matt as when the hospital janitor entered Matt’s bedroom to empty out the trash can. Whether to continue antipsychotics became a question of what kind of life Matt wanted to lead. On the one hand, when he did not take medicine, Matt feared his reflection. Satan stood behind him in mirrors. But to make the devil disappear also meant sacrificing joy.
Living medication-free promised a life of deep feeling. Matt experienced disabling social anxiety. Depression settled on his body like an avalanche of sand. But in between waves of panic and sadness stirred moments of such epic beauty. At nineteen years old, he stopped the drugs and moved into a trailer on his parents’ property to get back on his feet. He reassured himself that he knew the difference between hallucinations and reality. Anyone could see that he was not one of those men you spotted in big cities, stomping around and looking dirty and having conversations with the sky.
And Matt was lucky, in that sense. He felt everything. The ups and downs of human existence struck him with equal intensity. Stress consumed him, but so did love.
Matt’s parents owned multiple properties in Waukesha. But they were careful with money, keeping detailed ledgers of things they bought for Morgan as a baby—gifts that most middle-class parents would consider to be a standard part of becoming new grandparents. Like many conservative, religious men, Matt’s father expected to be in control, and his family catered to him. At dinner, he asked for a drink by commanding his wife with a single word, “Milk!” and she would fetch it immediately. Whether Matt was the first in his family to struggle with a mental illness was impossible to know, because the family never talked about it.
When Matt’s Mormon parents found out that Angie was pregnant two years into their relationship, they insisted the couple return to Waukesha and be wed as soon as possible. Matt didn’t need much prodding. He felt like a lucky guy. Angie was so beautiful that the cashier at the gas station near their apartment called her Matt’s “New York City girlfriend.” For Angie’s part, Matt stood out from her other boyfriends because he was kind and sensitive, with a larger-than-life sense of humor. The wedding took place in Angie’s parents’ dim living room, with the blinds partially closed, when Morgan was around three months old. Angie looked gorgeous in her simple gown. Matt’s beard was shaved into a chin strip. His long black hair fell almost to his shoulders.
After getting married, Angie enrolled in a technical college, and Matt became Morgan’s primary caregiver. Angie got a job as a neurodiagnostics specialist, monitoring machines that measured a patient’s neurological functioning during operations. She commuted up to one hundred miles on short notice to assist on brain and spine surgeries. To bring in extra income, Matt worked part-time as a janitor in one of his father’s office buildings. They purchased a condo at Sunset Homes for $78,000. Matt pushed Morgan’s stroller down familiar streets from his childhood. Later she brought home report cards signed by teachers who had taught him in school.
As the family’s primary earner, Angie often left the condo before sunrise and did not return until after Morgan’s bedtime. Over time, she became intimately familiar with the sight of the human brain. Yet she never guessed what was going on in Morgan’s head—all those voices, reverberating in her little skull like trapped birds.
Being a full-time dad gave Matt’s life meaning and acted as a stabilizing force against his schizophrenia. People with untreated mental illnesses can self-isolate. Their self-care and sleep hygiene fall to the wayside. But fatherhood forced Matt to stick to a schedule, to interact with the outside world on Morgan’s behalf. He made her healthy snacks, scheduled activities for her outside the home, and adhered to a strict bedtime routine that included lots of books. Every night, he sat on the edge of her bed and read Harry Potter novels upside down because he knew it impressed her. He drove her to school and helped her with homework. When Matt took her with him on janitorial jobs, Morgan pushed his vacuum cleaner down long carpeted hallways in empty office buildings, pretending to drive it like a car.
Matt had never expected to return to Waukesha. But he felt that it was good for Morgan—good for any child, really—to grow up in such a safe, idyllic place. At Morgan’s fifth grade graduation, he and Angie posed with her in front of a bunch of balloons and smiled for the camera. They were happy, and they thought she was, too.
But sometimes Morgan wanted to kill herself and didn’t know why.