DURING THE LATTER PART OF this past summer and the early autumn several people I knew were murdered in the most publicized and bizarre crime wave in the history of Minneapolis. It didn’t last long but things like that don’t have to be lengthy to do the damage. Some lives were blown to pieces which were terribly difficult to reconstruct; others floated soundlessly off into eternity like space garbage. Violent death has a way of attracting money and power and media. Having written a previous book about a crime and a trial, I was commissioned by my publisher to write an on-the-scene journalistic investigation of the murders. I was even expected to do some detecting myself, an expectation smacking of another era altogether. As it turned out, it would have been much too close to autobiography for me to give it the proper treatment. So I returned the advance and retired to lick my assorted wounds. No book was ever written and the whole matter remains so shrouded in inconclusiveness that I seriously doubt if there ever will be one.
Lovers of crime fiction and, even more so, followers of true-life crime stories have a weakness: They want the story to come to a satisfactory climax and denouement which finds justice being evenhandedly meted out, the guilty punished, the innocent freed to resume their normal lives. Neat 360-degree affairs rounded off with legalistic tidiness. In the case of the murders in Minneapolis there just wasn’t that happy, convenient set of conclusions followed by the lights coming up, THE END hanging in limbo as the curtain rattles closed.
The fact was, the murderer was never brought to justice or even revealed; identified by some of us, yes, but never quite brought to heel. The motive remained hidden from the public and the murders remain officially unsolved. And the innocent would never return to the lives they had once found quiet, comforting, normal.
My life was one of those which exploded. I was no writer, no observer, no reporter. I was a participant. And as the story kept peeling away, like a snake dropping away its skins, it was I who held it wriggling and twisting and darting out. The truth, when such extreme efforts are made to conceal it, develops a peculiar life of its own. It struggles to make itself known, to receive the credit it deserves, to achieve the capital T. The Truth dies hard. Maybe it never dies at all, but lies sleeping, waiting for someone to find it, decipher its code.
This, then, is a story about the search for an elusive truth.
The truth exists independent of us all, for its own sake. It has no moral validity. It reminds me of Melville’s white whale. Captain Ahab was wrong: Moby Dick was not evil, he simply was. And so it is with the truth. There it sits, expressionless, a disinterested party. I am what I am, says the truth, and the rest of us are stuck with it.
When you have finished with what I’ve decided to say, you will know the truth and only you will be able to decide if it was worth learning. Worth it for the people involved, worth it for you, and most of all if it was worth it for me.
My name is Paul Cavanaugh. This is what happened.