CHAPTER 16

In a home that now rarely knew a moment’s peace, an appearance by Brian, riding in from California for a family visit, was a welcome balm, a break from the pathos and a shot of electricity—the rock ’n’ roll star, or at least the Galvin family’s version of one, returning home. When he turned up with a girlfriend, that got everyone’s attention. The couple communed with everyone in the Galvin living room, playing reel-to-reel tapes Brian had brought of his band, Bagshot Row. He brought his guitar and played along with his brothers, and the air pressure of the place changed completely. Mimi even let the couple sleep in a room together downstairs—a special dispensation that spoke to Brian’s elevated status in the family.

Lorelei Smith, or Noni to her friends, was a native Californian—bright, cheerful, and no-nonsense, with sun-kissed blond hair and a friendly smile. She was three years younger than Brian, and her childhood had been far more luxurious than his. The walls of Noni’s childhood bedroom in Lodi, a small town outside of Sacramento, were covered with ribbons from horse shows. But there was more than enough heartache and strife in Noni’s life to interest Brian, who had always seemed drawn to the darker aspects of the human condition. Noni was barely a teenager when her mother died from a combination of pills and alcohol. Her father, a well-known pediatrician in town, married a woman from the horse show set who was less than ten years older than Noni was. Noni never lived with her father again. She spent three years at boarding school, and her senior year at her sister’s house in Lodi, so that she could finish at the local high school. By the time she and Brian were together, Noni had found work at a veterinarian’s office in Lodi while taking classes at a business college.

Nearly a half century on, few people are left who remember Noni. Her father, mother, stepmother, and sister have all passed away. Her sister’s former husband remembers her as a happy girl, likable and charming. She had floated through Lodi High School for just a year, not long enough to make a lasting impression. The only member of the next generation who was alive at the same time as Noni is a nephew, the son of her sister—now an adult, nearly twice the age Noni was in 1973. All that nephew has is the awareness that once there was a girl named Noni whose boyfriend shot and killed her—and that after that, no one in his family ever was the same.

BEFORE HE’D LEFT for California, Brian had been given to hippieish philosophical musings. He had talked about death, but not in a grim or fatalistic way—more as if it were a state of mind, a crossing over to another dimension. “To him, it wasn’t ending,” said John, the third son, who roomed with Brian for a year in the music program at CU Boulder. “It was just going somewhere else. He’d always talk to me about going over to the other side.”

To John, there didn’t seem anything too urgent or dangerous about the way he was talking. “It was the times,” John said. “The psychedelic times that we lived in.” Some of this could have been fanned by drugs; no Galvin brother dropped more acid than Brian. But there was a darkness to Brian that never seemed to concern his brothers, either because they couldn’t see it, or because they didn’t want to see it, or because they found it romantic.

On the afternoon of Friday, September 7, 1973, the Lodi police department received a phone call from Noni’s boss’s wife at the Cherokee Veterinary Hospital, concerned that Noni had gone home for lunch at noon and had never come back. An employee missing for an hour or two would hardly seem to rise to the level of a police matter—unless there was something happening with Noni that everyone at the office knew about, something that made her vulnerable.

Noni and Brian had broken up a month or so earlier. They had been arguing ever since. And now, Noni was living alone.

The first officer to arrive at 404 ½ Walnut Street found the apartment door open. He walked inside and found the young couple on the floor, a .22 caliber rifle beside them. Noni’s face was covered in blood. She had been shot in the face. Brian had a gunshot wound to his head—a wound that the police on the scene determined to be self-inflicted.

THE YOUNGEST CHILDREN— Peter, Margaret, Mary—awoke to the sound of their mother sobbing.

Downstairs, Mimi was lighting candles on the kitchen table, and Mark was trying to calm her down. Don was on the phone, making arrangements, pulling their brother Donald out of Pueblo on a temporary pass so that he could attend his brother’s funeral.

The official explanation, at least for the little ones, was a bicycle accident. Margaret was eleven and Mary almost eight, too young to be told that Brian had shot and killed his girlfriend, and then turned the rifle on himself. Many of the others didn’t get the full story, either. Some believed the couple had been the victims of a robbery gone wrong. They most likely would not have thought that, had they been told what the police had learned—that Brian had bought the murder weapon from a local gun shop just a day earlier. What happened in Lodi seemed premeditated.

Years later, others in the family entertained other theories—that Brian and Noni had a suicide pact, or had taken LSD together. But what only Mimi and Don knew, and told no one for many years, was that sometime before his death, Brian had been prescribed Navane, an antipsychotic. There is no known record of the diagnosis that called for that prescription—mania, or depressive psychosis, or trauma-induced psychosis, or a psychotic break triggered by the habitual use of psychedelic drugs. The other children never learned when their parents first knew about this. But both Don and Mimi must have understood that one of the conditions Navane treats is schizophrenia. The thought of another insane son—their amazing Brian, of all people—was so devastating to them, they kept his prescription secret for decades.

MICHAEL WAS NUMB. He had been on his way to California, but had stopped in L.A., thinking he’d get around to seeing Brian up north some time later. Now all he could think was that Brian needed someone to throw a wrench in whatever it was that had been set into motion—and that he hadn’t been there to help. Now he was asked to help again: His father recruited Michael to come with him to California to get Brian’s body and find something to do with all of Brian’s belongings. They met with the police, but as an officer explained to him and his father what they thought had happened, Michael couldn’t handle it. He tuned out, refusing to hear anything more, about a second after he heard the words “murder-suicide.”

Even without knowing about Brian’s prescription, the younger boys connected what had happened to what was happening to their older brothers: first Donald, then Jim, and now Brian. John’s wife, Nancy, was the first to say out loud what everyone else had to be thinking—that what was happening to the Galvin boys had to be contagious. She and John left Colorado for Idaho, where they both found jobs as music teachers. The other sons started to drift away. Joe, the seventh son and the oldest of the four hockey boys, moved to Denver to work for an airline as soon as he graduated high school. Mark, the next in line, graduated a year later and headed off to CU Boulder.

After a brief furlough for his brother’s funeral, Donald returned to Pueblo—“quite intense about his religion,” the staff reported that year, “extremely controlled” in affect, again with an “underlying hostility close to the surface.” He stayed for more than five months, returning home in February 1974 with some new medications: Prolixin, an antipsychotic alternative to Thorazine; and Kemadrin, a Parkinson’s drug often prescribed to temper the side effects of neuroleptic drugs. Not counting Donald, Don and Mimi had just their four youngest children left at home: Matt, Peter, Margaret, and Mary.