Detective Buckner and his partner walked back to their vehicle and took off.
“I had a day, two, maybe three, tops, before they took me in,” Jesperson recalled. “I had to do what I’d planned all that week—take my life. The kills weren’t doing it. Suicide was the only answer.”
*
ACTIVE ADDICTION IS A painful, costly (to family and friends), deceitful, prolonged suicide. I’d made the decision to end my alcohol dependence on April 1, 1994—and never looked back. Getting sober once was Everest; there was no way I could summit twice.
“The key to sobriety is that you never have to do it a second time. Just don’t pick up that first drink again,” a friend had told me early on.
I live by that one piece of advice.
One of the regrets I live with is never knowing the source of my brother’s pain: Why did he drink and drug? What was he medicating all those years? What trauma had he stuffed? Our grandfather on my dad’s side gave us the alcoholic gene, but my dad never touched a drop. Was Mark, like the rest of us, simply wired to be an addict? Once he got a whiff, boom, off and running he went. I knew, somewhat, why Diane had chosen drugs and alcohol. I’d heard stories about her childhood, many of which were later verified by family. But Mark? I never understood. He was, at a young age, involved on a low level in a chapter of organized crime in Hartford run by the late Louis Failla. Mark was never a “made” guy, but he came close. Was what he’d done in that respect the source of his pain? Had he committed sins he couldn’t reconcile? Things he couldn’t escape no matter how much poison he injected and ingested?
When my brother started using hard-core drugs, it was as though he stepped on a land mine. After Diane died, I think he gave in to the idea that, as each day passed, an uncontrollable weakness forced him to lift his foot, however little at a time, knowing the explosion that would someday follow.
What struck me during those years after Diane was murdered was the way I changed. But that’s how life goes, right? You think you’ve got it figured out, but then faced with a tragedy, your response is not what you thought it would have been. Within the dynamic of brotherhood, there is a lumpy emotional landscape connecting siblings, one that you have to manage walking through by yourself, at your own pace. The way I viewed my childhood might not be the same way in which my brother viewed his, or even mine. In this sense, you believe you know your sibling because you share his DNA, grew up in the same house. When, point in fact, you really don’t.
As the hep C ate away at Mark from the inside out, I sensed a clarity emerge from him. I’d ask how it was going. “Fine,” he’d say. “Why don’t you come to the casino with us?” He sounded different, almost at peace. Mark lived on disability after being diagnosed with bipolar disorder. Being a bookie once, having never held down a full-time job for more than a few weeks, Mark loved Foxwoods, playing poker and roulette, betting on sports. My brothers, Meranda, his two sons, my mother, and my stepfather were forever taking him gambling, shopping, out to eat, to endless doctors’ appointments, helping him run errands. Mark was one of those guys who sued everyone. He spent a lot of time doing research for those lawsuits. Tagging along on any of these trips wasn’t something I was interested in. As I said, I couldn’t stand to see my brother melt. I had also started a second chapter: raising a daughter. Watching my blood germinate into life at home and fizzle out elsewhere was not something I could face.
*
IN SEPTEMBER 2000, THE Hartford Courant published an article, CAN POLICE CONNECT THE CASES?—“City Investigators Looking for Links in 11 Unsolved Killings.” It detailed the murders of eleven “prostitutes and drug addicts” over a six-year period, all of whom were found in a two-to three-mile radius, the bull’s-eye being Asylum Hill. Among those counted as a potential serial killer’s “third” victim was Diane. Three years after her murder, in 1999, not far from where she had been killed, on the same street, twenty-eight-year-old LaDawn Roberts was found beaten to death and left on the rear porch of an apartment building. Roberts was five months pregnant.
“Can you imagine?” Mark said. “That headline pisses me off.”
“I was irritated,” Meranda recalled. “Like many reporters, they don’t really care about what or who they are writing about. They are just going for the salacious headline.”
All of the victims’ photos (including Diane’s) were published on the front page of the newspaper, with a detailed map showing where they’d been found. It was as if the newspaper linked the eleven murders by proximity and victimology. Investigators were skeptical: some of the murders were definitely connected, while others did not share the same signature. There was even a male among the eleven. Me, I looked at it and thought the story made for a great headline, but that was all. Murders that happened in the same specific area of a city, with similar circumstances, no known suspect, sounded neatly packaged for the nightly news, but where was the evidence linking a serial killer? Perhaps it was all just coincidence, despite Jesperson’s harebrained theory there are no coincidences in murder.
That one part of the article upset my brother and his kids: Diane being labeled a prostitute and drug addict. It was unfair to label any of them in this way. All victims of murder are human beings, somebody’s children; friends and family love them, despite how their lives turned out. No young girl, having tea in plastic cups and playing with her Barbie, dreams of becoming a drug-addicted street hooker. Your life should not be distilled into a noun. Moreover, from a law enforcement perspective, labels smother and tunnel an investigation at its fundamental core.
Still, we considered that her case was moving. It had been four years since Diane’s murder and nobody in the family had heard anything. We felt for the first time Diane had not been singled out; her murder had been part of a spree of murders, spanning years, and her case, with the others, might one day be solved because of that alone.