*
The day they buried Jeremy, the rain cleared after the funeral. The rain bookends the news reports: first Lorilei’s saying that the angels were crying, then the way the angels stopped when the boy had been laid to rest in the earth. In the time I’ve been standing at Jeremy’s grave, the rain has only started to come down harder. I look at his name on the plaque and I try to make myself understand that he’s below me. His autopsy report is in the file I read before coming here. I have held in my hand the grim weighing out of each of his organs. The rest of the records from this case are in the court archive. Somewhere in the court archive are the pictures of his body. Once he wasn’t only a name in the files, a school picture flashed on the evening news, a cautionary tale. Once he was a boy.
*
The week after the funeral, twenty-five people gather to march from the local state senator’s office to the Lake Charles Civic Center in protest. They should have been warned about Ricky. “He was around children all day,” says a neighbor. Perhaps she was one of the searchers gathered on the porch of the Lawson house, comparing their routes and trying to cheer each other up in the long stretches of finding nothing, and perhaps she is remembering Ricky’s bringing them out Styrofoam cups of coffee. She took that coffee from Ricky’s hands, they all did, and she thanked him. Perhaps now she is remembering sending her children up to his bedroom to play with the others. She feels the horror of having trusted. “People got a right to know if Jeffrey Dahmer’s moving into their neighborhood,” she says. Before Jeremy’s disappearance, the Dahmer trial consumed the media for weeks. The people of Iowa and Lake Charles saw updates on the front pages of their newspapers and in clips on the evening news. The week Dahmer was sentenced to life, Ricky killed Jeremy. No longer does it seem just a spectacle.
Lorilei stands at the head of the march, her leather motorcycle jacket open over her T-shirt and jeans. The marchers carry signs all with the same black-markered handwriting, the same white poster board. The sign lettered for her says: SAVE YOUR CHILD FROM BEING A VICTIM. “I believe this is what my baby’s death was meant for,” she tells a reporter. “This is what my baby was born for.”
Everybody’s watching her in this moment. Thrusting their microphones in her face. Flashing their camera bulbs. The sheriff made her go through two lie detector tests before Ricky confessed. Soon the defense attorney will have things to say about her mothering. Soon the prosecutors will, too. Here, at the head of the march, she is a symbol of loss. The woman no one wants to be.
When the marchers reach the state senator’s office, he comes to the door and listens to their chanting. Then he joins them. The senator knows a movement when he sees one. They’ll get their law, he promises the group. “I don’t want to see another Jeremy Guillory case ever happen again.”
As the marchers raise their signs—as they chant, as they demand what they believe will keep them safe—I understand their need. It is the way I feel when I look at the forms Ricky filled out in the mid-1980s at the Lake Charles Mental Health Center, when he said he was afraid he’d molest a child again and asked to be locked up, or when I read that Lanelle turned away when Ricky blocked her on the stairs. Why didn’t she force her way upstairs? Why didn’t she go tell a cop what had happened?
But even if there had been such a law when Jeremy knocked on the Lawson house door—or before that, when Lorilei first went to stay with Melissa, or before that, when she couldn’t keep the heat on and she realized that she and Jeremy would have to find somewhere else to sleep—that law likely wouldn’t have saved Jeremy. No one in law enforcement knew where Ricky was; the last place they’d kept track of him was his parents’ house. There were at least ten known sex offenders living around Iowa, ten whose names I will find in the records. Ten whose names the Louisiana parole officer actually gave Lucky and Dixon before she gave them Ricky’s name. It wasn’t as neat as the story was told. Of course it wasn’t. One of the ten actually showed up to help search for Jeremy. The cops turned him away—and meanwhile Ricky served coffee to the searchers and watched the children play in his bedroom, shooing them away from the closet door.
The marchers, they get their law. But six months later the newspaper runs an editorial pointing out that it just hasn’t worked. Thanks to the law, eighteen sex offenders have been identified in the area—but for only three of them has community notification happened.
All across the nation it is like this. Laws passed in blusters of well-meaning. Laws failing, because so rarely do the notifications work and so much of the burden falls on already burdened parents. You could make yourself sick worrying about who was on the registry and who’d moved into your town, you could drum those people out of your town or under a highway overpass, and half the time you’d be worrying about someone who had gay sex a few years before it was legalized in an area, or someone who slept with his underage girlfriend when he was barely of age himself, or someone who did something awful thirty years ago and had been all right since. In some places even prepubescent children will end up on the registries, gone too far in schoolyard games of doctor. And even then you’d only be worrying about the people you knew to worry about. About those someone had called the law on. Not the coach, the best friend, the babysitter, the stepfather, the uncle. The grandfather.
Twenty years after these laws begin, sexual abuse rates won’t have dropped at all.
But in 1994, in Louisiana, the marchers get their law. Every news article about its passage refers to an unnamed “Iowa boy”—Jeremy, now turned into a symbol. By the time of the trial, Lorilei’s drinking again. She’s using drugs again. She’s suicidal. Her son’s killer is convicted and sentenced to die and when her brother Richard tells her the news she thinks, Good riddance. She gives birth again and names this son Cole. Jeremy’s father is long gone, never once mentioned in the files, but this baby will have his father’s last name.
Then, a few months later, she and Cole’s father split up. Lorilei’s alone with her son again. So she tries to give Cole another new beginning. She says goodbye to Jeremy where he lies in the earth, and she moves to South Carolina. She’ll raise Cole far away from this place.
*