Rebecca said nothing. She took a second, small envelope from the larger one and handed it to me. It was identical to the first, and as I drew it from her hand, I heard her call the man’s name and age, though without expression, as if doing an inventory.
“Gerald Ward Stringer. Age, forty-one.”
The second set of pictures was arranged in exactly the same order as the first, more or less chronologically.
The summation of the case is under the photographs,” Rebecca said.
I nodded, my eyes already settling on the first picture.
Gerald Ward Stringer sat in a recliner, shirtless, legs stretched out, his bare feet aimed at the camera, his belly pouring over his beltless trousers. He was nearly bald, a shiny star of light gleaming on his forehead, the result no doubt of the reflected flash that had been used to take the picture. He was smiling, very broadly, the happy fat man in his cluttered lair. The room in which he sat was paneled in pinewood. A few mounted animal heads hung from the walls that surrounded him, and I could see a rack of hunting rifles hung between a deer and a fox. A safari hat, one side of its bill turned up raffishly, dangled from one of the deer’s upturned antlers.
Rebecca gave her narration as I leafed through the photos.
The murders occurred six months after this picture was taken,” she said. “Stringer killed Mary Faye, his wife of nine years, and his three sons: Eddie, four. Tyrone, six. And Jimmy Dale, seven.”
She waited a moment, then added softly, “With a rifle, as you’ve probably already figured out.”
As if realizing that I didn’t want to read the summations she’d written, she continued on, relating the details of the case, describing what had actually happened on February 11, 1967. As she did so, I found that I could see it all quite graphically in my mind.
Gerald Ward Stringer had come home from one of a string of small, very successful bakeries that he owned in Des Moines, Iowa, at the usual time of seven-thirty. He’d gone to work at five o’clock that morning, and he was, as he later told police in a description of himself that was eloquently simple, “a very tired man.”
Mary Faye worked as an office clerk at a local brewery, and she had been at work all day, too. When Stringer arrived home, he found her sleeping on the sofa in the den, one leg hanging over the side, her right foot almost touching the floor, her body in the exact position in which the police would find her several hours later, and which Stringer described as looking “sort of like a big towel that somebody had just thrown onto the couch.”
The children, all three of them, were in the basement. Tyrone and Jimmy Dale were playing at the miniature pool table they’d gotten for Christmas two months before, while Eddie played with a set of Tinker Toys on the large square of outdoor carpet which covered the basement’s otherwise cold, cement floor.
For nearly an hour, Stringer sat in the den only a few feet from his sleeping wife. From time to time during that fateful hour, Miss Zena Crawford, the woman who rented the small apartment over the Stringers’ two-car garage, looked down from her window and glanced into the Stringer family house. From her position over the garage, she had a commanding view of the den and kitchen. In the den, she saw Gerald Ward Stringer as he sat silently in the big recliner. He sat upright, his hands in his lap, rather than the usual reclining position in which she’d glimpsed him at other times.
At 8:20 P.M., Miss Crawford heard Tyrone calling to his mother, asking her to unlock the door that separated the basement from the upper floor of the house. She looked out the window and saw both Tyrone and Jimmy Dale at the basement window, the one which looked out at just above ground level, and which was situated almost directly below the window in the den. She glanced up and saw Mrs. Stringer rustle slightly on the sofa, as if the voices of her children were awakening her.
Having seen nothing that alarmed her, Miss Crawford turned from the window, took a couple of steps toward her small kitchen, then heard a shot. She returned to her window, glanced down, and noticed that the blinds in the Stringer’s den had been lowered. She looked down at the small basement window just in time to see Tyrone and Jimmy Dale as they turned away from her, back toward the basement’s interior darkness, as if in answer to someone’s call. They lingered at the window for an instant, then shrank away from it. Seconds after the two boys had left the window, Miss Crawford heard three shots.
Rebecca paused a moment after she’d finished her narrative. She was watching me closely, no doubt because this particular crime resembled my father’s a bit more closely than the first. It had been committed with a firearm, and three of the murders had taken place in a basement, which, on the surface, appeared to resemble the sort of place in which my mother, too, had died.
“Do you have any questions?” she asked tentatively as she returned the pictures to their envelope.
“No.”
Rebecca pulled out a third envelope.
“Herbert Malcolm Parks,” she said. “Age, forty-three.”
She said nothing else, now clearly preferring that I read the summaries she’d attached to the photos rather than listen to her own narration of the events.
The summary was neatly typed on plain white paper, and it was very succinct, giving the details briefly and without the slightest literary adornment.
Herbert Parks was a real estate agent in San Francisco. On June 12, 1964, he’d suddenly been stricken by an upset stomach while sitting at his downtown office. After complaining of the pain to several fellow agents, he’d driven to his home in Mill Valley, and there murdered his wife, Wenonah, age thirty-eight, and his two daughters, Frederica, twelve, and Constance, seven. Mrs. Parks had been shot once in the back of the head. The two girls had been forced to drink orange soda in which their father had dissolved several rat control pellets which contained cyanide. All three bodies had been stacked one on top of the other in the walk-in closet off the master bedroom.
The murders had occurred at approximately two-thirty in the afternoon, and as a result, there was no Miss Crawford to glance out her window and see something strange going on at the house next door.
Nonetheless, there were witnesses of a type. George McFadden, an electrical lineman perched high above the street only a few yards from the house, saw Parks’s dark gray Mercedes pull into the driveway at approximately two that afternoon. According to McFadden, Parks had not gotten out of the car right away, but had remained behind the wheel, “as if waiting for some kind of signal” before entering the house.
A few minutes later, two young girls had come from the house, both of them moving toward the car. The smaller one, who must have been Constance, darted enthusiastically toward her father, while the larger one, Frederica, held back. Parks had already gotten out by the time they reached him, and, once again according to McFadden, he took each of them into his arms, hugged them for a long time, then, hand in hand, his shoulders slightly hunched, led them back into the house.
No one else saw or heard anything after that.
After reading the summation, I turned to the photographs. Arranged once again in the established order, the first picture showed Herbert Parks in a dark double-breasted suit. It was a professional photograph, done at a studio, and the smaller marks and blotches which must have been on his face had been air-brushed into oblivion. He had gray hair at the temples, but otherwise jet black, and for the purposes of the photo he appeared to have pulled a single curl down so that it dangled, slightly greased in fifties matinee-idol style, near the center of his forehead.
There were only two other photographs. The first, just under the studio picture of Herbert Parks, showed his wife posed beside the same dark Mercedes which George McFadden saw pull into the driveway on the afternoon of June 12, 1962. She was wearing a light blue blouse, its ends tied in a knot across her waist, a pair of jeans, rolled up to mid-calf, and white tennis shoes. She was holding a water hose and a red plastic pail, and seemed to be pretending to wash the car.