A final review: James Whitfield Thomson probe the death of the sister

To what extent do we know our adult brothers and sisters? In “A Better Ending”, James Whitfield Thomson returned to the events of the summer of 1974, when her younger sister, Eileen, died at the age of 27 of a ball injury to the chest. The death of her sister was quickly judged of suicide, even if she bore all the characteristics of the murder, and the initial reaction of Thomson to the circumstances surrounding her death reveals a lot about the distinct realities in which men and women continue to live.

According to official police reports, Eileen died by suicide in the middle of an argument with her husband, Vic, then cop in San Bernardino. The Sanrardino Sheriff department investigated his death and almost immediately determined him as a self-inflicted shot, despite the presence of Vic in the house at his death.

Eileen was the youngest of three and the only girl in the family. Thomson describes a Pittsburgh childhood where money was tight and their father's alcoholism was a destabilizing force. The two younger brothers and sisters, just a few years apart, were both very close and inclined to fight and strike.

One of the currents of Thomson's writing is the admission of the occasional violence that surrounded them, and the feeling that the family was not particularly able to discuss feelings. Sometimes Thomson's accounts – like his role in the hazing of one of his secondary football teammates – are told at such a distance that he reads as if he were not participating. This distance often reproduces when he becomes a character in history – almost as if he felt forced to report his actions but is not willing to offer an overview of himself.

After the death of Eileen, his parents struck with sorrow asked him to speak to Vic in order to try to discover everything that could suggest that Vic had killed his wife. In their conversation, Vic said to Thomson that Eileen had demanded a test separation, but after a few months, they had reconciled and that everything had been fabulous. But Vic had accused Eileen of having cheated on him during their separation after sitting in his car in front of her house all night, of handling Rude Eileen even when she had denied having sex with the man. Vict tells his brother that Eileen had accused him of spying on him. (What it was.)

On the day of his death, shortly after the couple reconciled and began to see a marriage therapist, Eileen had admitted that the one -night stand that she had disclosed during their advice session had in fact been a full -fledged multidagical case with a colleague. She wanted to go out in the open air so that the pair could move forward.

The two argued violently. When Vic left the room to make a phone call, Eileen got into a ball, supposedly shame for her infidelity.

And this is where gender perceptions come into play. Shocked to discover that her sister had broken her wishes for marriage, Thomson moves her loyalty to Vic. He asked Vic if he had struck her when he became aware of cheating. It is not an unrelevant question since Thomson had struck his wife when he discovered that she had an affair.

He writes: “How could I condemn Vic? A month earlier, I had slapped Connie and had tolerated it in my mind as an acceptable action for a man whose woman had cheated on him. The feeling that I had at the moment was that of empathy with Vic, so much so that I took, as he did, that Eileen did not lie when she had not happened between her and the seller. ”

Eileen died in 1974, when domestic violence was still considered a private affair between husband and wife and rarely prosecuted criminally. Perhaps still injured by his own experiences with his wife, Thomson, author of the novel “Lies You Wanted to Hear”, sees Vic as the injured part. Vic said he had left Eileen in their room because she was “hysterical” and that he wanted to call Eileen's mother to see if she could help calm Eileen. It was then that Vic heard.

These details triggered alarm ringtone in my head. Eileen's motivation for herself felt like a fragile excuse made up on the spot by a deadly husband. According to recent government statistics, the number of Women murdered by an intimate partner were five times higher than for men; According to research by EveryTown, 76% of women killed by firearms In 2021, were murdered by their partners.

While the forgetting of Thomson in the phenomenon in 1974 could be a product of attitudes and the consciousness of the problem, it still does not seem to know how spread is spread when it begins to investigate Eileen's death in 2001. He hires a male private investigator to find more details, but this is not an investigator immediately joins a scheme of domestic violence.

The following is Thomson's story about his obsessive research of answers on what really happened to Eileen this afternoon. You never know what feeds his quest almost 30 years after his death: at the beginning, he says that it is because he wants to write a novel about the case of his sister; Later, when others ask him, “Why now?” His answer is “chance”. As if he had accidentally came to mind.

The stories of real crime often run on the continuation of a more precise report of what really happened that the authorities were agreed for the first time. Traditional ideas on the story – that a story has a beginning, in the middle and the end – to feed the expectation that by discovering the sequence of events and the motivations of the people involved, we will arrive at a place called “truth” and that by knowing the truth, justice will prevail.

What does a writer – a brother in mourning – does with a case that begins in ambiguous circumstances? If it turns out that Eileen has targeted a firearm to her own heart, will confirmed suicide be a form of justice? What if Thomson's investigation reveals that her husband killed her in 1974, what would justice look like later?

Thomson is aware of the dilemma. “We want a verdict in cases like this, the truth selected with a court printer,” he wrote, discussing the cases of real crime which is a basic food of television programs such as “Dateline”, observing that the producers of these programs “know their audience. resolved And reaffirm their conviction that there is order in the universe, that justice will prevail. This is what I wanted for Eileen – and for me – order, justice, redemption, resolution. Certainty. “”

Thomson is looking for his own redemption. On the death of Eileen, he had accepted the idea that his suicide had been a natural consequence to break his wishes for marriage. Her understanding of her was based on a one -dimensional vision of what a moral woman was. But marriage is much more complex, and it knew almost nothing about Eileen's life in California. He admits that he has casually accepted the story of Vic because of his own “pride and his eagerness to continue my life”.

His views of Eileen as an adult woman had to change if he had to find peace with the death of Eileen. At best, what he gets is difficult peace.

Even in 2001, Thomson operated in a world in which he was unconscious of the way in which gender ideologies and power imbalances affect men and women in different ways. His hypotheses on Eileen were based on views he had had as a child. What he understands is that his little sister was 2,000 kilometers from family support, living with a husband with a bad character, a pistol and a badge. In her last moments, she was alone and frightened by this angry man, and about to shorten his life by expectations on the way a “good” woman should behave.

Berry is a writer and critic living in Oregon.